Page 34 of The Devil Gets His Due

Jesus help me. This is what Keeley has brought my life to: I’m back in California, unable to even get a cup of fucking coffee without fourteen conversations and some financial advice from a homeless guy. “I’ll look.” And because I can think of no other way to escape this conversation, I add, “I’m going to Starbucks. You want anything?”

He shakes his head. “I’m all set. Just ate breakfast, and Keeley brought me lunch.”

And he holds up the Tupperware I gave her not an hour before.

19

KEELEY

Iknow the moment I walk into the office that today’s going to go badly.

“Your schedule is totally full,” says Trinny, turning her computer screen toward me.

“I blocked off lunch,” I argue.

She gives me that combination of a wince and a shrug, the kind that says she was simply following orders. “Dr. Fox had stuff she needed to do.”

I swallow. I either nip this in the bud right here or I go home to get scolded by Graham once more. Which is worse?

“I have plans. Dr. Fox will need to reschedule those patients if she can’t make it in.”

Her eyes go wide. She’s scared for us both, now, and it just makes me mad. Completing my residency was supposed to free me from this bullshit—from having no control whatsoever over the hours I work and the cases I take, from having people tell me how disappointing they find me. And now I can’t seem to escape it. Not here. Not in my own apartment.

I’ve just left an examining room when Dr. Fox comes storming in, her hair freshly highlighted.Something came up,my ass.

“Can I speak to you?” she demands. Her voice is thin and high, the voice she normally reserves for support staff who’ve written something down wrong.

“I’ve got someone waiting,” I reply. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that my whole day is a shambles now because I wasn’t informed until nine this morning you were unable to see my patients. I need to be able to count on you.”

“I wasn’t informed until 8:45 that I evenhadyour patients. I haven’t had a lunch break in over a week, so I actually blocked the time off and I still—”

“Are you serious right now? I’m in here because you wanted a lunch break?”

I should tell her. I should just say,“I’m pregnant, and I can’t keep eating shit from a vending machine because you want to get your hair done.”I can’t. Not yet.

“I need to be able to count on thirty minutes at some point in the day. You’re not the only one offloading patients on me.”

Her left eye twitches. “Don’t forget,Dr. Connolly,” she says, spinning away from me. “You’re still on probation.”

The words hang over me for the rest of the day, and I can’t even plough through a bag of mini Snickers bars to deal with my sadness. I do, however, plough through a quarter of the bag and then throw it in the trash, mad at myself, mad at Dr. Fox, and especially mad at Graham for whom this minor effort at self-restraint would be deemed laughable. When Trinny warns me as I’m leaving that Dr. Fox has scheduled patients during my lunch break the next day, I don’t say a word.

At home, I stop to pick up the mail and Paul tells me his newborn grandson won’t eat. It could be anything—sensitivities, reflux, or something more serious like pyloric stenosis.

“They’ve taken him to a gastroenterologist?” I ask, and he says he isn’t sure.

It’s not my specialty, and Ishouldn’tgive him medical advice right now, but the real problem is that I can’t do it anyway, and in a few months, I might be the one in his position. I might need to know, and I won’t, and I’ll have Dr. Fox throwing a fucking fit because I’m taking my kid to a specialist to save his or her life.

All I want right now is to curl up on my couch under a blanket for a while, but I can’t because Graham will be there—judging me, angry I skipped lunch, angry that I’m lounging and not stacking gold coins in a safe like Scrooge McDuck or whatever it is he thinks I’m supposed to do in my downtime—so I walk outside to see Mark instead.

“You look tired, Keelster,” Mark says. He opens the chair for me and I sink into it. The redistribution of my weight will soon make rising from this thing impossible.

“I think I’m about to get fired.”

He’s the one person I can admit this to. The one person who won’t say,“Keeley, you’re grossly irresponsible and anyone could have seen this coming. You probably deserve it.”

“There are worse things,” he replies.

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