I is for Ian

“I apologize for Dr. Davis,” he said. “Everyone here is working very hard and is rather tired.”

“I understand, sir, and again, I apologize,” I said.

He waved his hands in front of him as if to wave me off.

“I wanted to apologize to you,” he said.

“What?”

“Earlier,” he said. “I came to you angrily, and for that, I apologize.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I am very upset at how things turned out. The generator being blown directly led to our current situation, and it is absolutely unacceptable that people’s lives were put further in danger because of it. However, I feel I took that out on you, and after some thought, I have decided that I was being rash. It is clearly that—what was his name?”

“Ben?”

“Ben,” he said. “It was Ben’s fault. I will be sure to note that when the report of this situation is made.”

“Thank you,” I coughed. I was in disbelief. As far as I had the impression of him, Dr. Sutton was not a man who was ever in the business of apologizing.

“You know,” he said, seeming to relax his shoulders a bit and the faintest hint of a grin crossing his lips, “I wasn’t always a surgeon. I used to do some construction work when I was a young man.”

“Really?” I asked. I tried to picture him with a tool belt on and almost laughed out loud.

Dr. Sutton just didn’t strike me as that type of man, but then again, he was a deceptively large man. Probably about six four and with a frame that suggested at one time he was perhaps more muscular than he was now in his, I was guessing, seventies. The more I thought about it, adding hair to the top of his head and removing his thick-rimmed glasses, adding some extra bulk to him, he could have passed for any of the guys on my crew.

“Indeed,” he said. “I grew up in Tennessee. Lived not too far from here, actually, all the way until I moved to Richmond for university. In the summers, I did construction work for my uncle’s company. Built roofs, laid carpet, built decks, that sort of thing.”

“No shit,” Carl said. His eyes went wide, and he bowed his head after a moment, squeezing them shut. “Sorry. Once you get the curse word train rolling, it’s hard to stop.”

“It’s fine,” Dr. Sutton said. “If you could hear what I mutter under my breath during surgery, you would be surprised. I learned it all doing construction with my uncle. He was a sailor in a past life.”

I laughed. Part of me couldn’t believe what was happening. Dr. Sutton was actually 7a normal person. From everything I had seen and known of him until now, he was like that doctor on TV who was so smart that he was an asshole to everyone. But here he was, acting like I was a peer or something. Being nice. I looked past his shoulder and saw Mina standing in the doorway of the breakroom, a teacup in her hand, fuming.

Whether that was because she was still angry with me, angry with how her interaction with Dr. Sutton had gone, or angry that he was seemingly having a nice, casual conversation with Carl and me I didn’t know. But I had a feeling it was the latter. She stirred something in her tea and watched.

“Well, I guess I had better go get my bag from the truck,” Carl said. “If we’re stuck here, I’ll need it as a pillow. Do you think I could stretch out on those chairs over there, Dr. Sutton?”

He turned to look at the waiting chairs in the main lobby. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but that was probably where we were going to end up. The quarters on the bottom floor were likely going to be used by the staff, and the hidden room the nurses and doctors thought no one else knew about was likely going to be taken by someone before I would ever get a chance to get to it.

“You could,” Dr. Sutton said, “but it would be mighty uncomfortable.”

“You’re right,” Carl said. “I just have a back thing. I’ll need to have something flat to lie on that isn’t the floor. Those chairs look flat enough.”

“Well, you could just stay in my old office,” Dr. Sutton said. “Both of you. I won’t be using it much, and it has a separate room I could go to if I needed it.”

“Wait, you have an office down here too?” Carl asked.

Dr. Sutton laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “Once the upstairs office is done, this one is supposed to become an auxiliary office space for when I have guest surgeons in. It’s frankly ridiculous to have so much space wasted on me, especially since I won’t be sleeping much over the next few days.”