"No, no, I remember, or have this impression of her. I spent a summer here as a kid. Memories keep popping out at me. You just walked into one.
"Oh." The eyes behind the amber lenses lost their clinical shrewdness and warmed. "That explains it. I know just what you mean. I spent several summers here growing up, and memories wing up at me all the time. That's why I decided to relocate here when Granny died. I always loved it here."
Absently, she grabbed her toe, bending her leg back, heel to butt, to stretch out. "You'd be the Yankee who's taken Little Desire Cottage for half a year."
"Word travels."
"Doesn't it just? Especially when it doesn't have far to go. We don't get many single men renting for six months. A number of the ladies are intrigued." Kirby repeated the process on the other leg. "You know, I think I might remember you. Wasn't it you and your brother who palled around with Brian Hathaway? I remember Granny saying how those Delaney boys and young Brian stuck together like a dirt clod."
"Good memory. You were here that summer?"
"Yes, it was my first summer on Desire. I suppose that's why'remember it best. Have you seen Brian yet?" she asked casually.
"He just fixed me breakfast."
"Magic in an egg." It was Kirby's turn to look past the cottage, beyond it. "I heard Jo's back. I'm going to try to get up to the house after the clinic closes today." she glanced at her watch. "And since it opens in twenty minutes, I'd better go get cleaned up. It was nice seeing you again, Nathan."
"Nice seeing you. Doc," he added as she began to jog toward the dunes.
With a laugh, she turned, ' backward. "General practice," she called out. "Everything from birth to earth. Come in for what ails you."
"I'll keep it in mind." He smiled and watched her ponytail swing sassily as she ran through the valley between the dunes.
Nineteen minutes later, Kirby put on a white lab coat over her Levi's. she considered the coat a kind of costume, designed to reassure the reluctant patient that she was indeed a doctor. That and the stethoscope tucked in its pocket gave the islanders the visual nudge many of them needed to let Granny Fitzsimmons's little girl poke into their orifices.
she stepped into her office, formerly her grandmother's well stocked pantry off the kitchen. Yirby had left one wall of shelves intact, to hold books and papers and the clever little combo fax and copy machine that kept her linked with the mainland. she'd removed the other shelves, since she had no plans to follow her grandmother's example and put by everything from stewed tomatoes to watermelon pickles.
she'd muscled the small, lovingly polished cherry wood desk into the room herself It had traveled with her from Connecticut, one of the few pieces she'd brought south. It was outfitted with a leatherframed blotter and appointment book that had been a parting gift from her baffled parents.
Her father had grown up on Desire and considered himself fortunate to have escaped.
she knew both of her parents had been thrilled when she'd decided to follow in her father's footsteps and go into medicine. And they had assumed she would continue to follow, into his cardiac surgery specially, into his thriving practice, and right along to the platinum-edged lifestyle both of them so enjoyed.
Instead she'd chosen family practice, her grandmother's weatherbeaten cottage, and the simplicity of island life.
she couldn't have been happier.
Tidily arranged with the appointment book that bore her initials in gold leaf were a snazzy phone system with intercom-in the unlikely event that she should ever need an assistant-and a Lucite container of well-sharpened Ticonderoga pencils.
I<-Yirby had spent her first few weeks of practice doing little more than sharpening pencils and wearing them down again by doodling on the blotter.
But she'd stuck, and gradually she'd begun to use those pencils to note down appointments. A baby with the croup, an old woman with arthritis, a child spiking a fever with roseola.
It had been the very young or the very old who'd trusted her first. Then others had come to have their stitches sewn, the aches tended, their stomachs soothed. Now she was Doc Yirby, and the clinic was holding its own.
Kirby scanned her appointment book. An annual gyn, a follow-up on a nasty sinus infection, the Matthews boy had another earache, and the Simmons baby was due in for his next immunizations. Well, her waiting room wasn't going to be crowded, but at least she'd keep busy through the morning. And who knew, she thought with a chuckle, there could be a couple of emergencies to liven up the day.
Since Ginny Pendleton was her gyn at ten o'clock, Yirby calculated she had at least another ten minutes. Ginny was invariably late for everything. Pulling the necessary chart, she stepped back into the kitchen, poured the last of the coffee from the pot she'd made early that morning, and took it with her to the examining room.