Dr. Forget-Me-Not

“Photo op?” Melanie guessed. This was the Golden State and a lot of things were done here for more than a straightforward reason. It seemed like everyone thrived on publicity for one reason or another. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said quickly, “some of these people really need to be seen by a doctor, but if this is just some kind of publicity stunt so that some doctor can drum up goodwill and get people to come to his state-of-the-art new clinic, or buy his new skin cream, or whatever, I don’t want to see Brenda and her son being used.”

Sympathy flooded Theresa’s eyes. She had to restrain herself to keep from hugging Melanie. “Oh honey, what happened to you to make you so suspicious and defensive?”

She was not about to talk about Jeremy, or any other part of her life. Besides, that had nothing to do with this.

“This isn’t about me,” Melanie retorted, then caught hold of her temper. This wasn’t like her. She was going to have watch that. “This is about them.” She waved her hand toward where they had left Brenda and her children. “I don’t want them being used.”

“They won’t be,” Theresa assured her kindly. “This doctor really does see the need to give back a little to the community.” That was the story Maizie and the doctor’s mother, Charlotte, had told her they’d agreed upon. “He’s a very decent sort,” she added.

Melanie looked at her, confused. “I thought you said you didn’t know him.”

“I don’t,” Theresa readily admitted. “But I know the woman who knows his mother and Maizie would never recommend anyone—even a doctor—who was just out for himself.” Theresa paused for a moment as little things began to fall into place in her mind. She had the perfect approach, she thought suddenly, pleased with herself.

“Dr. Mitch is a little...stiff, I hear, for lack of a better word. I hate to ask, but maybe you can stick around a little longer, act as a guide his first day here. Show him the ropes.”

Melanie would have thought that Polly, the director who was bringing him on board, would be much better suited for the job than she was. “I don’t know anything about medicine.”

“No, but you know people,” Theresa was quick to point out, playing up Melanie’s strengths, “and the ones around here seem to trust you a lot.”

Melanie shrugged. She didn’t know if that was exactly accurate. She was just a familiar face for them. “They’re just desperate...” she allowed, not wanting to take any undue credit.

Theresa laughed, nodding. “Aren’t we all, one way or another?” This was the perfect point to just retreat, before Melanie could think of any further objections to her interacting with Mitch on a one-to-one basis. So Theresa did. “I really do need to get back to the kitchen to get things set up and ready or dinner is going to be late,” she told Melanie.

About to leave, Theresa hesitated. It wasn’t just small sad faces that got to her. She’d been infinitely aware of the sadness in Melanie’s eyes from the first moment she’d been introduced to the volunteer.

Coming closer to Melanie, she lowered her voice so that only Melanie could hear her. “But I just wanted to tell you that should you ever need to talk—or maybe just need a friendly ear—I’m here at the shelter every other week.” She knew she was telling Melanie something that she already knew. “And when I’m not—”

Digging into the pocket of her apron, Theresa extracted one of her business cards. Taking a pen out of the other pocket, she quickly wrote something on the back of the card, then held the same card out to Melanie.

“Here.”

Melanie glanced at the front of the card. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m going to be having any parties that’ll need catering any time soon.”

Theresa didn’t bother wasting time telling the young woman that she wasn’t offering her catering service, but her services as a sympathetic listener. “That’s my private number on the back. If I’m not home, leave a message.”

Melanie didn’t believe in pouring out her heart and burdening people, especially if they were all but strangers. “But we don’t really know each other,” she protested, looking at the card.

“That’s what phone calls are for,” Theresa told her. “To change that.” She paused for a moment, as if debating whether or not to say something further. “I know what it feels like to lose someone you love.”

Melanie stared at her, stunned. She’d exchanged a few words with the other woman and found Theresa Manetti to be a very sweet person, but she’d never shared anything remotely personal with her, and certainly not the fact that her fiancé had been killed. Why was the woman saying this to her?

As if reading her mind, Theresa told her, “The director told me about your young man. I am very, very sorry.”

Melanie stiffened slightly. “Yes, well, I am, too,” she replied, virtually shutting down.

But Theresa wasn’t put off so quickly. “I think it’s a very good thing, your being here. The best way to work through what you’re feeling right now is to keep busy, very, very busy. You have to stay ahead of the pain until you can handle it and it won’t just mow you down.”

“I am never going to be able to handle it,” Melanie told her with finality.

“I think you’re underestimating yourself,” she told Melanie. “You’re already thinking of others. Trying to talk that young mother into taking her son to see a doctor is definitely thinking of others.”

Melanie’s mouth dropped open. She stared at the older woman. “How did you know?” She’d had that conversation with Brenda before Theresa had come on the scene.

Theresa merely smiled, approximating, she knew, the look that sometimes crossed Maizie’s face. She swore that she and Celia were becoming more like Maizie every day. “I have my ways, dear,” she told Melanie just before leaving. “I have my ways.”

Chapter Two

He was having second thoughts.

Serious second thoughts.

Anyone who was vaguely acquainted with Dr. Mitchell Stewart knew him to be focused, dedicated, exceedingly good at everything he set out to do and definitely not someone who could even remotely be conceived of as being impetuous. The latter meant that having second thoughts was not part of his makeup.

Ever.

However, in this one singular instance, Mitch was beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of what he had agreed to undertake.

It didn’t mean that he wasn’t up to it because he lacked the medical savvy. What he would be doing amounted to practicing random medicine, something he hadn’t really done since his intern days. These days he was an exceptionally skilled general surgeon who garnered the admiration and praise of his colleagues as well as the head of his department and several members of his hospital’s board of directors.

Mitch could truthfully say that he had never been challenged by any procedure he’d had to perform. In the arena of the operating world, it was a given that he shined—each and every time. He made sure of it, and was dedicated to continuing to make that an ongoing fact of his life.

But just as he knew his strengths, Mitch was aware of the area where he did not shine. While he was deemed to be a poetic virtuoso with a scalpel, when it came to words, to expressing his thoughts and explaining what he was going to do to any layman, he was sadly lacking in the proper skills and he was aware of that.

However, that was not enough for him to attempt to change anything that he did, or even to attempt to learn how to communicate better than he did. He didn’t have time for that.

Mitch truly felt that successfully operating on an at-risk patient far outweighed making said patient feel better verbally about what was about to happen. His awareness of his shortcoming was, however, just enough for him to acknowledge that this was an area in which he was sorely lacking.

Hence, the second thoughts.

As he drove to the Bedford Rescue Mission now, Mitch readily admitted to himself that he’d agreed to volunteer his services at the local homeless shelter in a moment of general weakness. His mother had ambushed him unexpectedly, showing up on his doorstep last Sunday to remind him that it was his birthday and that she was taking him out to lunch whether he liked it or not.

She had assumed that as with everything else that didn’t involve his operating skills, he had forgotten about his birthday.

He had.

But, in his defense, he’d pointed out to her patiently, he’d stopped thinking of birthdays as something to celebrate around the time he’d turned eighteen. That was the year that his father had died and immediately after that, he’d had to hustle, utilizing every spare moment he had to earn money in order to pay his way through medical school.

Oh, there had been scholarships, but they didn’t cover everything at the school he had elected to attend and he was not about to emerge out of medical school with a degree and owing enough money, thanks to student loans, to feed and clothe the people of a small developing nation for a decade. If emerging debt free meant neglecting everything but his work and his studies, so be it.

Somewhere along the line, holidays and birthdays had fallen by the wayside, as well. His life had been stripped down to the bare minimum.

But he couldn’t strip away his mother that easily. He loved her a great deal even if he didn’t say as much. The trouble was his mother was dogged about certain things, insisting that he at least spend time with her on these few occasions, if not more frequently.

And, once he was finally finished with his studies, with his internship and his residency, it was his mother who was behind his attending social functions that had to do with the hospital where he worked. She had argued that it was advantageous for him to be seen, although for the life of him, he had no idea how that could possibly benefit him. He had no patience with the behind-the-scenes politics that went on at the hospital. As far as he was concerned, glad-handing and smiling would never take the place of being a good surgeon.

In his book, the former didn’t matter, the latter was all that did.

And that was where his mother had finally gotten him. On the doctor front. She had, quite artfully, pointed out that because of new guidelines and the changing medical field, getting doctors to volunteer their services and their time was becoming more and more of a difficult endeavor.

He never saw it coming.

He’d agreed with her, thinking they were having a theoretical conversation—and then that was when his mother had hit him with specifics. She’d told him about this shelter that took in single women who had nowhere else to turn. Single women with children. She reminded him how, when his father was alive, this was the sort of thing he had done on a regular basis, rendered free medical services to those in need.

Before he was able to comment—or change the subject—his mother had hit him with her request, asking him to be the one to volunteer until another doctor could be found to fill that position at the shelter. In effect, she was asking him to temporarily fill in.

Or so she said.

He knew his mother, and the woman was nothing if not clever. But he was going to hold her to her word. He planned to fill in at the shelter only on a temporary basis. A very temporary basis.

Mitch knew his way around surgical instruments like a pro. Managing around people, however, was a completely different story. That had always been a mystery to him.

People, one of the doctors he’d interned with had insisted, wanted good bedside manner, they wanted their hands held while being told that everything was going to turn out all right.

Well, he wasn’t any good at that. He didn’t hold hands or spend time talking. He healed wounds. In the long run, he felt that his patients were much better served by his choice.

This was just going to be temporary, Mitch silently promised himself, pulling up into the small parking lot before the two-story rectangular building. He’d give this place an hour, maybe ninety minutes at most, then leave. The only thing he wanted to do today was get a feel for whatever might be the physical complaints that the residents of this shelter had and then he’d be on his way home.

It was doable, he told himself. No reason to believe that it wasn’t.

Getting out of his serviceable, secondhand Toyota—he’d never been one for ostentatious symbols of success—Mitch took a long look at the building he was about to enter.

It didn’t look the way he imagined a homeless shelter would look. There was a fresh coat of paint on the building and an even fresher-looking sign in front of it, proclaiming it to be the Bedford Rescue Mission. A handful of daisies—white and yellow—pushed their way up and clustered around both ends of the sign. Surprisingly, he noted almost as an afterthought, there were no weeds seeking to choke out the daisies.

As he approached the front door, Mitch was vaguely aware of several pairs of eyes watching him from the windows. From the way the blinds were slanted, the watchful eyes belonged to extremely petite people—children most likely around kindergarten age, he estimated.

He sincerely hoped their mothers were around to keep them in line.

Those uncustomary, nagging second thoughts crept out again as he raised his hand to ring the doorbell.

He almost dropped it again without making contact. But then he sighed. He was here, he might as well see just how bad this was. Maybe he’d overthought it.

The moment his finger touched the doorbell, Mitch heard the chimes go off, approximating the first ten notes of a song that he found vaguely familiar, one that teased his brain, then slipped away into the mist the moment the front door was opened.

A young woman with hair the color of ripened wheat stood in the doorway, making no secret of the fact that she was sizing him up. It surprised him when he caught himself wondering what conclusion she’d reached.

“Dr. Stewart,” she said by way of a greeting.

A greeting he found to be rather odd. “I know who I am, who are you?” he asked.

For such a good-looking man—and she could easily see all the little girls at the shelter giggling behind their hands over this one—he came across as entirely humorless. Too bad, Melanie thought. She’d take a sense of humor over good looks any day.

A sense of humor, in her eyes, testified to a person’s humanity as well as his or her ability to identify with another person. Good looks just meant a person got lucky in the gene pool.

“Melanie McAdams,” she told him, identifying herself as she stepped back and opened the door wider for him.

Mitch noticed there was a little girl hanging on to the bottom of the young woman’s blouse. The girl had curly blond hair and very animated green eyes. He assumed she was the woman’s daughter.

“You run this place, or live here?” he asked her bluntly.

“Neither.”

Melanie’s answer was short, clipped and definitely not customary for her.

She wasn’t sure if she liked this man.

One thing was for certain, though. Theresa was right. He was definitely going to need someone to guide him through the ins and outs of dealing with the residents here. Especially the little residents.

She could tell by the expression on his face that he felt, justifiably or not, that he was a cut above the people who lived here. Obviously not a man who subscribed to the “There but for the grace of God go I” theory of life, Melanie thought.

It jibed with what she’d found out.

Once she’d been told the doctor’s name yesterday, she’d done her homework and looked him up on the internet. The list of awards and commendations after his name went on and on, but the few photographs she could find of the doctor—and there were very few—showed a man who looked stiff and out of place each and every time. It seemed as if he were wishing himself somewhere else.

She supposed, in his defense, fund raisers—because those were all she’d found—could be seen as draining.

But she had a nagging feeling that the good doctor reacted that way to most people he was around. He probably felt they were all beneath him because, after all, it took a certain amount of intelligence and tenacity to study medicine and pass all those tests.

Or maybe the man was just good at memorizing things, she thought now, looking at him face-to-face. The true test of someone’s ability and intelligence was putting their knowledge into action.

Hopefully, the only thing this doctor was going to be putting into action would be his stethoscope and his prescription pad when it came to writing prescriptions for antibiotics.

Once word got out that a doctor was coming to the shelter, suddenly their “sick” population had mushroomed.

Mitch raised a quizzical eyebrow, as if waiting for more information.

“I’m your guide,” Melanie told him, explaining her current function.

She thought her word for it was a far more tactful label than telling the doctor that she was going to be his go-between, acting as a buffer between him and the patients he would be seeing because his reputation had preceded him—both his good reputation and the one that was not so good.

“I hope you brought your patience with you,” Melanie said cheerfully. “No pun intended,” she added quickly, realizing the play on words she’d just unintentionally uttered. “When word spread that you were coming, people couldn’t put their names down on the sign-in sheet fast enough.”

He looked at her, slightly mystified. “They know who I am?” he questioned.

Mitch didn’t see how that was possible. He didn’t move in the same circles as anyone who would find herself to be homeless.

He didn’t move in circles at all, which was another source of distress to his mother. He preferred to spend his downtime learning new techniques, studying medical journals and observing new methodologies.

“They know that you’re a doctor,” she clarified. “And some of them haven’t been to see one in a very long time,” she said tactfully.

So saying, Melanie took hold of his elbow and gently directed him toward the left.

“That way,” she said when the doctor spared her a warning look.

She couldn’t help wondering if there was some sort of a penalty exacted by him for deigning to touch the man. He didn’t look the least bit friendly or approachable.

But then, his competence was what was important here, not how wide his smile was. Smiles didn’t cure people. Medicine, competently utilized, did—and that was all that mattered.

But a smile wouldn’t have killed the man.

“We’ve taken the liberty of clearing the dining room for you,” she informed him, still doing her best to sound cheerful.

It wasn’t for his benefit, it was for April’s. The little girl had literally become her shadow, hanging on to her and matching her step for step. She was observing this doctor, looking at him as if he were some sort of rarefied deity who had come to earth to make her older brother well.

“The dining hall?” he repeated as if she’d just told him that he had a complimentary pass to a brothel.

Melanie nodded, wondering what the problem was now. There was no disguising his disdain.

“It’s the only room big enough to hold all the people who signed up,” she explained.

Not waiting for him to say anything further, Melanie opened the dining room’s double doors.

There were women and children seated at the long cafeteria-styled tables. Every seat, every space beyond that, seemed to be filled as a sea of faces all turned in his direction.

Mitch stared at the gathering, then looked at her beside him. “I was planning on staying about an hour,” he told her.

“You might want to revise your plans,” Melanie tactfully advised. “Some of these people have been sitting here, waiting since last night when they first heard that a doctor was coming. They didn’t want to risk being at the end of the line and having you leave before they got to see you.”

That was not the face of a man within whom compassion had just been stirred. For two cents, she’d tell him off—

More bees with honey than with vinegar, Melanie silently counseled herself.

Putting on her best supplicant expression, she decided to attempt to appeal to the man who seemed rooted to the threshold as he scanned the room.

“Is there any way you could possibly revamp your schedule and give up a little more time today?” Melanie asked him.

Like maybe three more hours?

She knew saying aloud what she was thinking wouldn’t go over very well, but then, what had this doctor been thinking? He had to have known this was a homeless shelter which, by definition, meant it went literally begging for help of every kind—and that obviously included medical aid.

Medical aid was not dispensed in the same manner as drive-through fast food was.

“I know that everyone here would be very grateful if you could,” Melanie said as tactfully and diplomatically as she could.

Just as she finished, another voice was added to hers.

“Please?”

The high-pitched plea came from the little girl who had been hanging on to the hem of her blouse off and on since she’d opened the front door.

April was currently aiming her 100-watt, brilliant green eyes at him.

In Melanie’s estimation, Dr. Mitchell Stewart should have been a goner.

Chapter Three

To Melanie’s disappointment—and growing concern—the doctor wasn’t a goner. He did not melt beneath the pleading look in April’s wide eyes.

But at least Dr. Stewart appeared to be wavering just the slightest bit, which was something.

Okay, so the man apparently didn’t come with a marshmallow center beneath that tough exterior, but at least his heart wasn’t made of hard rock, either, which meant that there was hope. And—except on a very personal level, where she had learned better—when it came to dealing with things at the shelter, Melanie found that she could do a lot of things and go a long way on just a smattering of hope.

Hope was like dough. It could be stretched and plumped with the right kind of preparation, not to mention the right wrist action.

She heard the doctor clear his throat. It wasn’t exactly a sympathetic sound, but it wasn’t entirely dismissive, either.

And then the next second she heard him say, “I’ll see what I can do.”

And we have lift off! Melanie thought. The man was conceding—at least a little.

She watched as Dr. Stewart looked around the dining hall, frowning at his surroundings. At first, Melanie thought he was frowning at the occupants in the room, but when he spoke, addressing his words to her, she realized that something else was bothering him.

“Don’t you have anyplace more private? I’m not practicing war zone medicine,” he informed her. “I don’t think these women would appreciate being examined while everyone looks on, as if they were some items brought in for show-and-tell.”

“Not exactly diplomatically put, but you do have a point,” Melanie agreed.

When he looked at her sharply, she realized that she’d said the first part of that sentence out loud instead of just in her head. She would have to do a better job of censoring herself around this man.

Rather than apologize, she flashed him a quick smile and said, “Stay here. I’ll see if I can get Polly to give up her office.”

“Polly,” he repeated as if he was trying to make a connection. “That would be the woman who runs this place?”

Melanie nodded. “That would be she.”

“Why wasn’t she out here to meet me?” he asked.

The question was blunt, but she was beginning to expect that from him. She wondered if his ego had been bruised by the unintentional slight.

Melanie paused for a moment, weighing her options. She could lie to him and say they’d suddenly had an emergency on their hands that required Polly’s presence, but she had a feeling that the man valued the truth above diplomacy. She also had the uneasy feeling that he could spot a lie a mile away. That cut down on her viable choices.