“Brrrr! It sure doesn’t feel like spring yet!” said the weather reporter.
Brooke fixed a stray eyelash in her rearview mirror. Her eyes were red and watery. She would tell today’s patients she had allergies. Nobody wanted a physio with migraines.
Nobody wanted a wife with chronic migraines. A daughter or a sister with migraines. Or even a friend with migraines. All those cancellations! Brooke let the self-pitying train of thought unravel only so far before she snipped it short.
“Who’s looking forward to the last few weeks of the snow season?” said the weather reporter.
“I am,” said Brooke. Spring skiing meant torn and strained knee ligaments, back injuries, wrist fractures.
Please God, let there be injuries. Just enough to get that cash flow flowing.
God replied in the same aggrieved way Brooke’s mother answered the phone when her children left it too long without checking in: Hello, stranger.
Forget I asked, thought Brooke. She turned off the radio, undid her seatbelt, and sat for a moment. Her stomach roiled. Mild nausea was expected the day after a migraine. Come on, she told herself, like she was a toddler. Out you get.
Even on a good day, when she wasn’t postdrome, when she had arrived somewhere she actually really wanted to be, she always experienced this resistance to getting out of the car. It was a little weird, but it wasn’t a thing. Just a quirk. No one noticed. Well, Grant noticed, if they were running late, but no one else noticed. It dated back to her days of competitive tennis. She’d arrive at a tournament and be paralyzed by her desire to stay in the warm musty cocoon of the car. But she always did move in the end. It was not a thing. She was not her sister.
No rush. She had half an hour before her first appointment.
She hugged the steering wheel and watched a big-bellied man pick up a hefty box from outside the post office without bending his knees. That’s the way, buddy, strain those back muscles.
When she’d taken on the lease for the clinic, she’d known about the planned redevelopment and been offered a substantially reduced rent as a result, but she hadn’t anticipated that months would slide by with delay after delay. Business slowed for everyone. The overpriced patisserie closed after forty years of business. The hairdressers’ marriage broke up.
It was stressful, and Brooke needed to manage stress in order
to manage her migraines. Migraine sufferers shouldn’t start new businesses or separate from their husbands, and they certainly shouldn’t do both at the same time. They should move gingerly through their days, as if they had spinal cord injuries.
Brooke had just managed to keep her fledgling practice afloat, barely. There was a period where she didn’t have a single patient for twenty-three days in a row. The words “You need more money, you need more money, you need more money” buzzed in her ears like tinnitus.
But now the renovations were complete. The diggers, trucks, and jackhammers were gone. The car park was full every day. The café that had replaced the patisserie bustled. The hairdressers were back together and booked up six weeks ahead.
“It’s now or never,” her accountant had told her. “This next quarter will be make or break.”
Her accountant reminded her of her dad. He used to grab her by the shoulders and look her in the eyes. Leave it all on the court, Brooke.
She could not have her business fail at the same time as her marriage. That was too many failures for one person.
She was leaving everything on the court. She was giving it her all. She was being the best she could be. She was writing free articles for the local paper, doing letterbox drops, studying her Google Analytics, contacting possible referring physicians, contacting every contact she had, even God, for God’s sake.
“If it doesn’t work out, the door is always open,” her old boss had said when she handed in her notice. New clinics failed all the time. Brooke had two friends who’d had to cut their losses and close up shop: one cheerfully, and one devastatingly.
She put her hand on the car door. Out you get.
She opened the door and her phone rang. At this time of day it had to be business-related. Friends and family didn’t call before nine.
She answered at the same time as she registered the name on the screen: Amy. Too late.
“Hi,” she said to her sister. “I can’t talk.”
Brooke once had a boyfriend who could always tell which family member she was talking to on the phone just by the tone of her voice. Amy, he would mouth if he heard her now. “When it’s Amy you sound pompous and put upon,” he told her. “Like you’re the school principal.”
“Is everything okay?” She tried not to sound like the school principal.
The problem was that she didn’t really feel like the school principal at all when she spoke to Amy; what she felt like was the baby of the family, the one who always did Amy’s bidding, because Amy was the revered, adored boss of the family, and they all used to do what she commanded, even the boys. That was fine when they were children, when Amy was the best at coming up with ideas for games and finding loopholes in the rules set by their parents, but now they were grown-ups, or at least Brooke was a grown-up, and she was not taking instructions from someone with no career, no driver’s license, no fixed address, and precarious mental health. Yet as soon as Brooke heard Amy’s voice she could sense an involuntary reflex, as irresistible and unmistakable as the knee-jerk reflex, to please and impress her big sister, and consequently, in her fruitless attempt to resist and conceal that reflex, she ended up sounding like the school principal.
“Why did you answer, then? If you’re busy?” Amy sounded breathless.
“I accidentally answered.” Brooke leaned back against the car door. “Are you running for a bus or something?”