Page 17 of A Country Practice Christmas
His face must have shown his thoughts, because she shrugged one shoulder in a sheepish way. ‘I may have inferred you and I had scheduled a medical appointment.’ She even smiled. This was quite a turnaround from the last two times they’d greeted each other.
‘I doubt a medical appointment would have slipped my mind,’ he said. Understatement.
‘It’s day five,’ she said. As though that meant something.
‘Day five,’ he echoed, before the penny dropped. ‘Oh, right. Also known as walk without pain or face the truth of an MRI day.’
‘That’s right.’
She walked up to him and they stood face to face in the doorway of his home. The journal lay between them on the old floral carpet, and maybe only he was the one feeling its malevolent throb, because Jodie took no notice of it whatsoever.
He wondered what that would be like. Whathewould be like if one day he could look beyond the remnants of his old life. Contentment had seemed goal enough, but now, looking at Jodie, who was still smiling faintly and appeared to have no idea that she should smile always, every day, every minute, because her smile was a thing of beauty, he realised that contentment had been a low bar. It didn’t allow room for the giddy stuff like fun.
Happiness.
Love.
‘So? How’s the leg? Any pain? Why don’t I take a look?’
He’d worked the late shift last night, then sat up until three am, debriefing with the dinner cook about how to tackle social issues such as the three-year-old hooligans who apparently ruled at the local day care, who wouldn’t let the cook’s kid play with the dinosaurs in the sand pit. Psychosocial development theory, in a nutshell.
But explaining that he’d only just woken up at two o’clock in the afternoon felt like admitting he was lazy. A pub manager’s hours could be wildly unpredictable.
‘The leg’s awesome,’ he said, hoping that was the case. He’d not had to crawl up the stairs last night, but then, he’d poured himself a stiff rum and Coke once theClosedsign was up, and two nips of rum were a hell of an anaesthetic. ‘You can judge for yourself by following me downstairs. I have chores to do.’
‘I hope you’ve not been overdoing the chores since I was last here. Gentle stretching after I say, remember? Too soon, and you overstrain an already strained tissue.’
‘Uh-huh,’ he said, unwilling to admit how many chores he’d been doing on the hobble.
‘The bar’s empty. One couple having coffee out in the beer garden—that’s the way I came in—but they were talking about hitting the road for Kyogle when I passed them.’
He stepped over the journal into the hallway, deciding the floor was the perfect place for it to stay for the time being, and she took a step backwards to give him room. They almost—almost—touched, torso to torso, as he passed. She smelled nice, like flowers and rain, and that little waft of woman as he moved past dissolved the ache the journal had given him.
He felt—contentment be damned—good.
Good enough to let himself relax, and grin, and say, ‘I knew it wouldn’t be long before you wanted to get your hands on me again.’
She chuckled. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who was tired of not allowing happiness into their lives. ‘You wish. But have it your way. You go about your business, and I’ll observe.’
He headed for the stairs. Was he limping? He didn’t think so, and the action of going down the stairs pulled, and he felt it, but did it hurt?
That was a question with no short answer; ‘hurt’ was a word with a lot of scope.
Jodie was right about the lack of patrons in the pub, but that was normal for an afternoon that didn’t fall on a weekend, and was kinda the reason why he often took this shift for himself: he could get stuff done. Stuff like the list of tasks the Christmas Twilight Markets committee had blithely handed over to him to ‘get done’.
He stood in the store room with Jodie at his side and inspected his clipboard. ‘We need twenty trestle tables. How many do you count?’
She’d given his gait the okay, but had drawn the line when he suggested he was right to clamber around in the shed and fling ladders over his shoulder. She’d offered to assist and he’d not overthought it. He’d just said yes.
Now, she twisted and weaved her way through stacked empty kegs and old A-frame signs and piles of other pub clutter to the rack up the back where the tables were kept. ‘Eighteen. Someone’s written a note on this one in marker pen, which says “dodgy leg”.’
‘Let’s call it seventeen, then. The committee can borrow three from the tennis ladies if they ask nicely. Better let Carol do that,’ he muttered, half to himself, as he scribbled a note down on his clipboard. ‘Hoges and Sal Simpson—she runs the tennis club—aren’t on speaking terms for some fool reason. What about marquees?’
‘These things? Like big beach tents?’
‘Yep. We should have eight, but sometimes we lend them out and they don’t get returned.’
‘No, there’s eight here. All of them appear to be well covered in spider webs, just saying.’
