Bobby crossed his arms over his chest. “No!”
“Buddy, we have to let the doctor decide and do whatever he thinks is best.”
“No!” Bobby repeated.
Sam cast a helpless look at the nurse. She sat down on Bobby’s other side.
“You know he’ll give you something so it won’t hurt,” she told him gently. “And the rumor is that he has lollipops for his bravest patients.”
“Gram’pa Mick has candy, too,” Bobby said, as if the doctor’s offering weren’t all that special.
“But Grandpa Mick can’t fix up your cut,” Sam reminded him.
Bobby seemed to be considering the truth of that. “I’ll go if Carrie comes, too,” he said finally, startling Sam.
“I think this is something you and I can handle,” Sam told him, determined to hold his ground. He wasn’t sure why he was so insistent, but it seemed important to prove, if only to himself, that he could care for Bobby on his own.
Bobby’s expression turned even darker. “No! I want Carrie.”
As badly as he wanted to stay firm, Sam concluded this wasn’t the time or place for an argument. “I’ll call Carrie when we get in the car and ask her to meet us there,” he conceded. “If she’s free and close by, she’ll be there when we get there. How’s that?”
“I guess that’s okay,” Bobby relented.
A few minutes later Carrie met them at the doctor’s office, which was in the same block as her new business. She gave Bobby a reassuring hug, then glanced curiously at Sam as Bobby drifted off toward a selection of toys in the waiting room.
“When you called, it almost sounded as if you weren’t sure I’d come,” she said quietly.
“You have a lot going on right now. I wasn’t even sure if you’d be in town. I didn’t want to drag you all the way back from Julie’s.”
“Nothing I have to do is more important than this,” she said, regarding him curiously. After glancing down to make sure that Bobby’s attention was focused on some LEGOs in the waiting-room play area, she said, “Didn’t you want me here? If that’s it, why did you bother calling?”
Sam sighed. “It’s just that I rely on you a lot, most recently last night, to bail me out of yet another tight spot.”
“The impromptu birthday party?” she said incredulously. “That was fun. It wasn’t an imposition. Sam, I know you and I have a whole lot of things we need to figure out.”
“One of the things we agreed to was that we didn’t want to confuse Bobby while we were figuring out the rest,” he reminded her.
“True, but I thought we were friends. Friends step up in a bind, no matter what else might be going on.”
Sam suddenly felt ridiculous for making too much out of this. Had he wanted to use this incident to prove he was up to the task of fatherhood? Now wasn’t the time for his pride to kick in. Since he didn’t want to admit to that, he said, “But Bobby isn’t your responsibility.”
Carrie held his gaze for a very long time, disappointment in her eyes. “One of these days we need to talk about the difference between responsibility and caring enough to be around for the people we love,” she said. “If you don’t get that, then maybe we shouldn’t even consider anything more.”
Before Sam could say a word in his own defense—assuming he even had one—Noah McIlroy came out of the back to get Bobby and the moment ended, leaving Sam more shaken than he’d been in a long time. Not even the call from the school had gotten to him the same way that Carrie’s quietly spoken rebuke had.
Bobby isn’t your responsibility.
The entire time Carrie was in the examining room, Bobby clutching her hand tightly as Noah put two stitches into his lip, she was fighting the hurt that had spread through her at Sam’s comment. How could they possibly have been so close last night, only to have him utter such careless words today? She’d thought they’d been making real progress toward something meaningful, and in a split second, he’d destroyed that illusion and put her in her place.
She was aware of Noah studying her curiously, but knew he would never ask the questions that were so clearly on his mind, such as why she was here with Bobby or why she and Sam couldn’t even look each other in the eye.
“Good job!” Noah told Bobby when he was finished. “You were very brave.”
“The nurse at school said you might have lollipops,” Bobby said hopefully.
Noah chuckled. “I do, indeed.” He pulled a carton with an assortment of flavors from one of the drawers. “Now here’s the deal. It might be best if you don’t eat this right now. Your lip’s going to be numb for a little bit longer and you don’t want to dribble all over yourself. Can you save this till tomorrow?”