Free Suddenly by Barbara Delinsky

that she was leaving, and started for the door. But her mind was into organizing her thoughts, one of which was that life would be immeasurably easier for Paige if she didn’t have to work in the morning.
    Saturday office hours were nine to twelve. With the time reserved primarily for acutes, of which there were rarely more than a handful, only one doctor had to be there. Who that doctor would be was always the source of much good-natured bickering and bartering.
    Angie thought it would be super of Peter to take Paige’s turn for free. So she returned to the kitchen and gave him a call.
     
    The Tavern had been the major watering hole in town for as long as Peter Grace could remember. His father had imbibed there, and his grandfather before that, and although rough-hewn benches and bare bulbs had been replaced by polished pine and Tiffany lamps, it was still rustic. To hear his three older brothers talk, a Tucker male wasn’t a man until he had staked out his booth at the Tavern. By that definition, Peter hadn’t achieved manhood until he was thirty years of age, which was when he returned to Tucker with medical school and a four-year residency in pediatrics under his belt. Only then had the onetime runt of the Grace litter had the courage to choose his booth.
    It was the second one in from the front door and offered a visibility that the darker rear booths did not. Peter liked being seen. He was an important man, having been places and done things that few natives had, and he was a doctor. He was respected by the townsfolk, even loved by his patients. Their adoration was like a tonic. It was a sign of success that no amount of money could buy and went a long way toward compensating for the days when he had felt like a loser.
    Likewise, there was something gratifying about watching his brothers file past to the obscurity of their booths farther back. Once upon a time, the three had been hometown stars, headlining the sports section of the Tucker Tribune, scoring touchdowns, swishing free throws, and hitting home runs, while Peter was fending off the taunts of his classmates. Small and uncoordinated, measured against unfairly high standards, he withdrew into a quiet world in which he read, studied, and dreamed of the day when his brothers’ knees went bad and he would shine.
    He was doing that now. While his brothers worked construction, he played God. In counterpoint to their callused hands, beer bellies, and, yes, bad knees, he was in prime shape. Once skinny, he was now tall and firm. Once unruly curls had mellowed into dark auburn waves that were professionally styled. He dressed like a man who had known the sophistication of metropolis and successfully adapted it to hicksville.
    Tonight, he was celebrating. He didn’t tell anyone that, of course. As far as the general populace of Tucker was concerned, he was nursing his beer in an attempt to lighten the sorrow he felt over Mara O’Neill’s death.
    In fact, the sorrow had lightened with each clod of dirt that the cemetery workers had shoveled into Mara’s grave. Peter had stayed to watch long after the crowd of mourners had left. He had wanted to be sure that the job was done right, had wanted to see with his own two eyes that she was six feet under and gone.
    Mara O’Neill had been a dangerous woman. She’d had the knack of befriending a man, drawing him close, then stabbing him in the back. She had done it to her husband and nearly done it to Peter. A dangerous woman, to say the least. He was lucky to have escaped.
    He took a healthy swallow of his beer and was setting the glass down when several men from the steelworks entered the Tavern. They passed his booth en route to theirs at the rear.
    “Too bad about Dr. O’Neil.”
    “Real loss for the town.”
    “She was a trooper.”
    Peter nodded, spared a response by the guise of grief, grateful when the men moved on. A trooper? Oh, yes, Mara was that. Once she set her mind on something, she didn’t give up,