ONE

As she pulled into the employee parking lot at the Malvern Medical Center, Shelagh Mannion sighed to herself. When she had the early shift at work, parking was never an issue. In fact, her car was often the second or third in the lot thanks to her punctual nature. That day, however, she was going in mid-morning because she was covering for a fellow nurse, who could not work that evening due to an obligation with her children. Shelagh didn't mind the deviation in her schedule all that much, but she hadn't expected to find such difficulty with parking!

After looping around the lot, she found a space at the end of a row that would be best to back into. She lined her car up as best she could before putting it in reverse. The Toyota, which was nearly as old as she was, sputtered a bit as it often did while in reverse, but she was able to coax it into the space despite its protests. Then, she turned off the ignition and picked up her purse from the passenger seat. After stepping out, she locked the driver's door, dropped the keys into her bag, and then began the longer-than-normal trek across the parking lot.

Within three steps, Shelagh had to lift up her right hand to shield her eyes from the sun, which was making her eyes water from how bright it was. With the official first day of summer just a few weeks away, the days were getting progressively warmer. She realized then that she was rarely outside at the hottest points of the day because she was either working or busy inside her apartment. Perhaps that meant it was time to make a more conscious effort to actually get some sun exposure, but she so rarely had the time for that. Perhaps now that her finances were beginning to stabilize she would be able to make the time.

When she reached the building entrance and the automatic doors slid open for her, Shelagh felt grateful for the cool blast of air conditioning that would quickly remove the droplets of sweat that were threatening to form on her brow. She blinked a few times, letting her eyes adjust from the bright light of the outdoors, and then instinctively turned right to walk towards the elevators.

After pressing the button to call the elevator, she moved her purse from her right shoulder to her left and made sure her nametag was pinned in the correct spot on her pink scrubs. When the elevator arrived, she stepped inside and pressed the button for the second floor, which was shared by the women's health practice she worked for and by a family medicine office that three doctors shared. She waited for the car to ascend and then, almost without looking, stepped out onto the second floor. Thankfully, at the last second, she glanced in the correct direction and was just narrowly able to avoid bumping into someone by bouncing up on her toes and hoping quickly to her left. "Woah—sorry!" she said instinctively. Then, when her brain fully processed that the person she nearly ran into was a child not an adult, she paused and glanced around the immediate area.

The boy standing by the elevators appeared to be no older than seven or eight, yet there were no adults in the immediate vicinity. Shelagh spun around on the spot to confirm that she and the boy were the only ones in the lobby area, before turning back to look at the boy, who seemed to be too busy scuffing the toe of his shoe along the grout lines of the floor tiles to notice her.

Feeling the need to confirm that the boy was not in need of help, Shelagh said pleasantly, "Um, excuse me. Hello. Are you—are you alone here?"

The boy turned to her and shook his head before pointing towards the door leading to the family medicine office. "No, I'm waiting for my dad."

She nodded and glanced towards the door that led to the medical office's waiting room. Despite the door being mostly glass, she was not actually able to see into the waiting room because it was around the corner from the entrance. Feeling a strange pull of maternal instinct towards the boy with floppy brown hair and matching brown eyes, she said, "Oh, well, I'll just wait with you a second then, okay?" The boy said nothing, so she continued with, "My name is Shelagh. What's yours?"

"Timothy," he replied.

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Timothy. I like your dinosaur shirt. What's your favorite dinosaur?"

"Umm…" He gazed down at his shirt and then pointed to a green dinosaur with a long neck towards the bottom of his shirt, which displayed six different species. "This one, 'cause he's green."

"Is that your favorite color?" she asked. When he nodded, she replied, "Mine too."

"I also like orange!"

"Oh, that's a nice bright color. Are you all done with school for the year?"

He tugged on his shirt and swung his hips side to side as he answered. "Yeah. I'm going to start camp next week, but my dad didn't sign me up in time to start this week."

"Oh, I see, well-"

"Timothy! Timothy! Timo—oh. There you are. I told you to wait by the door!"

Shelagh glanced up to see the harried father approaching from the family practice's waiting room. She recognized him immediately as Dr. Turner, the GP who had joined the practice about a year prior after another doctor retired. She had only seen him in passing in the halls or on the elevator, but he was always polite. More notably, he had an accent that she had only ever heard before on the television or in movies, never in person, which had always piqued her curiosity.

"I am waiting by the door!" Timothy chirped.

"That is the elevator, not the door." The doctor scolded. Then, turning to Shelagh, he added, "I'm so sorry if he was bothering you, nurse….?"

"It's Shelagh," she told him and then gave a little shrug. "And he wasn't bothering me at all. I was just checking to make sure he wasn't alone."

"Er, right…" The doctor adjusted the laptop bag over his shoulder and then reached out for the elevator call button. "Well, thank you, Shelagh. C'mon Tim; let's go home."

"It was nice to meet you, Timothy," Shelagh said. The boy gave her a little wave, and then she turned and walked hurriedly into the door to the right side of the hall so that she would not be late to her shift. She waved a friendly greeting to Cynthia, the receptionist who manned the front desk and fielded calls about scheduling, and then hurried back to her station to clock in and ready herself for her first patients of the day.

"Come on, come on," Patrick Turner groaned at the traffic moving slowly through the green light ahead of him. He drummed his hands on the wheel of his SUV then pushed himself back against the seat with a huff. If traffic continued like this there would be no way for him to get to the grocery store and be able to pick up his son before the six-p.m. cut off time at his day camp. All he could do was hope that Tim had a good day at camp and would agree to stop at the store with him on the way home. It was a bit out of their way to do so, but the chicken he'd hoped to use for that night's supper seemed spoiled when he'd glanced at it that morning while making breakfast, and the last thing either of them needed was food poisoning.

As the light began to change from green to yellow to red before his car had moved even three inches, Patrick sighed and scrubbed his hands over his face. It was fine—everything was going to be fine. It had only been three weeks and so there were bound to be pitfalls. He would get used to full time fatherhood…eventually. He had to keep telling himself that, anyway; it was the only thing getting him through the days.

If he let himself think about it, the notion was quite ridiculous. He was capable of analyzing symptoms and providing diagnosis, prescribing a wide array of medications, and at one point in the past, performing surgeries. Yet, the process of providing a nightly meal with a balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fiber for his son was proving to be his greatest challenge. His cooking skills were passable enough, especially when it came to grilling meats and boiling up some frozen vegetables. Rice was proving to be a bit of a challenge, but his last two batches hadn't been that bad. At that moment he was struggling with the gathering of suitable ingredients, especially when the grocery delivery service happened to forget one of his bags and thus a large portion of his order.

Even during those good days when he was able to leave work in a timely manner and muster up the energy to cook something for them both, he still struggled to get Timothy to actually eat, which to date had led to him raising his voice more often than he was proud of—but he was working on it. He just couldn't understand why Tim wasn't interested in food. He remembered when he was younger his own mother had complained about how much he ate and regularly joked that one day she'd find him nibbling on the plates and silverware.

The counselor had warned him that his son's grief could manifest itself in a variety of ways and low appetite could be one of them, but it had been nearly three months since his mother had died. Shouldn't his appetite have returned by then? Perhaps that was one more thing he'd need to research in the evenings after Tim went to bed.

After another cycle of the traffic light, the cars finally began to move again. One glance at the clock confirmed he would not be able to shop before picking up Tim, so he cut down a side road that would lead him to the back entrance of the community building where the summer camp for elementary aged children was being held.

Thinking Tim could be more interested in eating if he was also involved in the selection process, once the boy was strapped into his booster seat, Patrick offered, "We need to stop at the store before we go home, but I'm going to let you choose what we eat for dinner."

"McDonalds!" The boy proclaimed.

"No…" Patrick said with as much patient he could muster now that he was once again in stop-and-go traffic. "We had McDonalds on Tuesday, remember?"

Before Timothy had returned to his life full-time again, Patrick had spent many more evenings than not eating takeout. Not McDonald's—but generally whichever restaurant had the shortest estimated time of delivery on his app. Though he knew it would be a significant burden on him, Patrick decided that he simply could not let Timothy fall into the same pattern of having his only daily vegetable be the pathetically limp lettuce and white-ish pink tomato on a sandwich. For the sake of convenience, they could have one fast-food meal a week, but no more than that. Despite all of his other fatherly shortcomings, he had managed to stick to that rule for three weeks in a row.

"I want nuggets!" Tim insisted.

"We can have chicken." Patrick offered. "We'll get chicken tenders and—and I'll even bread them," he said without even knowing how to cook chicken that way—but that was what Google was for, right?

"But I want fries, too!"

Patrick thought for a moment then said, "You can have some pan-fried potatoes, but you have to have a vegetable with a color, too."

"Potatoes are white; white is a color."

"A non-white color."

"Like what?"

"Well…you could have some carrots; those are orange. Or broccoli-"

"Blech." Tim gagged from the back seat.

"Green beans?" Patrick offered as an alternative.

"Can I have the little carrots?"

"Sure, we'll get some baby carrots too," Patrick said just as they pulled into the grocery store's parking lot, which was already full of other people trying to grab enough food to make dinner before going home. After unbuckling Tim from his seat, Patrick took his hand to cross through the busy parking lot, and then grabbed a shopping basket to collect their items. Now, all he had to do was hope that Tim would agree to eat the chicken and carrots once he was able to prepare them.