“Yuck,” Terry said.

“I played touch football, with some tackling. My mother almost died of heartbreak.”

“Thank God you’ve never had an ounce of compromise in you,” Terry said. “Listen, it’s understandable if you need a break, but will you come up one of these days and have dinner at my house with Jake and maybe my daughter and her family? I miss you. I boss around those residents and I swear they pee their pants. When you’re not around there’s hardly any muscle in the operating room. It’s sad. It’s pathetic.”

Maggie was so touched she sighed. “I miss you. I miss the OR.”

“I like to hear that.”

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

“Oh? Dr. Mathews, right?”

She shook her head. “We’ve been off a few months now. A new boyfriend. I met him at the crossing and he just won’t go away. He’s a lawyer.”

Terry laughed. “Well, that’ll probably come in handy.”

At eight o’clock Maggie said goodbye to Jaycee, Rob and her other friends. Terry drove Maggie to her house, her husband following. She pulled into the drive behind a truck.

“Who’s that?” Terry asked.

Maggie smiled. “The boyfriend. Want to meet him?”

“Bring him when you come to dinner. We’ll get to know each other then.”

Maggie got out of the car, Cal got out of the truck and they met in the drive. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“Just in case. If you need to be quiet and alone, I brought a good book. But I wanted to see you. I wanted to get my arms around a free woman.”

“They had a celebration for me. That’s my OR nurse...” she said, turning.

But Terry was moving toward the waiting car. She waved and yelled, “Bring him to dinner so we can look him over!” Then she jumped in her husband’s car and off they went.

“Very outgoing, isn’t she?” Cal said.

“Did you bring an overnight bag?” she asked.

“Always the optimist,” he said with a nod. “Have you eaten?”

“Ate, drank, laughed,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t told you I wanted to do it alone, Cal. I wish you’d been with me tonight. I have some very good friends, it turns out.”

Earth and sky, woods and fields,
lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea,
are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some
of us more than we can ever learn from books.

—Sir John Lubbock

Chapter 14

Cal suggested he drive back to the crossing rather than join Maggie for her visit with Phoebe and Walter. “When the time is right, I’ll visit them with you,” he said.

“I can’t wait to see what makes the time right,” she said. But she let him off the hook.

This was a new experience for Cal, this kind of courtship. When he’d met Lynne he knew the second he saw her that she was the one. Crazy as it was, he’d felt it reaching way down inside him. There was something about her that signaled stability, sense of purpose, commitment—the things he had desperately needed at the time. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful, sexy and fun.

Maggie wasn’t really so different, it had just taken him longer to see it. She was equally stable with an uncanny sense of purpose, even though she was on hiatus from her purpose at the moment. He was attracted right away, but how hard was that? Maggie was hot—tall, lean, muscular with high cheekbones and a quirky, slightly crooked smile. And she didn’t know that about herself—that she was stunning, which only added to her sexiness. He loved the way she stood, one knee bent, her foot balanced on a toe like some kind of dancer. And there were a dozen other qualities that kept turning up, making his attraction stronger and stronger. Her strength was empowering. It was ironic—she thought her strength was running out and that she had to step back, but it was only growing stronger. She was a little afraid, given all the complications in her life, that’s all. She wasn’t weakening. She was so demanding of herself. She was demanding of others, too, but fair. He thought watching her with Sully was a premonition of what was to come when her future husband became old and infirm. She might not know it yet, but she was going to be just like Sully toward her children when she was old and creaky. She loved hard, but with compassion. She was fearless. Because she hurt over things that had happened to her professionally, she thought she was running out of courage, but it was the opposite. She was afraid her fast action and fearlessness was going to keep giving her trouble over and over. She was partly right—at some point you have to decide if you can take the heat. More specifically, you have to decide if what you do is worth the trouble. She was asking herself that question right now. He bet on her finding the answer soon.