Wishes and Stitches by Rachael Herron Page A

Pederson had been ready to sublet the space to a flower vendor who was looking for retail space on Main, but Naomi had talked him into letting her try the clinic. He’d never been excited about it like she had, but that’s because he was on his way out, anyway. Surely that was why.
    The mirrors still hung from its dance studio days—they made the space look even bigger than it was. Naomi didn’t care for the harsh overhead fluorescents, but they were all she had to work with for now.
    Around the room, she’d placed card tables covered with brochures on just about every medical problem imaginable. She’d added transitional flyers, ways to help a recently diagnosed loved one apply for Medicare, for disability, for hospice. Wooden chairs bought cheaply at an office-furniture sale sat next to the tables, and the whole center of the room was empty. But if the Red Cross agreed, as she hoped they would, this would be a fantastic place to hold a blood drive.
    The thought of that actually gave her tingles. There was so much that could be accomplished here, why didn’t people see it?
    Her father would have. Gilbert Fontaine had been her moon and her stars while she was growing up. As soon as Anna had been born to her mother and stepfather, Naomi had realized it wasn’t that her mother wasn’t good at mothering—she just wasn’t good at mothering her. But as long as she’d had her father’s approval, she was okay. She could handle Maybelle taking Anna on shopping trips, bringing to Gilbert’s apartment a bag of clothes that were either too large or too small for Naomi, because while they’d been shopping, Naomi had been lying on the rough orange carpet in Gilbert’s office, using tracing paper to go over the diagrams and images in his medical books. When she tumbled into naps on long, warm Saturday afternoons, Gilbert had always picked her up and placed her on the office settee, tucking blankets knitted by his mother around her. When she woke, sometimes she pretended to be asleep longer than she actually was so she could keep her cheek on the scratchy, overstuffed pillow, listening to the drag of her father’s pen across his notes.
    Only once did she shame herself in front of him. She was just nine or ten, helping in her father’s practice. He’d asked her to go next door, into his health clinic, and tell everyone waiting that he was almost done with his patients, and he’d be there shortly.
    â€œNo. They smell.”
    â€œThey what ?”
    Naomi had made herself smaller as her father had grown taller, his face darkening with displeasure. But she’d said, “They don’t smell good. Some of them aren’t . . . clean. They should probably go somewhere and wash before they come here.”
    Gilbert had thundered, “No daughter of mine would say that.”
    Naomi had felt as if he’d slapped her. Her father had never said anything to her that wasn’t loving or encouraging.
    He’d said, “They don’t have a place to wash. You think the people who come to the clinic like the way they live? You think they chose that? Out of all their options? Do you think they like having three kids before the age of twenty to a junkie dad who makes them work in a way I can’t explain to you? Don’t you ever look down on them. Don’t you ever even think badly of them. What they’ve gone through, we’ll never understand. They are, cumulatively, wiser than we’ll ever be, and I’m ashamed of my daughter.”
    Naomi had bitten the inside of her mouth so hard she’d drawn blood, and then not only had she gone next door to tell everyone her dad was almost ready to come help them, she’d used her allowance to fill up the candy bowl that was fallen upon by the children who’d been playing in the kids’ area.
    Now, in the re-creation of her father’s dream, the one that had become her own,