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That’s where Camden stepped in. The second he heard I was coming back to Murdock to take over the practice, he offered his home for me to crash in should I need it. Ryan and Graham had made similar offers, but both of them had young families. Wives and children and careers that I would get in the way of. I would be a weird, busy third wheel all the time. Even staying at the bed and breakfast would feel weird since I would be a client and not a friend.
I had left with a trailer full of stuff and a storage unit pod with the rest being delivered a couple days ago. The pod would have most of my things that I didn’t need day to day, but the trailer had to come with me wherever I was going. I drove it all the way to Murdock and straight to the house, parking in the driveway and noticing immediately that the outside looked terrible.
Vines were growing up one side, and the gutters were full of sticks and leaves. It was badly in need of a power washing, and the shutters needed to be replaced. The porch steps needed to be repaired, and the railing on one side was just simply missing. I could see my dad in my head when I was younger losing his mind over those sorts of things. Calling to have them fixed immediately and most of the time getting it done as a favor by someone who owed him their lives or their partner’s lives or their kids’ lives. Everybody in town had a Doc Murphy story.
But seeing it this way was disheartening and reminded me again of the sharp pain of loss in my chest. How big a hole he was leaving, not just as town doctor, but as a man. As my father.
Dad and I had always had a good relationship, but to say it was strained when Mom passed would be an understatement. I was growing into a teenager and suddenly fell into a deep depression over her loss. It was difficult for everyone, especially my father, who also was experiencing the pain of loss of the person he’d planned to spend his life with.
He did the best he could, but he also threw himself so deeply into work that I didn’t see him as much as either of us would have liked. He wanted me to take over the practice one day even then, and I resisted. I didn’t want to stay in Murdock. I didn’t even want to stay in Texas. I wanted more from life than that.
It was like we took two very different lessons from Mom’s death. He took the lesson of holding on to your roots, living each day as simply and fully as possible, and loving your family and friends because they would be who you lean on in tough times. I learned that life is short and that if you wanted to do something, you needed to do it as soon as you could. There was no time to waste, and death could be waiting behind every window.
So, when I left home to go to school, I didn’t look back. I didn’t visit much, and Dad didn’t really ask me to. He was busy with work. It was only last year, when he started getting sick, that he asked me to come see him. When I did, I figured he would get better, that his cancer was treatable, and if it got worse, he would tell me.
How naïve I had been.
Not wanting to bother anyone with his own personal problems, Dad didn’t tell anyone. It wasn’t until he had to cancel appointments so he could attend chemo that anyone in town knew what was going on. When he came back bald, struggling, and unable to fill his schedule like he used to, people began to talk. To speculate.
So, he told them. He told them all what was going on, that he only had so much time. The whole town got to mourn him for a year while I was blissfully unaware, traveling around the mid-South working my own job.
In retrospect, I had gotten a letter from Dad’s lawyer a few months before the call that should have tipped me off. He had altered the will. He hadn’t touched it since Mom died, and in it, he had chosen to leave the house to me and donate all his money to charity. He told me he was doing it then, and I was fine with it. I didn’t expect him to leave me money and was honestly okay with the decision.
But the changes were very specific. He had line-itemed donations, choosing exact dollar amounts to go to specific charities. Not something one does when they think they might be adding to the amount of money to be donated. I didn’t think about it at the time, much like I didn’t think about the line item that was listed as “home repairs.”
