Previously on When the Wind Turned
Chapter Thirteen
Classes. Friends.
All soon fall into place.
Tutors don’t become a necessity. Eve finds the after-school extra sessions with her pre-algebra teacher sufficient. Noah integrates smoothly. Jacob’s main concern becomes choosing a topic for his senior project.
Eve and Danielle are already thick as thieves. Jacob and Marcus have achieved an easy ritual sharing a table in the dining hall. Noah has a buddy named Peter who shares his passion for order. Categories. Systems. It’s Peter who suggests they help coordinate the recycling program.
Frankie divides part-time hours between the school library and the village library. Jeremy navigates visiting-professor life at Dartmouth. In the meantime, they share responsibilities at home. Once, Frankie caught herself watching Jeremy in amazement as he flipped burgers on the grill. Not that he had never done it before, but it had been a long time, and even when he did participate in domesticity in their prior life, there had been the medical pager — looming threat, anticipated killjoy, always a dreaded possibility.
The New Hampshire medical license is still pending and until that goes through there is no question of him doing rounds at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
As he confides to Frankie one night, as they walked into the village to see a movie, he realizes that he isn’t sure he wants to practice just yet, license or not.
“I like teaching,” he says.
“I can’t be objective on this subject,” she says, smiling. “I can only be selfish. What have you been teaching?”
“Mercer set me up to help with the first years. Foundational stuff. Organs. Just to get my feet wet, he says. Some of the faculty want me to do something more ambitious next semester. Trauma and recovery. Operating in disaster zones. Talk about Charity.”
“Oh, Jeremy!”
He shrugs. “I tell them I’d rather stick to what I know best. The heart. Cardiovascular tissue. But I’ll do what they want. Whatever’s needed.”
She walks closer to him. He puts his arm around her. They’re going to see the night’s main feature at the cinema. Every week they do this. Just the two of them. Last week it was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This week it’s The Natural. It came out when they were Tulane students. They went to see it together at the Prytania.
It’s the last week in September now. The mild weather holds.
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