Page 33 of A Mommy for His Daughter

Derek chuckled. “It’s not some angler’s fish hook you can buy at the store and use at the old fishing hole, Evelyn. It was a large commercial fish hook.”

Evelyn winced again. “Okay. Got it. I don’t need to hear anymore.”

Derek chuckled. “That makes you queasy?”

“Yeah, your description of it does make me queasy. This is why I didn’t pursue trauma surgery. It’s not my forte. I can lend a hand in a trauma situation, but fish hooks…no, thanks.”

He grinned and then shook his head. “It’s a way of life up here.”

“I know. My dad was the doctor here and… I remember some interesting accidents.”

“Like what?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I’m really not going to talk about them.”

“Come on,” he teased.

She shuddered. “Fish hooks were some, I guess. But the most interesting one was a bear mauling.”

“I’ve had one of those.”

“Oh. Was it a tourist?”

“Yes,” he said in surprise. “How did you know?”

“They get in too close to the wildlife. I remember Dad talking about it. It used to frustrate him, because once a bear loses its fear of a human it ends up getting destroyed. It was a pet peeve of his.”

“I get that.”

They didn’t say anything else, but he knew that Evelyn understood the way of life up here. It was nice that she got it. That he didn’t have to explain things to her. She just knew and he could talk to her openly about life up close to the sixtieth parallel. Which was so different from anywhere else—except further north, perhaps.

I wish she’d stay.

And that thought caught him off guard.

“Anyways, Mr. Schilling will make a full recovery. He’s at home for the rest of the season and Dr. Vance will check in on him while we’re gone,” Derek said, changing the subject.

“Your replacement?”

Derek nodded. “I was hoping he’d take a permanent position in Wolf’s Harbor, but I don’t think he will. He has a girlfriend in Sitka. I just need a couple of regular doctors to help with my bid to get funding for a hospital in Wolf’s Harbor.”

“If you had a hospital I wouldn’t have to go to Juneau to run this test, or send Jennifer so far away from Wolf’s Harbor to have her baby.”

“Exactly. Wolf’s Harbor is right in the middle of the Inside Passage and we serve a lot of fishermen and loggers. I’ve been trying since I lost my first patient over a preventable injury when I first came here.”

“What happened?” Evelyn asked.

“Cut his femoral artery in a logging accident. If I could’ve gotten him into surgery we might have saved him. But I can’t get surgeons or nurses to stay in Wolf’s Harbor.”

Evelyn didn’t respond to that, but he saw the bloom of color in her cheeks as she went back to looking out the window.

Great. This is going to be a fun three hours. What else can we talk about to make it completely awkward for her?

“Ever been to Juneau before?” he asked, trying to steer the conversation to something more chatty.

“No. I’ve never been to Juneau…well, other than to the airport when I was sent to live with my grandmother in Boston. I went to Sitka and then flew to Juneau and then to Boston, which was a long flight.”

“You don’t like flying?” he asked.

“No.”

The silence fell between them again. He felt awkward, nervous around her.

Then Derek chuckled. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I can’t seem to start a conversation without it getting awkward.”

Evelyn grinned. “I know. Let’s stick to talking about Juneau, because I’ve been to Hoonah, and my dad would take me sometimes to watch the cruise ships come up the Inside Passage or we’d watch for whales, but I’ve never taken the ferry to Juneau.”

“Never?”

“Never. Dad would take the ferry to Juneau if he needed to go to the hospital, but I would always remain behind with Le´elk’w.”

“Le´elk’w means grandmother?” he asked.

“It’s what I called her. Or what she told me to call her. Do you know much Tlingit?”

“No. I don’t know much. I’ve had people try to teach me, but no.”

“You’ve been in Wolf’s Harbor for—what?—fifteen years?—and you don’t know much Tlingit?”

“Well, I haven’t had much time to learn it, and languages are not my forte, much to my mother’s chagrin.”

“Your mother wanted you to speak a lot of languages?”

“She is Haitian and my dad was Ukrainian, but I couldn’t pick up any of the languages my parents spoke—not Haitian Creole, not French, and certainly not Ukrainian or Russian. My Spanish grades in school were miserable too.”

---