AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I rounded the house behind Camden and looked up at the vehicle that had parked in the open space beside the house.
My breath hitched.
4
MARK
Murdock, Texas. It had been a year since I had been there, and when I left, I was positive I wouldn’t be coming back. Not for a long time, at least.
The plan had been to come down, spend a few days with Dad, and then head back home to Austin. I would stay there unless I was needed in Dallas again, in which case I would move again. I was fine staying in Dallas, and in fact, kind of wanted to go back. I liked the big-city life. The busy atmosphere. The people. The nightlife.
But I had gotten back to Austin and found myself being loaned out all right. All over the damn mid-South. At first it was great, traveling to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tampa, Savannah, Charleston, Birmingham, and Memphis… all over. Then it got tiring. Three weeks here, three weeks there. Hotel after hotel. No real cooked food at home, just restaurant after restaurant. I was doing good work, but I felt like a stranger everywhere I went.
I was so distracted by the moves and the sheer volume of work that I barely noticed my father’s calls were coming further and further apart. Or that he sounded weaker each time I talked to him. Or the symptoms he did let on about were signs of something much more problematic than the sickness he’d had when I went to visit him last.
Then, one day, he called me while I was getting on a plane to head back to Austin. He had been transferred to Dallas for treatment. I asked what for, and when he told me, my heart sank. His health had taken a nosedive, and the cancer had progressed so quickly there was no fighting it. He had a matter of days left, not weeks.
I took a leave of absence from my hospital network to go meet him in Dallas and be with him in his final days. The treatment quickly turned to hospice care, and I tried to get them to move him back home and let me care for him there. But Dad didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay in Dallas so that the people of Murdock would never see him in that state. They cared for him so much, and he didn’t want anyone to be sad.
That was Dad. He was always thinking about other people. The citizens of Murdock loved him. He was the only doctor who would do house calls and work at his own clinic on the edge of town. On one side was a major network hospital, sharing with the next town over, and on the other side of town was Dad. And that was where most of the people of Murdock went if they didn’t need an emergency surgery.
I stayed with Dad in Dallas, not leaving the hospice room as he died. During the last conversation we had where he was fully awake and fully functional, he asked me to do him a favor. A favor only I could do.
“Come home and take over the clinic.”
His eyes had been so full of hope and worry. I couldn’t tell him no. I’d never wanted to take over his clinic. I’d never wanted to live in Murdock again. But Dad had always harbored the hope that I would, that there would be another ‘Doc Murphy’ in town, and it would be me. The town and the people of Murdock meant everything to him, and with his dying wish, he asked me to come take over the clinic that bore my family name.
So, I quit my job at the hospital network, flew back to Austin, packed my apartment up, and headed back. Home.
Ostensibly, I was going to live in the old house. I’d grown up there, and Dad had owned it outright for many years, using the life insurance money from my mother’s death to pay off the mortgage. I remembered it fondly for what it was when I was a child, but in the years since I left town, it had fallen into some disarray.
Dad had never been much of a homebody. He tended to think of his house as a place that he slept and occasionally ate sandwiches. Other than that, it was just walls to hold stuff in. Without me there to keep up the place and with the cancer slowly stripping him of his energy and motivation, the house had gone into disrepair quickly.
I’d had no idea he was that sick, but when I saw the house, I knew it was going to be a project and a half to get it livable again. It certainly wasn’t something I could do while living there, not the major stuff, anyway. I was going to have to stay somewhere else in the meantime.
