Free What Matters Most by Gwynne Forster Page A

have to take it. Please. I want you to have it.” The boy’s eyes beseeched him.
    Jack hunkered beside the boy whose illness had changed Jack’s life, awakening him to a world that he knew existed, but hadn’t understood or cared to investigate. The child gazed at him as if he were regarding a saint. He draped his arm around Tommy’s shoulder. “Thank you, Tommy. I’ll cherish this. I see you like to draw.”
    “Yes, sir, and I can draw you. Can you sit there for a minute?”
    He didn’t have time, but how could he say no? “Yes, but only for a couple of minutes.”
    A few minutes later, the boy tore off the sheet from the pad and handed it to Jack, whose jaw dropped when he looked at it.
    “This is unbelievable. It’s definitely me. Would you sign it, please? I’ll give it to my father.”
    Tommy signed the drawing. “Friends?” he asked.
    Jack felt his face crease into a wide, happy grin. “Good friends. How’s your grandma?”
    “Fine, except she’s always tired. I have to bring her something from the store. See you next time.”
    “Thank you for the bat, Tommy.” He made a mental note to see that Tommy didn’t slip through the cracks. His guardian was a woman in her late eighties or early nineties, and the boy would need support.
     
    At home that night, anxious for some quick answers, Jack ate his dinner sitting at his computer. He wanted to learn as much as he could about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, because an idea had begun to form in his mind, and he believed it had merit. Children under age twelve constituted half of his patient load, and he was even less of a pediatrician than he was an internist. Melanie was a quick study, and she could learn a lot during a six-week internship at the country’s leading children’s hospital. On the Internet, he found a telephone number and an e-mail address and, most importantly, encouragement to dialogue with St. Jude doctors about the health care of his patients. He made notes, signed off, went downstairs to the refrigerator and treated himself to a bottle of beer. He didn’t know when he’d felt so good. His dad wasn’t with him, but he could talk with doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital who would sympathize with what he was trying to do.
    The next morning as soon as he arrived at his Bolton Hill office, he telephoned Alice Hawkins and took a complete history of Midge’s ailments and treatments. Since the girl hadn’t been born in a hospital, but at home with the help of an old woman who served as midwife, she hadn’t been screened for sickle-cell anemia. He made a note to revise the questionnaire he used for the children he treated in the South Baltimore office to include whether they had been screened for that ailment.
    When he reached his office at three-thirty that day, Melanie greeted him with raspberry scones and coffee. “These are the best scones I have ever tasted,” she said. “You only ordered them for Tuesday and Thursday, when you’re here. How could you? What about the other days? What’ll I eat then?”
    He bit into the scone, savored it and let a smile drift over his face. “This is heavenly. I like you just the way you are, and eating two of these things five days a week would ruin your perfect figure.”
    “Will not.”
    “Will so. And nothing’s worse than a good figure gone bad.”
    “You can’t be serious,” she said. “If I thought you were, I’d—”
    “You’d what?”
    She didn’t answer, just sat there eating the scone, sipping coffee and licking her lips. When she put the last piece into her mouth, she slumped down in the chair and moaned lightly. “Boy was that good!” She crossed her knees and closed her eyes.
    He stared at her, so soft and so sensuous. He didn’t doubt that if they had been anywhere private other than his office, he’d have been inside her within five minutes.
    “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked him, her face the picture of