Fred turned at the sound of her voice, and as she stretched over him still cranking the window, he looked deep into her eyes. Nina stopped rolling and stared back into the warm brown depths. He really was a sweet dog. Of course he wasn't being perky. In his situation, she'd be cautious, too. He didn't know anything about her. She didn't know anything about where he'd been. Maybe his previous owner had been mean to him. It didn't matter.
What mattered was that he needed love. Everybody needed love. Even she needed love. And now she had Fred.
Fred.
Nina closed her eyes. Terrific. She had Fred. Even her best friend was going to think she was nuts.
"You bought a what?" Charity was going to say, and then when she saw Fred, middle-aged, broken-down and tired, she was going to- Nina looked into Fred's patient brown eyes again and felt ashamed. "It's okay, Fred." She stroked the top of his head. "You're my dog now. It's okay."
Fred met her eyes, made his decision, squared his shoulders and lunged at her, licking her from chin to forehead with one sweeping slurp.
"Oh, Fred." Nina burst into tears and wrapped her arms around him. His body was fat and warm and wriggly, and Nina hugged him tighter, so glad to have someone alive in her life again and so relieved to finally be able to cry out the frustration and loneliness that she didn't even care the someone had four legs and smelled like rank canine. "We're going to be so happy together, Fred," she told him, sobbing. "We really are. We're going to be wonderful together."
Fred sighed and began to lick the tears from her face, which made Nina cry even harder. It was the best she'd felt in weeks.
She gave one final sniff and let go of Fred to put the car in gear so she could show him his new home and call his aunt Charity to come meet him.
"You have family now, Fred," she told him. "You're going home."
Alex Moore was stretched out on a bed in an empty examining room in the Riverbend General ER, trying to forget his family and get some sleep before another emergency erupted, when his older brother came in and dropped a brown paper bag with a six-pack of beer in it on his stomach.
"Hey!" Alex curled to absorb the blow and then saw it was Max and stretched back out again. Pain in conjunction with his family was nothing new. "I'm sleeping. Go away. And take that damn beer with you before somebody sees it."
Max pulled the beer out of the sack and peeled off a can. He popped the tab and left the five remaining beers on Alex's stomach as he collapsed into an orange plastic chair. The chair scraped and screeched on the floor, and Max's purple silk shirt clashed against the green wall. Alex winced and closed his eyes, hoping Max would take the hint and leave.
Max didn't. "You know, if you didn't spend your nights chasing women, you wouldn't get this tired during your shifts," he said and sipped his beer.
Alex didn't bother to open his eyes. "I did not spend my night chasing a woman. I took Debbie to dinner. She started talking about kids. I took her home. Story of my love life."
"It's because you've got that blond good-guy look," Max told him. "You've got nice guy written all over you. Now me, I look like a rat."
Alex kept his eyes closed as a hint. "Yeah, you do. Go away, rat."
"Of course, it's too late to pretend you're a rat around here since everybody knows you. You should have just changed the subject. 'Speaking of kids, Debbie, how about some sex?' You've got to learn to be faster on your feet."
Alex thought about snarling at him to go away and decided against it. He liked Max a lot, and given his family, a relative he was usually happy to see was a rarity. "I don't want to be faster on my feet. I just want to spend some nice quiet evenings with a woman who wants me more than she wants kids or a wedding ring. All the women I know have biological clocks and a burning need to commit. I want a woman who has a burning need to be with me and watch old movies and laugh. But right now, all I want is to sleep, which is why you're leaving."
Max swallowed some more beer. "It's because you're a doctor. Women always want to marry doctors."
Alex opened one eye, trying to ignore the purple shirt against the green wall. "You're a doctor. How come it doesn't happen to you?"
"I try not to date anybody more than twice," Max said. "It keeps the subject from coming up."
"That's real mature of you, Max." Alex closed his eye again. "Now go away. For once there are no disasters out there, and I need some sleep."
Max sipped his beer again. "This is your last day as a twenty-something, kid. How does it feel to be old?"
"You tell me," Alex said. "You're the one pushing forty."
"Thirty-six is not forty," Max said with dignity. "And you're going to lose your hair before I do. It's already creeping back from your forehead. I can see it from here. It's because you're blond. Dark-haired guys like me never lose it." He tipped the beer into his mouth this time and sucked up the last half of the can.
"Tell me you're not still doing rounds."
"Finished an hour ago." Max pitched the can into a nearby wastebasket and slumped, as much as he could, in the plastic chair. "You off soon?"
"Three more hours. Go away."
"So you ready for tomorrow?"
"It's my birthday," Alex said with his eyes shut. "It's not something I have to get ready for. Other people have to get ready for it. You, for example. Go buy me something expensive. You make the big bucks."
"Exactly," Max said. "And you know why."
Alex groaned and rolled away from his brother, who lunged to get the five-pack of beer as it tipped toward the floor.
"Hey!" Max said. "Avoid reality if you have to, but don't spill the beer."
Alex kept his back to him. "I'm not avoiding reality. I'm avoiding you. Go away."
"I am reality, buddy," Max said, and Alex heard the scrape of the plastic chair as his brother sat down again and the clank as he put the cans on the floor. "I ran into Dad just now. He was looking for you."
Alex groaned again.
Max's voice was sympathetic. "Yeah, I know. He wants to have dinner with you tomorrow."
"No," Alex said.
"I told him you would. Hell, it's not like you could get out of it. He said to meet him at The Levee at seven. For drinks first."
"Oh, hell." Alex rolled onto his back again and stared at the stained acoustic ceiling. "You could have told him I was sick. You could have told him that you'd diagnosed me with something ugly and catching."
"I'm a gynecologist," Max said. "What was I supposed to tell him? You got a yeast infection so you can't do dinner?"
"Would he have noticed?"
"Yeah," Max said. "He was working, so he was sober."
"Great. Just what I wanted on my birthday, to pour the old man into a cab at midnight."
"I took care of that," Max said. "I told him we had plans at nine. He understood."
Alex gave him a withering look. "So I get to pour him into a cab at nine. Thank you."
"It gets worse." Max beamed at him, cheerful as always. "He said your mother's coming to town tomorrow."
Alex sat up. "My mother's flying in for my birthday?"
"No," Max said. "She's flying in for a one-day seminar on the new laser technology. It just worked out that it's your birthday."
"Thank God." Alex flopped back down on the pillow. "For one awful minute, I thought she was going maternal on me."
"She told Dad she wants to have lunch with you," Max said. "Noon at the Hilton. Be on time, she's speaking at one." He picked up another beer from the floor and cracked it. "It's a shame you're still on duty. You could have one of these."
"My mother," Alex said to the ceiling. "An hour with my mother."
"You've got an hour with my mother, too," Max said after he'd taken another swig. "She wants to have a drink with you at four. She has surgery at one, so she figures she'll be free by then."