He ignored the issue through the whole Rangers game, but by the time it was over, he was thinking about the caretaker job all over again. He’d be getting paid just enough to put food on his table and gas in his truck to get to and from Austin for physical therapy. And he’d have a place to stay that didn’t cost him a dime. It could keep him afloat until the World Championship, at which time he intended to beat the crap out of Carter Hanson and then laugh all the way to the bank. It was the perfect solution.
Except for the fact that Shannon was in the mix.
But he had no feelings for her anymore. None at all. Eleven years had passed. Water under the bridge. This would be a business arrangement, nothing more. And the shelter was big enough that he could probably steer clear of her most of the time.
But Shannon wasn’t the only resident of Rainbow Valley he wanted to avoid.
He did a Google search. In what passed as the society section of the online version of the Rainbow Valley Voice, he found an article about a recent charity event. Apparently Shannon’s mother, Loucinda North, was still fulfilling her role as a warm, sympathetic, philanthropic pillar of the community.
Funny how deceiving looks could be.
The odds of Shannon wanting to hire him were exactly zero, but he had no intention of letting that stand in his way. The longer he thought about it, the more certain he became that it was his best option. Maybe even his only option.
He decided when he was able to drive again in a few days, he was going back to Rainbow Valley. And one way or another, that job was going to be his.
Dr. Russell Morgensen finished examining Vernon Taylor’s teeth, thankful he didn’t have more patients like him. Vern was in his sixties, but he had the teeth of a twenty-year-old. Fortunately, the rest of Rainbow Valley didn’t have Vern’s devotion to dental health, so Russell’s practice had a profitable future ahead.
He walked out of the exam room and went to his office, leaving Velma to clean Vern’s teeth. At first Russell hadn’t been too sure about hiring a sixty-year-old woman, but that turned out to be a nonissue where her ability was concerned. What he hadn’t counted on, though, was the fact that she was virtually mute. If he’d hired a mime he’d have gotten more verbal interaction. But in the end, she got the job done, and that was all he cared about.
His office manager, Cynthia, was another story.
She’d come from Waco to be near her grandmother, who’d just moved to a nursing home in Rainbow Valley, and she had experience in a medical office. She might have been five feet tall if she stood up really straight, but she had the kind of curves a woman her height rarely did. He’d been so distracted by her Kewpie-doll lips and Betty Boop eyes that before he knew it, he’d offered her the job. Then she came to work, and he wondered if he hadn’t made a big mistake.
Things started showing up on her desk. A small stuffed rabbit. A ceramic frog. A wooden pencil cup from Sea World. A big bowl of Starlight mints. Swirly metal frames filled with photos of people and animals he would never meet, but there they were in his clinic, looking at him every day of his life. And plants. Everywhere there were plants.
And, as it turned out, she wasn’t quite as sweet and compliant as he’d originally thought. In fact, sometimes she was borderline insubordinate. She did what he asked, but usually in her own time, and differently than he would have done it. But his patients seemed to love her, and if she contributed to his bottom line he could put up with damn near anything.
Velma disappeared every day at lunch, and he still had no idea where she went. Cynthia, on the other hand, microwaved the lunch she brought from home every day, then sat at the tiny table for two in the kitchen, her nose buried in a book. Russell felt weird about sitting down next to her. So on days he didn’t go out for lunch, he waited until he heard her talking to a patient on the phone. Then he nuked a frozen dinner and took it into his office to eat it.