Page 11 of Motivating Mira
Over the years someone had drawn a face on it with a sharpie, and then a stethoscope around what would be the neck, and finally according to Liza, they’d added a cape ten years ago and started the game. The cape was made out of a piece of old hospital gown that someone must have taken home and sewn because it had two ties around the neck and a D sewn on the back of it.
Jesse clapped my shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t prefer, Dr. Feel Good?” He laughed.
I shook my head. “Don’t start.”
“What was his big save?”
“Toddler,” Liza said. “Pool accident. Down for close to ten minutes. Got him back with full brain activity, which, as you know, is pretty much a miracle. Was singing Daddy Shark to his parents when they walked out of here yesterday. Totally heroic.”
Jesse turned and gave me a slight bow. “I think we’d all agree a toddler trumps just about everything.”
“Indeed,” Liza said, “But, Dr. Feel Good? I need to know more about this.” Liza spun on her rolling stool to fully face me, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“It’s a nickname. An offensive one. Ignore him.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll tell you why we called him that,” Jesse said, jumping up to sit his ass on the nurse’s desk.
I shot him a pleading look. “I’ve only worked here for three months, and I came to Butte for you, remember? Do not ruin my reputation with the nurses just because you’re jealous I won the hero dildo for the week.”
“I gotta hear it now,” Liza said, scooting closer to my best friend. “Su-pillthe tea.”
“We used to call him Dr. Feel Good in med school because he had a lot of ladies visit, and every one of them left with a secretive shy smile and flushed cheeks.”
I sighed, pressing my fingers to my temples. “It sounds so bad when you say it like that.”
Liza looked at me and I shook my head. “I wasn’t a sex worker or a man whore.”
“Nothing wrong with either, doc.” Her eyebrow rose and fell in a wiggle, taking the barbell piercing with it and making it seem as if the bushy, but groomed line of hair was lifting weights.
“They weren’t there for sex,” I protested. “I was tutoring them.”
“Tutoring?” Now Jesse’s brow rose. “In what? How to say your name in moans and gasps?”
“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled low enough that only they can hear me. “You’re supposed to be a grown man, a fucking doctor. You sound like a teenaged boy in a locker room full of other horny teenaged boys.” For a second I felt guilty for saying it, because that wasn’t who he was anymore, not really, although he kept up the façade for reasons I’d never understand.
When I showed up at his door three months prior with our med school best friend’s thirteen-year-old daughter and told him he was a father, he didn’t believe me. He thought I’d hired some kid to prank him. And then when I handed him an envelope from Beth’s lawyer with a DNA test she’d gotten somehow, likely when we used to practice medical procedureson each other, he thought I’d known all along and kept it from him.
It took me a long time to convince him I was just as shocked as he was that Marni was his. Beth and I had worked in the same hospital and lived in the same condo since Beth’s daughter was eight years old, and we spent most of our free time together. How could I not have known?
Beth and I were so close most people thought Marni was mine. Even my parents, which at least had the benefit of keeping my matchmaker mother at bay. Beth and I used to laugh about it. She told me a million times she had no clue who the father was. And that stung. Almost enough for me to ignore the request in her will that I be the one to deliver Marni to Jesse and explain.
Actually, if it weren’t for Marni needing me, I might have denied Beth her dying wish, that’s how bitter I was.
And then when I was supposed to leave Butte to go back home to my life, both Marni and Jesse separately begged me to stay.
“Please, Uncle Wes, I don’t know this guy. Just because my mom’s will says he’s my father, it doesn’t make him my dad. Hell, you’re more of a dad to me than this rando.”
“Wes, bro, you know the kid. She’s grown up with you in her life. You gotta stay and help me. I don’t know the first thing about being a dad, let alone a single one, to a teenaged girl. I’ll fuck this up. She already hates me.”
All of those things were true, except the hate thing, because you can’t hate someone you don’t know, so I left everything behind in Canada. I settled in Butte, Montana, moved into Jesse’s two-bedroom house, where I slept on a lumpy couch, and took an open position in the emergency department of St. James Hospital.
It wasn’t totally altruistic of me though. Beth’s death hit me hard, and I didn’t want to lose Marni too. There was also the bonus of escaping my family.
And then there was the girl. The girl who stopped replying to my texts one day and then out of the blue sent one that said I should forget about her, she’d met someone else. And yet I still couldn’t get her out of my head.
I hadn’t even known if she was still around when I’d made the decision. She could’ve been married, or halfway around the world, hell, she could’ve been dead. Although that last thought had killed me, it didn’t make it any less true. If I’d learned anything working in the ER it was the fragility of life.
“Don’t deny you’re amasterwith the ladies,” Jesse said, bringing me back to the moment, and I wanted to strangle him, because his emphasis on the wordmasterwas too on the nose for my taste. Even though secretlyDaddywas more my thing. Although only one girl had ever called me that. I didn’t need anyone here knowing my personal life.
