One Day in Apple Grove Read Free

“If you want to keep up with your PT, Dan usually jogs every morning. I go with him a few times a week. Give him a call.”
    Jack chuckled. “Hmmm, the patient giving the doctor advice, but I could use a jogging partner.” He cleared his throat and added, “My dad had good things to say about him and how easily he seemed to fit in from the moment he arrived. Mom couldn’t say enough about the way he rescued Charlie Doyle and Tommy Hawkins off the railroad trestle bridge.”
    Joe looked up at Jack and asked, “Do you believe in fate?”
    “With our Irish heritage, you need to ask?” Joe was still laughing when Jack said, “My dad wanted me to make sure you are getting in your daily walks and following the diet he gave you.” Joe’s heart attack scare a few years ago had Jack wishing he could have gone home to see for himself that his childhood friend’s father was recovering, but he was in the middle of his internship at the time.
    The older man hesitated. “Not a big fan of green things.”
    Jack tried to keep a straight face. He could take the green stuff or leave it, but he was at least twenty years younger and thirty pounds lighter than Joe.
    “Start small and add dressing if it’s salad or a little bit of peanut butter if it’s celery.” When Joe frowned, Jack added, “I could insist on a stricter diet, higher in vegetables and fish—”
    “I’ll give it another try, but I’m not promising anything.”
    “Do it for yourself and your daughters, Joe,” Jack said quietly. “By the way, how are Cait and Grace doing?” He hadn’t seen either of Meg’s younger sisters in years. Cait had been eleven and Grace ten when he’d joined the navy, so if he had seen either one of them when he’d been on leave, he didn’t remember.
    Joe snorted with laughter, a man’s man through and through. A former coast guardsman, he still ran a few times a week and wore his graying hair in military fashion: high and tight. “Driving me nuts, trying to keep me from my threat of running our handyman business again.”
    “Mom said that you’d retired and turned everything over to your girls.” Jack pointed the tongue depressor at Joe. “Say ah.”
    Joe did and Jack nodded. “Looks normal. I can have a talk with your daughters, but I might not recognize them if they walked past me on the sidewalk.”
    Joe chuckled. “They’re hard to miss. Almost half a foot taller than Meg—close to five feet eight—and both strawberry blonde, like their mother, with green eyes.”
    Jack sat down on his rolling stool and used his feet to push off so he was back in front of his laptop. He finished entering data and turned back around. “Any more weddings on the horizon?”
    Joe sighed. “I had high hopes for one young man Cait had been dating, but she’s been so busy picking up the slack, what with Meg’s morning sickness, that she hasn’t had the time or energy to date. Grace hasn’t brought anyone around to meet me, but I know she’s seeing someone from out of town.”
    Jack noticed Joe’s worry lines when he was talking about his daughters and wanted to do something to erase them. As a physician, he would always treat his patients to the best of his ability, but here in Apple Grove, there was much more to be considered. With Joe Mulcahy, it was the link to his childhood friend and the need to help her father. “If I learned anything during my years in the navy, I learned that life and insurgents come at you with both barrels—” He buried the ever-present turmoil just bubbling below the surface to a controllable level and finished what he’d wanted to say. “Life is too short.”
    He thought of the marine that bled out while he had worked in earnest to stitch the young man back together under fire. If he didn’t close the lid to the box where he kept those memories, he’d be up all night, positive he could hear the whistling sound of the explosive before it hit, feel the white-hot agonizing pain of having his