Good Hope Road by Lisa Wingate Page A

mouth.
    Mrs. Gibson noticed it, too. “Doc, you need to get some rest. You’re gonna give yourself another round of heart trouble.”
    Doc Howard rolled his gaze upward. “You been downtown talking to my wife.” He smiled beneath his thick white mustache. “She send you up here to mollycoddle me?”
    Mrs. Gibson huffed and braced her hands on her hips. “No, but I did see her downtown, when we took some chili to the sheriff’s temporary station down there. She’s pretty busy running the dispatch radio, but she’s worried about you. A man who just got over a heart attack ought not to be doing this kind of work. Not for this many hours, anyhow.”
    Doc took a bite of chili and rolled it around in his mouth. “Not much choice about that. Anyway, I’m just helping out since they brought that Dr. Albright in here late last night. It’s not so bad now that we’ve got a real doctor.”
    Mrs. Gibson glanced suspiciously around the room. “Don’t see him here.”
    Doc shrugged, wiping a chili bean from his beard. “He went out the back door. Reckon he had to use the bushes. Why don’t you go check, Eudora? He might be in some kind of trouble out there.”
    “Oh, Doc, you hush!” Mrs. Gibson flushed red. “Honestly!”
    Mazelle Sibley piped in, from where she was carefully arranging bandages on the supply shelves. “Dr. Albright has been gone over-long. Maybe someone should check. . . .” She flushed, as if she’d suddenly realized what Doc had meant by use the bushes .
    Doc Howard looked proud of himself. He always called Mazelle Sibley, Mrs. Gibson, and the rest of the garden club “the bossy biddy society.” He liked to get the best of them when he could. “Mazelle, for heaven’s sake, leave the man alone,” he said. “Reckon he’s entitled to a minute to himself. It’s been a long morning. You been hanging on his coattails since the minute you got here.”
    Mazelle coughed indignantly, then threw her chin up and went back to arranging bandages. “Well, it only comes natural, my father having been the doctor in town for sixty years. You know I always was his best assistant.”
    Doc Howard rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I know. You told me that. Once or twice.” He glanced sideways at me and winked, then went back to his chili.
    Mrs. Gibson leaned over to look in my bowl. “You eat that chili, Jenilee Lane. You need something to eat. The sheriff told me you been savin’ lives this mornin’.”
    Over by the medicine shelves, Mazelle coughed and smacked her teeth just loudly enough for us to hear.
    Mrs. Gibson opened her mouth to say something, but the wail of a siren outside drowned her out as a car skidded up to the loading platform.
    Doc set his chili on the floor and stood up as a highway patrolman rushed in carrying a mud-covered toddler bundled against his chest in a blanket.
    “Doc! I got a little boy, probably around two years old.” The highway patrolman unwrapped the blanket and tried to lay the naked, mud-covered toddler on the floor, but the baby screamed and hung on with all ten fingers and toes.
    Doc Howard chuckled, relief lifting the corners of his thick white beard as he took a rag and wiped the dirt from the baby’s eyes and mouth. “Can’t be too much wrong with this one. He’s stuck like a tick.”
    The patrolman smiled, and I was surprised by how good it felt to see someone smile.
    “This one’s a miracle,” he said. “I was just driving along Highway Forty-two, and I looked over and saw a ball of mud moving in the ditch. No houses around or anything. I’m thinking I’m going to rescue a dog or something. I climb down the ditch and pick up this thing, and there it is, a little boy. He grabs aholt of me and he ain’t lettin’ go. Don’t have no idea who he is, but I put it out over the radio. You know someone’s desperate to find this little guy.”
    Doc continued trying to check over the child while he clung to his rescuer. “See if he’ll let you hold him, Jenilee,