The 'Woman's Doctor'

How you doing Danielle?  What one are you on?  I will try to give you a break, but I am having an urge to post fiction again today!   Maybe because I am sick and want to feel creative instead?

 Because it was liberating to post a future-teaser yesterday, I thought i'd follow up with one i wrote some time ago but have been looking forward to finally sharing.  Why the fuck not, right?  It is may blogdy, and I'll do what I want! lolz.

This one is somewhat different, because it is from a peripheral character's perspective.  I love it because I love the idea of how rumors and gossip and point of view come into play in a place like CF.  It is sometimes nice to take a step back and see what other people around the Delaneys are thinking\seeing\guessing\supposing.

This is Sam Bennett, the gynecologist and Delaney family friend. I only have two written for him but I thoroughly enjoyed writing both!  And re-reading too.  Plus I love the opening line, heeheehee.

So even if you haven't been following CF closely I encourage you to give this a read.  And let me know what you think!

Enjoy!  And thank you for all your hearty well-wishes!  Another sick day today (unpaid).  But what can you do?

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“The Delaney girl is knocked up” growled Doc Bennett around a bacon-wrapped scallop. 

Sam sipped his beverage and sized up the bride, who was warmly making the rounds about the pavilion, greeting her guests and making requisite small talk while they admired her gown and her hair and whatever else they were supposed to gush about.  She looked perfectly slim, her balance seemed normal. She betrayed none of the early indicators of pregnancy. His old man was losing it.  “You sure?”  he asked politely, knowing Avalon had just been in his office not more than five weeks ago and she certainly hadn’t been pregnant then.

“Not the bride you idiot.”  His father grumbled and lifted his whiskey to his lips, his eyes fixed on someone in the opposite direction.

Sam clenched his jaw and indulged the old man’s fantasy.  Being the son of the ‘village doctor’ could grow tiresome quickly.  He was always sizing folks up, offering comments and diagnoses out of the corner of his mouth.  ‘Teaching you’ is what his father had always asserted when Sam complained, as a boy, that he didn’t like knowing about his neighbors medical problems, but Doc Bennett had scoffed.  “You expect to follow in my footsteps you’d better learn to train your eye boy.”

Nobody called Doc Bennett anything besides “Doc”, as if he were the only doctor, and as if a doctor was the sum total of the man.  Even his sons called him Doc.  His wife called him Doc.  Now his grandchildren called him Doc.

Sam blinked and scanned the area of the party that Old Doc was fixated on.  “Velvet can’t have more children” he said grimly.  She was an exquisitely beautiful woman, the mother of the bride.  And still young enough for his father to entertain the notion.  But Sam had performed the tubiligation himself after her youngest had been born, after all the complications that had nearly put her in that Marble Calder Mausoleum up in Cedar Falls Cemetery.

“Christ boy, you call yourself a woman’s doctor?”  Doc laughed derisively.  Sam smiled wanly.  His father embraced the country doctor persona to the degree that he eschewed proper medical terms such as ‘gynecologist’ and he seemed to loathe the abbreviations even more.  Sam had never once heard his father refer to him as an OB.  “You can’t see that that little girl is more than a third of the way gone then you maybe oughtta hang up your speculum.”

Sam pressed his lips together and looked harder.  Velvet wasn’t pregnant.  Nolan’s wife, also a ‘Delaney’ was over there too, but she didn’t appear to be expecting either.  And He assumed the Doc wasn’t referring to the now blatantly pregnant Mrs. Grey Delaney, everyone was already buzzing about that, that was old news.  What the Christ?  When he was just about to admit to his father that he had no idea what he was talking about, just as he was about to turn and accept whatever ridicule the man had ready to pour on him, he watched his old friend Jonah pull a chair out for his youngest, and when she’d sat, push the chair in beneath her.

“Shit.”  Said Sam, amazed and astonished.

“See it now?”  His father goaded, boastful.

“Christ.”  Commented Sam.  “I don’t know how I’ve missed it.”

“You never look close enough at the teenagers.”  His father said.  “A made-up thing, teenagers.  Fiction.”

Sam took another drink and studied Viola from across the pavilion.  “So you’ve said.”  He murmured.  The subject of society’s pet fiction, ‘the teenager’, was a favorite topic of The Doc’s.

“It’s a fool who thinks a fifteen year old hasn’t got the urges of a thirty year old.  Hell, it’s a biological imperative.”  The Doc managed to obtain two more bacon-wrapped appetizers from a passing waitress.  “Fifteen year old girls get knocked up quicker and better than their mothers, boy, I’ll tell you that.”

Sam hated to admit it but the Doc was right.  Viola Delaney was pregnant.  He wondered how the hell that had happened.  Well, he knew how it had happened, he was a ‘ladies doctor’ afterall, but wondered if she’d been airheaded and irresponsible or if she’d deliberately gone off the pills.  That’s why he encouraged the shot for girls that age…

“And another thing—“  His father added, licking his fingers thoroughly, “Their bodies bounce back better too.”  Sam had heard this lecture a hundred times.  Now that he’d talked about how their young bodies were meant to carry babies he’d move on to the issue of statutory rape.  About how there was nothing criminal about a man having a physical response to a teenage girl, in fact, according to The Doc, a man wasn’t healthy unless he did look. 

“You think they know?”  Sam asked his father, not taking his eyes off the family as they settled in for cake.  He didn’t feel like having the same old discussion for the umpteenth time.

“The girl knows.”  The Doc said.  “And.”  Sam waited while the man sized up the picturesque pillars of the community.  “Her pretty mother hasn’t a clue, but I’d bet my license that her Daddy knows.”

Sam looked sharply at Jonah.  He looked pale and drawn, but very handsome and composed in his wedding finery.  It didn’t ring true to Sam that Jonah knew but Velvet didn’t.  Jonah was a romantic sap, and he was the kind of husband that told his wife everything.  Now if the Doc had argued that Velvet knew and Jonah did not, well, Sam would have precedent to believe that.  But the other way around? “I doubt that very much.”  Sam said, finally turning away from the family with the dark secrets and looking at The Doc.

The man shrugged and tossed several long toothpics onto a large empty tray as it passed by.  “He knows something.  That strain he’s under ain’t normal.”

“His oldest daughter just got married Doc.”  Said Sam in a patronizing tone.  “And he paid for the whole damn thing.  Look around you.  I’d say that’s an inordinate strain, wouldn’t you?”

The Doc nodded vaguely and glanced around at the lavish wedding reception going on all around them.  “Like I said, I’d bet my license that there’s something else.”  He lifted his eyebrows and downed the rest of his whiskey drink.  “So she hasn’t been in to see you.”

Sam felt his jaw tick.  Doctor-patient confidentiality never seemed to apply to Sam where the Doc was concerned.  They shared most of their female patients anyhow.  The Doc was the Delaney family’s primary.  “No.”  Sam replied tersely.  “You?”

The Doc shook his head.  “Why d’you suppose she didn’t get rid of it?”

Sam looked back toward the Delaneys and wondered again if that young woman had been careless or deliberate.  He remembered the way she’d interrupted their poker night some months back.  How could he forget?  Christ, he’d jerked-off to thoughts of that night frequently since, and he’d closed his eyes and thought of her in order to finish with his own wife more than once.

“For whatever reason,” Sam said quietly,  “She wants it.”

The Doc examined his empty whiskey glass with a half smile, half frown.  “Biological imperative son.  There ain’t no such thing as a teenager.  They’re kids and then they’re women and there ain’t nothing in between.”

Sam watched his father head toward the open bar and he knew he disagreed.  Maybe biologically the girl was ready to carry a baby, able to screw around and conceive and deliver, but he came from a different generation than his father.  And he understood that there was a subtle but important psychological difference between teenagers and adult women.  And he knew Viola might want to play at being a grown-up, that she had sexual desires and needs and urges, but that she was still a little girl playing pretend.

He finished his drink.  And he wondered what lucky son of a bitch had put his cock in her pretty little pussy.