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Evergreen Springs
RaeAnne Thayne
DEVIN CONCENTRATED, NIBBLING on her bottom lip as she tried to work the needles that seemed unwieldy and awkward, no matter how she tried.
After her third time tangling the yarn into a total mess, Devin sighed and admitted defeat. Again. Every time they happened to be assigned to work together, Greta took a moment to try teaching her to knit. And every time, she came up short.
“People who find knitting at all relaxing have to be crazy. I think I must have some kind of mental block. It’s just not coming.”
“You’re not trying hard enough,” Greta insisted.
“I am! I swear I am.”
“Even my eight-year-old granddaughter can do it,” she said sternly. “Once you get past the initial learning curve, this is something you’ll love the rest of your life.”
“I think it’s funny.” Callie Bennett, one of the other nurses and also one of Devin’s good friends, smirked as she observed her pitiful attempts over the top of her magazine.
“Oh, yes. Hilarious,” Devin said drily.
“It is! You’re a physician who can set a fractured radius, suture a screaming six-year-old’s finger and deliver a baby, all with your eyes closed.”
“Not quite,” Devin assured her. “I open my eyes at the end of childbirth so I can see to cut the umbilical cord.”
Callie chuckled. “Seriously, you’re one of the best doctors at this hospital. I love working with you and wish you worked here permanently. You’re cool under pressure and always seem to know just how to deal with every situation. But I hate to break it to you, hon, you’re all thumbs when it comes to knitting, no matter how hard you try.”
“I’m going to get the hang of this tonight,” she insisted. “If Greta’s eight-year-old granddaughter can do it, so can I.”
She picked up the needles again and concentrated under the watchful eye of the charge nurse until she’d successfully finished the first row of what she hoped would eventually be a scarf.
“Not bad,” Greta said. “Now, just do that about four hundred more times and you might have enough for a decent-sized scarf.”
Devin groaned. Already, she was wishing she had stuck to reading the latest medical journals to pass the time instead of trying to knit yet again.
“I’ve got to go back to my office and finish the schedule for next month,” Greta said. “Keep going and remember—ten rows a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
Devin laughed but didn’t look up from the stitches.
“How do you always pick the slowest nights to fill in?” Callie asked after Greta left the nurses’ station.
“I have no idea. Just lucky, I guess.”
It wasn’t exactly true. Her nights weren’t always quiet. The past few times she had substituted for the regular emergency department doctors at Lake Haven Hospital had been low-key like this one, but that definitely wasn’t always the case. A month earlier, she worked the night of the first snowfall and had been on her feet all night, between car accidents, snow shovel injuries and a couple of teenagers who had taken a snowmobile through a barbed-wire fence.
Like so much of medicine, emergency medicine was all a roll of the dice.
Devin loved her regular practice as a family physician in partnership with Russell Warrick, who had been her own doctor when she was a kid. She loved having a day-to-day relationship with her patients and the idea that she could treat an entire family from cradle to grave.