Just What the Doctor Ordered

Chapter 1-3

I stood at the kitchen sink with the tap on as I clipped the roses’ stems under the flow of running water. At an angle, just like they said to in all of Lee’s gardening books. I found an old Coke bottle in one of the cabinets and arranged the flowers in it, pinching off a few withered leaves.

Lee was big on flowers, and plants, and those little stalks of green bamboo shoots that grow in shallow dishes of water. He had a half dozen of them all around his office at the clinic. At home he concentrated on the azaleas surrounding the house and the small water garden he put in the backyard two summers ago. The window above the kitchen sink looked out at a large mimosa tree, its fern-like leaves drenching the sunken pool and the glider beside it with shade. From where I stood at the sink I could look out and see flecks of light skimming the water—the setting sun reflected off Lee’s goldfish. “Koi,” he called them.

“I can be coy if that’s what turns you on,” I said at the time.

In the evenings, when the sun dipped down towards the horizon, its light would shatter the surface of the pool, splashing it into tiny prisms of color that the fish swam through gracefully.

Setting the impromptu vase on the breakfast bar, I crossed the hallway into the den. Quickly I riffled through our CDs, on the hunt for something mellow with a lot of sax. Something sexy. Lee wasn’t the only one hoping to get lucky tonight. When I found what I was looking for, I didn’t have to turn the stereo up loud. Our sunroom was nothing more than an enclosed porch but when we added it onto the back of the house, we wired a second set of speakers to pipe music out there.

I dimmed the living room lights, then went back into the kitchen for two long-stemmed glasses and the plates and silverware I had set out before Lee got home. Holding the plates to my chest, the knives and forks and napkins pressed in between, I carried both glasses upside down in one hand and still managed to snag the Coke vase, heavy with roses, in the other.

Ready to rumble, I thought, amused at my own excitement. Lee had that effect on me, though I was as much worked up about the possibility of an uninterrupted night with my lover as I was the whole summer ahead in which to write, uninterrupted by research papers and midterms and finals.

Behind me on the wall, the phone rang.

“Damn,” I muttered. I should have turned the ringer off when I came in, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything, to be honest, if it didn’t involve Lee in that hot tub.

Ignore it, I told myself, but curiosity made me glance at the caller ID. An out-of-state number I didn’t recognize and beneath that, the word Massachusetts. Not one of my students, who were all out of classes and shouldn’t be calling now anyway, and definitely not the college. It wasn’t the clinic or any of Lee’s patients, not with that area code. Wrong number then, I reasoned. I didn’t know anyone that far away.

Still, I shifted the vase into my arms and picked up the receiver, intent on saying something sophomoric like, “Sorry, can’t talk now. I’m about to get laid.” Then I’d hang up the phone before whoever it was on the other end of the line could answer, and I’d pull out the cord for good measure, just to make sure we weren’t bothered again.

But when I put the receiver to my ear, wedging it against my shoulder to grab at the vase again, any witty remark I might have made disappeared beneath a barrage of rapid-fire speak. A woman’s voice in an Asian tongue, angry by the sound of it. “Hello?” I asked, uncertain. This was definitely a wrong number.

Then I realized she wasn’t talking to me. “Hello?” I tried again.

Hang up, I thought, but it was the Massachusetts on the caller ID that stopped me. Lee’s mother lived in a suburb outside of Boston and though I had never met the woman, the voice in my ear sounded too young to be her.

“Look,” I said, frustrated. “I don’t know what you’re saying. I’m sort of in the middle of something here—”

The voice dipped away as the phone was handed to someone else. I could still hear the woman in the background, rattling on in a language I didn’t understand. “Hello?” I asked for the third time. If I didn’t get an answer—in English—I was going to hang up and yank the whole damn contraption out of the wall.

But I did get an answer, or enough of one that I knew the phone call wasn’t for me. “Li Gui there?” a second woman asked.

She spoke with the chopped, embarrassed air of someone not comfortable with foreign words and for some reason it reminded me the Ginshu knives they sell on TV. Finally, I thought. The plates slid in my arms and I moved a bit to keep them from falling to the floor. “May I ask who’s calling?”

“Li Gui,” she said again. She spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable as if she were talking to a child. When I didn’t answer immediately, she asked, “He there?”

The receiver started to slip. “Hold on,” I said, letting it fall from my shoulder to knock against the wall. I called out for my lover as I stepped through the sliding doors that led to the sunroom. “Lee?”

He was at the grill where I’d left him, the steaks stacked together on the plate that once held the shrimp. With a quick smile, he brushed hot butter along the kabobs and told me, “You’re just in time. Dinner’s almost done.”

“Telephone’s for you,” I said as he took the plates and glasses from me. “I think it might be your mother.”

His clear brow wrinkled in concern. “My mother?” He set the plates down and looked past me, almost as if he expected to see her standing in the doorway. “You sure?”

“I don’t know,” I dropped the silverware and napkins onto the empty plates, took the tongs from him and nudged him with my elbow. “Why don’t you go see? In the kitchen.”

I eased past him to stand in front of the grill, turning one of the skewers of shrimp with the tongs. For a brief moment his hand touched my hip and I bumped back against him playfully. “Go find out what she wants. Then turn off the ringer and get back here, babe. I’m in the mood to celebrate, if you know what I mean.”

That earned me a laugh and one of his winning smiles. “I knew those roses would work,” he teased as he hurried inside.