Usually when I’m riding to town, I get on and just go. I don’t even have to think about turning the pedals over. But this was different. This felt like work, and we weren’t even on a hill yet.
Then I looked down and realized why I was working so hard. Jeanine’s boots were going around, but when the pedals dropped, I could see the ground between the pedal and the boot. She wasn’t pushing at all. Her feet were just along for the ride. “Jeanine! Pedal!”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. Your feet are on a merry-go-round. They need to push. C’mon. Right. Left. Right. Left.”
“But that’s hard,” she whined.
“It’s called riding a bike.” I stood up on the pedals.
“Why are you doing that?”
“You get more power like this. But just sit. It’ll be too hard to balance with both of us standing.”
When the road flattened out, I sat back down. My back was killing me, and I was breathing hard.
“Are we almost there?”
“Can you please just pedal?” I was too out of breath to talk.
Jeanine was quiet for a while after that, and she was definitely pushing the pedals down now because I could hear her puffing behind me.
“I don’t like this!” she shouted as we started to pick up speed heading down a long hill.
“I can’t do anything about gravity, Jeanine.”
“Can’t you slow us down?”
“We’re not even going that fast. Just relax.”
But Jeanine didn’t relax. Instead, Jeanine did what Jeanine does. She freaked, and the bike began to dip and swerve like it was trying to shake me off.
“Okay! Okay!” I slowed us down until the screaming and the swooping stopped. “Better?”
“Better.”
Since even with Jeanine actually pedaling, we had no chance of making it up the monster hill outside of town, I stopped at the bottom of it. I’d planned on picking Jeanine and Dad up at the traffic light at the top, but once he was out of the buggy, Dad swore he’d never get back in, so I rode all the way to the clinic and waited for them there.
“Hello? Anybody here?” Jeanine called as we entered the empty waiting room.
Besides some armchairs and a coffee table, it didn’t look much like other waiting rooms I’d seen. The walls were crowded with colorful paintings from floor to ceiling, and there was no window with a receptionist sitting in it.
“Hey! Just come on up,” a man’s voice called.
“Up?” I called back.
It seemed weird to have a doctor’s office on more than one floor. If someone were really sick, would you want to make them climb a flight of stairs?
“Yeah, come up!” the man said again.
“I’ll go,” I said and left Jeanine quizzing Dad on U.S. capitals in the waiting room. These he remembered perfectly, at least according to Jeanine. I couldn’t tell you since I’ve taken a stand against memorizing facts readily available on the internet.
“Perfect timing. I need another pair of hands,” I heard the man say as I climbed the stairs.
Was it possible that Petersville was so short on able bodies that the doctor let just anybody pitch in to help with surgical procedures? My stomach somersaulted like I was in an elevator coming down too fast. I’m not so good with blood, mine or anybody else’s.
What I saw when I got up there did make me want to run back down again, but it wasn’t some lady having a wart sawed off. It was a man, super thin, dripping with sweat and wearing way too little clothing to be inviting in visitors. The only thing separating him from complete nakedness were those teeny, tiny running shorts. You know the ones that are so small you’re worried something will fall out? Those.
The man held a paintbrush in each hand, and he was going at an enormous canvas like he was trying to teach it a lesson. It must have been fighting back too, because the thick carpet of hair on his chest was more blue than gray.
Before I could ask where the doctor was, the guy was rushing at me, shoving a long piece of cardboard into my hands, and then pulling me by it back over to the painting. “Here, just hold it like this,” he said, pressing it against the canvas at an angle.
“But—”
“Shush! Quiet!” he ordered, raising his paintbrush over his mouth so fast, he splattered both our faces with paint. Then he began painting furiously around the cardboard, covering not just the canvas but both my hands with cold, syrupy paint.
“But—”
“Shush!”
“It’s just—”
“Please, please, please! This will only take one minute, sixty seconds, nothing.”
Okay, sixty seconds is nothing, but it was so not sixty. I counted. Somewhere after 200 Mississippi, I let the cardboard drop.
“Oh no,” he said, more sad than angry. “I was almost done.”
“Look,” I said. “I really need to find Dr. Charney.”
“You’re not Joe?”
“No.”
“You’re not here about the painting apprenticeship?”
“No, I’m here to see the doctor.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” he said, tossing his paintbrushes into a coffee can. I must have looked annoyed because then he said, “Kidding,” and knocked me a little too hard on the shoulder with a blue fist. “Just give me a second.”
This guy was the doctor? Maybe “doctor” meant something different in Petersville.
“Fever?” He went to a sink in the corner of the room and began washing his hands. “Flu’s already making the rounds. Have you been vaccinated?”
He spoke Doctor at least. “Uh, no. It’s not me. It’s my dad. Downstairs. He fell off our roof. We think he has a concussion.”
“I’m sure Dad’s just fine, but let’s go take a look,” he said, drying his hands as he headed for the stairs.
“Um, aren’t you forgetting something?” I tugged at my sweatshirt. Personally, I thought he could have used a shower too given all the paint and sweat, but the least he could do was put on some clothes.
“Right, back in a flash.” He dashed behind a screen that hid a corner of the room. As I waited, I looked around the large,
