A Boss Beyond Compare

Susan smiled at the bright-faced young woman coming through the door. Hawaiian obviously, with long flowing black hair and a smile that nearly lit up the room, the woman glided over to the bed with the smooth flow of an ocean wave, and stopped short of it. “Doc Etana thought you might like some breakfast before you leave this morning, so I’m here to take your order.”

“My breakfast order?” Like in room service? As nice as Ridgeway hospitals and clinics were, they didn’t offer room service.

Laka nodded. “We can fix almost anything you’d like, but my suggestion would be pa’i palaoa hala kahiki.”

They didn’t bill you for services here, and they catered your breakfast? She was growing to like this place more and more with each passing minute. “Pa’i pala…” She shook her head, shrugging. “I can’t pronounce it, but if that’s what you’d recommend, that’s what I’ll have,” she said cheerfully, amazed by how such a simple thing was brightening her morning.

“It’s a pineapple cake,” Laka explained. “A recipe from Doc Etana’s mother.”

“Who’s Doc Etana?” Susan asked. “I’ve heard that name mentioned before but I haven’t met him.”

Laka looked surprised. “He’s Dr Makela. His first name is Etana, and that’s what most of us call him.”

One name for the natives, one for the outsiders? Briefly, Susan wondered if Grant, or Etana, kept his lives separated that way, much the way she did. She was Susan Ridgeway, yet she was Susan Cantwell. “Is he around this morning?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant, even though she was anxious to see him.

“He’s never around this early. He has his morning routines, but he’ll be here soon enough. If you’d like to see another doctor, Dr Anai is here from Honolulu today. Should I call him for you?”

Susan shook her head. “No, that won’t be necessary.” It was a bit of a disappointment. She’d wanted to see Grant Makela before she left, to thank him and to…well, she didn’t know what else. It looked like that wasn’t to be the case, though. Maybe that was a good thing, because there was no medical need to see him. She simply wanted to, no reason. In a life like hers, there wasn’t room for any of that, so it didn’t matter, even though she felt a little let down.

“Would you like to have breakfast on the lanai?” Laka asked. “Lovely view of the water from there. And the gardens, too.”

The water. Another of her fantasies—her surfer Adonis. It was time for his morning visit to the beach, and she was missing it, which was a sure sign that matters were getting too far out of control with her. Come to paradise and forget all inhibitions, apparently. At least, that’s what she was doing. It was also what she was going to put a stop to this very instant. “The lanai sounds very nice,” she said, trying to mount resistance to fend off all these whimsies and wishes assaulting her. They were just another symptom of being overtired. The real reason she needed this holiday.

“Your clothes are in the closet,” Laka said on her way out the door.

Her clothes—a swimsuit, and a baggy shirt to cover it. That didn’t fit the occasion, but neither did the typical faded blue hospital gown she was wearing at the moment. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of surgical scrubs handy, would you?” she asked before the nurse got away.

“We do, but no one around here ever uses them.”

As Susan had noticed. Even the nurses wore Hawaiian-print dresses. “Well, if you could dust me off a pair…”

Ten minutes later, Susan seated herself on a white-painted bamboo chair at a white-painted bamboo table, glad to be outside in the fresh air again. Relaxing like this and getting outside was something she had no time for at home. Her communing with nature usually consisted of a minute or two on the way from the car to the building or the building to the car. So now any time spent with Mother Nature was a treat.

“Wonderful,” she said to Laka, after taking a sip of passion fruit juice and finally allowing herself to relax.

“We specialize in wonderful here,” Grant said from behind her, as Laka walked away.

A huge tingle crept up Susan’s spine as a slight smile crept to her lips. “What’s disappointing is that I may have to leave here, cut short my holiday and return to work,” she replied, trying to be cautious about her galloping shivers lest she did something else to draw his attention to the goose bumps rising on her arms.

“On the mainland?” Grant stepped out from behind the hibiscus and stopped directly in front of the table. He looked fresh from the shower…wet hair glistening in the sun, shirt open a few buttons down and a bare chest with a few lingering droplets of water. She caught herself staring openly, and shifted her gaze to her glass of juice, grabbing it in both her hands just to steady herself.

“Actually, I’ll be in Honolulu for a few weeks. On business. And I may get straight to that and skip the last of my holiday. There doesn’t seem to be much point in it now.” That much was true. There didn’t seem to be reason any more. Her heart for it was gone.

“You mentioned you were an administrator—is that for a clinic or medical practice?”

She shook her head. “I…um…I work for a company in Dallas that buys struggling medical facilities and brings them back up to standard. I oversee medical operations, but more from an administrative perspective.”

“That wouldn’t be Ridgeway Medical, would it?” he snapped, his friendly expression turning into dark thunder.

She looked up at him, saw the deep frown on his face signal the change in his mood. “You’ve heard of us?”

“Heard of you? I’ve done nothing but hate you for the past six weeks. You’ve made my life pure hell ever since I knew that you existed.” His words were angry, yet his voice was controlled and quiet.

That took her aback. Kahawaii Clinic wasn’t on her current acquisitions list. She was sure of that. So what was this about? “Why? What have we ever done to you?” she asked, trying to tamp down the surge in her own temper. No need to fight him when she didn’t know what it was about.

“Other than buying the clinic—what I hoped would be my clinic—and changing everything we’re about?”

“But we’re not! Yes, we’re in the process of a nice deal on Oahu, but I know what properties we’re looking at and this isn’t one of them.” It would be an ideal place for one of their clinics, she had to admit, but the Kahawaii name wasn’t on the list.

“The hell it isn’t! Mrs Kahawaii is in negotiations now, and she’s indicated to me that she intends on signing the deal within the next couple of weeks, if I can’t come up with a way to make a deal of my own. And she’s signing with Ridgeway Medical.”

“Kahawaii Clinic?” she asked, clearly perplexed.

“Officially, it’s Hawaii North Shore Clinic, which we renamed it unofficially after its founder when he died.”

That was a name she recognized. Susan sucked in an acute breath and immediately went on the defensive. “What’s wrong with Ridgeway Medical?” she asked. “We upgrade medical care in areas where it’s inadequate, and it’s good medical care. We have excellent standards. We keep hospital doors open that would otherwise close, depriving a community of medical care, and we equip small clinics like this with the best medical technology money can buy. What’s wrong with that?”

“You run roughshod over small clinics like this, forcing on them a standard that doesn’t fit. You don’t take into consideration the individual communities, and the people living there…what they need, what they want, what they’ll accept. Your emergency doctors won’t accept a haircut from a patient who can’t pay in money but who has too much pride to take charity, and I doubt that any of your patients love their clinic so much that they’ll volunteer to paint its exterior just as a matter of pride in the facility, like the people here did last year. You run institutional medicine, we run personal medicine. That’s what’s wrong with Ridgeway.”

She really didn’t have a defense for his argument because he was correct. But what he didn’t understand was that they operated the way they did because it was the best for the majority of their patients. This was the argument she’d heard so many times, when various hospital and clinic administrators had found out their facility was being sold. People often resisted the change, didn’t embrace it in any fashion. They fought against it, even though, like Grant, the decision wasn’t theirs to make. And she truly hated the arguments, because lives were disrupted by what she and her father did. In the long run, it was for the best. But in the short term, just getting to that point, it was difficult, and that was the part of this business she hated the most. She detested being disruptive, hated putting the fear of change into people like Grant, who devoted their lives to an ideal, only to have that ideal ripped away from them. “Have you been to one of our facilities? Because if you haven’t, I’d like to invite you—”

“Invite me to your indoctrination?” he interrupted. “Show me the proper corporate facility and tell me all this can be mine if I just adjust my attitude?”

Actually, that was correct. But she wasn’t going to admit that to Grant, because that would just fuel his fire, and he had such a big fire going already that adding to it would prove nothing. The truth was, she felt bad about this. Always did, when it became personal. This time more than usual, though, because she liked this clinic, and she did see merit in it existing as it did, without change. With Ridgeway, though, change was inevitable, which made her sad for the little Kahawaii Clinic because, if she could be honest with herself, she’d pictured herself working in a setting like this. Part of that discontent she’d been feeling for a while had been that she wanted to connect to medicine in a way she wasn’t allowed in her current capacity, and here, that connection would have been so easy.

But Grant was right. Kahawaii would change. She glanced down at his feet. He would have to wear regular shoes. No more bare toes. “Look, Grant, I know this isn’t going to be easy for you. But we…Ridgeway Medical…does have its place. Small private hospitals and clinics struggle against the larger ones for a lot of reasons, and unfortunately most of those reasons are purely business. They can provide outstanding care, have an exemplary medical staff, sterling reputation, everything you want in a medical facility, but if they can’t afford the latest MRI machine, for example, the patients who need an MRI for whatever reason go somewhere else, and it doesn’t take too much of that to affect the bottom line financially. Patients who go away rarely ever come back. They find it more convenient to bundle up all their medical needs together and keep them at the one facility that can meet all their requirements. So when the bottom line takes hit after hit like that, with people leaving to find more services, the facility suffers. That’s precisely why Ridgeway Medical is so important. We can keep that patient at that smaller facility and offer them everything they need there. In Indiana, for example, we own three small hospitals. Each, in itself, can’t afford an MRI scanner, and the patient load is such that it’s not warranted at any one of these facilities. All three were suffering when we stepped in, and the very first thing we did was buy a mobile MRI. It goes from facility to facility, and serves all three on a rotating basis. We’re not losing our patients who need an MRI, and they’re allowed to stay with the medical facility of their first choice because we pooled resources.

“I mean, people want to look at their medical treatment as something cozy and personal, but there’s a huge, demanding business behind it that makes it work, and what we do is try to find a way to allow people to have the kind of medicine they want yet make the business aspects work to keep it that way.”

“Is that in the company brochure?” he snapped. “Because if it’s not, it sure should be. You’ve got the corporate verbiage down perfectly. It’s a very good selling job if somebody wants to be sold, which I don’t!”

In the official presentation they made, this was the part where they usually went to a multimedia presentation—graphs, charts, movie, testimonials. Which made Grant correct. She did have the company verbiage down…another of the reasons she wasn’t so sure of her future in the company, as she was tired of the impersonal feel of it all. “Look, I don’t know what I could say to make it right for you. Most people don’t like the transition, and I understand that—”

“Do you, Susan? Do you really understand, or is that more jargon? Have you ever had everything you’ve come to count on transitioned right out from under you? And in the case of Kahawaii, have you even considered that you’re transitioning it right out from under its patients, too? Look out there.” He pointed to the gardens just off the end of the lanai, where Laka was helping an elderly woman take a walk down the path. The woman shuffled along on a walker, doing fairly well, actually, and Laka walked along with her, keeping a steadying hand on the woman’s back. “Her name is Pearl. Replaced hip. Aged eighty-nine. How would she fare in one of your clinics?”

“We have rehab facilities—”

“She lives at home, Susan. Not in a rehab facility. Laka, or one of the other clinic workers, goes over there twice a day to help Pearl walk. She’s living at home, where she’s happy and comfortable. We send meals over from the clinic, too. All Pearl needs is a little assistance, and I can promise you that if we were to send her to a rehab facility, she’d give up and die. For her, staying at home means everything so that’s what we’re helping her do, and she’s allowed her life and her dignity. It works out for us, too, as when we have children in the pediatric wards, she comes over to read stories to them. Or if we have babies staying here, she spends time sitting and rocking them, and singing to them when their parents can’t be here. It’s a valuable relationship, Susan, and I’m betting you don’t have anything that personal in any of the Ridgeway facilities, do you?”

His voice was softening now, going from anger to…well, it could have been pride because there was a lot here to be proud about. But maybe it was love. Grant did love this clinic, and he had a passion for the way medicine was practiced here. Watching Pearl make her way along the path for a moment, Susan finally shifted her gaze back to Grant. “No, we don’t, and I’m sorry. It would be nice to think that we could do something like that, but the truth is, when you have a hundred facilities to look after, it just can’t be that way.”

“Meaning the individual patient doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, the individual patient always matters, which is why we operate the way we do. We strive to give the best care to everybody who comes through our doors, but it’s just not so…”

“Personal,” Grant supplied.

“It’s nice to have an ideal, Grant,” Susan said, standing. It was time to leave. Truly, she did feel bad for what would of necessity happen at this little clinic, but it wasn’t under her control. Somebody other than Grant was selling the place, and if she and her father didn’t buy it, someone else would. Judging from the beautiful land on which it sat, that someone else might not be a company vested with medical interests. This would be the perfect place for a plush resort, or luxury condos… She wondered if Grant could see that handwriting on the wall, because it was written everywhere. Property this beautiful was scarce, and if Ridgeway didn’t seal the deal…well, she didn’t even want to think about the possibilities. “And I wish you well in yours. I’m sorry this won’t be turning out the way you’d like it to, but I really don’t make the deals. I just oversee the medical operations.”

“You don’t seem like the type,” he said, as she stepped away from the table.

“And what type is that?” she asked, starting to bristle again.

“Corporate.”

“And what is the corporate type supposed to seem like?”

“Not like you. Out there on the beach, when that boy drowned…the way you took it so hard…”

“I’m not unfeeling, Grant. I went to medical school just like you did, went through the same medical service rotations, learned the same procedures, dealt with the same kind of patients. And even though we don’t agree on anything that Ridgeway Medical does, it’s not fair to characterize me the way you’re doing. Saying that I can’t care, or that I don’t have compassion because I’m corporate is the same as my saying that because you’re only a country doctor you’re too simple to understand the reasons a corporation like Ridgeway exists. I wouldn’t do that because you do understand why we do what we do, even if you don’t like it. And being a country doctor certainly doesn’t make you backward, so I wouldn’t ever say anything like that.”

It was time to go, time to get back to the life she knew. She didn’t have a fight with Grant, and didn’t want to have one. He wouldn’t believe that, but she did admire his passion for the kind of medicine he practiced. She even envied him that. It had been such a long time since she’d felt that kind of passion about anything, and she only hoped that once Ridgeway took over his clinic, he would hold on to it. Doctors like Grant Makela were rare.

Men like Grant Makela were even rarer.

CHAPTER FOUR

“WORK here!” Grant shouted at Susan as she was about to climb into her rental car.

She spun around, assuming that he was chasing after her, but he wasn’t. He was still standing on the lanai. Imposing figure of a man, she thought. That had been her first impression, and it hadn’t changed. Standing there, in his shorts, Hawaiian floral-print shirt and sandals, he absolutely took her breath away. Forcing him to wear anything other than what he did was tantamount to a crime, but that was one of the changes on the horizon. “What?” she called back, not sure she’d heard him correctly.

“I said, work here. You said you were on holiday, so spend the rest of it working here.”

He clearly wasn’t going to come to her, so she walked halfway back to the lanai, then stopped. “And what would that prove?”

“You’ve never worked in one of your facilities, have you?”

Was that a devious little smile on his face? It was hard to tell, staring into the sun the way she was, but she would have sworn she saw a smile cross his lips. “I oversee corporate medical policy, but I leave the individual hospital and clinic admin matters to the hospital administrators.”

“Not administration, Susan. That’s not what I’m asking. I’ll bet you’ve never donned a lab coat, hung a stethoscope around your neck and set off as a practicing doctor in any of your medical facilities. You know, treat strep throats, prescribe for bronchitis, that kind of thing? You haven’t done it, have you?”

Such a devious smile, and he was challenging her, as it turned out. He probably thought he’d get her to work here for a few hours, for her to see what the real medical world was like, then change her mind. Except it didn’t work that way. Too bad, too, because if she had it in her to give him his clinic, she probably would. “What I’ve done is make it possible for hundreds of doctors to treat thousands of patients with strep throats and bronchitis.” She liked his gutsiness, though.

“Then work here, as a doctor. Let me rephrase that. Work here like a doctor who isn’t encumbered by the dictates you put on the doctors working for Ridgeway Medical.”

“How long?” she asked, surprised she had. She really had no intention of doing this, but she was the moth being drawn into the flame. The closer she got the more she knew she would surely meet an awful demise, yet something in her was wired to keep moving toward the flame. And she was a heck of a lot smarter than that moth. “If I were to stay here and work, which I’m not going to do, how long would you expect me to do this?”

“How many more days left of your holiday?”

He was serious. Grant was actually serious about this! “Six, including today.”

“Then I’ll take six, including today.”

This was crazy. She was actually entertaining the invitation. “And what’s in it for me, if I do this?” Not only entertaining it, showing enough interest in it that his devious smile was growing larger.

“Awareness of what it’s like at the other end of the spectrum. You sit at a desk and make decisions for lives that never touch yours. Here, you’ll make decisions for lives that do touch yours and that will make you a better administrator.”

“You’re hoping that I’ll change my mind, aren’t you? That when I leave here in six days I’ll wave some kind of a magic wand and you’ll miraculously have your clinic the way you want it.”

“Yes. And I’ll take my opportunities wherever I can get them.”

It was an honest arrangement, but it occurred to Susan that Grant didn’t know she was one of the corporate officers. Not just one of the officers, actually. One of the owners. For now, perhaps it was better that he didn’t. Especially as she was tempted to take him up on his offer. Funny how it coincided with her restlessness to get back to regular patient care.

Well, what would it hurt to give it six days then see what happened? For that experience, she’d discover if her restlessness was a passing whim or a valid problem. Maybe she’d find out she was truly cut out for admin work after all. Or maybe it would show her, once and for all, that she could be a practicing doctor. Besides that, she’d be in a good position to make recommendations to the Ridgeway board about Kahawaii, not that anybody on the board would necessarily agree with her. So, however it happened, this seemed like a good opportunity for her. “No promises, because I don’t know how these next days will turn out. I may or may not make the recommendations you want. And the board may not listen to me if I do recommend what you want. If that’s agreeable, with no strings attached to the outcome, I’ll give you my next six days.” Those words surprised her almost as much as they surprised him, judging from the look on his face. But why not? She did have the time, and she could think of worse things to do than spend a few days with Grant, in paradise no less, even though it was pretty clear they weren’t going to get along famously. How could they, given that they were at odds?

“I’m in charge,” he warned, like he had to. Of course he was in charge. She wouldn’t have had it any other way, especially given her lack of regular doctoring these past years.

“You’re in charge.”

A tight little frown popped up between his eyes, like he was adding up a list of pitfalls in this arrangement he’d just proposed. First, she wasn’t well practiced. Second, she wanted to quash the current Kahawaii operation. Third, she wanted to infuse Ridgeway practices. Yes, that was the list Susan imagined he was beginning to form, one that could have gone on and on from that, but she didn’t want to think about it because, it seemed, she was about to be put to work. That’s what was making her nervous now. Agreeing to be a practicing doctor was one thing, but actually doing it…

“The locals tell me you have another name,” she said, deliberately changing the subject for a moment. She needed time to catch her breath, to think about what she’d just done. Maybe back out once the brunt of it hit her.

“You’re backing out already,” he accused.

“I’m trying to make polite conversation,” she counted.

“In the middle of a disagreement?”

“Are we still disagreeing? I thought we’d settled all that for now.”

He chuckled. “Nothing’s settled, Susan. It’s just being avoided temporarily.”

“And in the spirit of avoidance, I was asking about your name. No ulterior motives here, Doctor. I was just curious.” He walked across the lanai, then crossed over the parking lot, stopping just a few feet in front of her, where he studied her face for a moment, making her more nervous than ever as she knew exactly what was written there. If she’d had a mirror to look in, she’d have seen a virtual masterpiece of insecurity and self-doubt. The implications of this arrangement she’d just made were beginning to set in now, and the enormity of what she’d promised to do… Crazy! What was she thinking, agreeing to work as a practicing doctor?