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resisting calling into Lakeside for a shift, anytime this weekend.
    Working at the hospital always made sense when nothing else did.
    He’d call Lacey, but he didn’t know what to say and as they got closer to opening, he found himself avoiding her more and more, even as he tortured himself, in spurts, with what it was he should be doing.
    Only to find out he had done the wrong thing, late, or that she had already done the right thing that he didn’t even know was necessary.
    Sam stomped a path through the mess to shower, remembering too late he’d forgotten to do a load of towels.
    Again.
    Under the hot water, his muscles felt tight from his workout, and he was already thinking about how to fit in a run after he saw PJ and worked with Nina this afternoon.
    When he was a kid, workouts used to help. He’d run around the track at the high school, take himself around the circuit in the weight room, and he’d feel something lift and open, and then he’d race through his shower and sit down with his homework, the focus almost like an absence of something, rather than somethinghe had gained.
    It had worked through medical school, too, and residency. Instead of sleeping in the on-call room during twenty-fours, he’d head to the PT center and lose the noise in his head, and it would feel like a sweetness that made the fatigue bearable.
    After he finished his family practice residency and worked in his neighborhood urgent care, the first couple of years were so easy. His book would fill over the day, one patient after the next, one problem at a time, the small team in the office compressing every encounter to intake, exam, treatment, then the chart.
    His dad was around then, taking care of everything else, and if his family still thought he was kind of a hopeless asshole, it didn’t matter, because they were just family.
    Not his to take care of in some kind of impossible and never-ending miasma of constantly moving targets.
    He saw the same patients over and over at the local urgent care, where every visit was twice as expensive than if they had the insurance to cover a primary care provider. He realized that most of the work he did wasn’t reducing fractures or suturing lacerations or treating urgent infections; it was monitoring his neighbors’ blood pressure medications after they lost their health insurance when the bottom was falling out of the economy.
    Lacey started floating at his urgent care. Noticed the same thing.
    Lacey was the one who made his first ideas for a clinic into something big. Started talking about DHS grants. About studies that demonstrated effective care for populations where they were treated by their cohort.
    He and Lacey were that cohort. A couple of neighborhood kids done good who studies said were the perfect candidates to take care of neighborhood people.
    He started thinking, just a little, he could do more than one patient in front of him, one book at a time.
    Wasn’t he already?
    Maybe if his dad hadn’t gotten sick and his sister Sarah hurt in her accident, maybe if his little sister Des, the only one who understood him, hadn’t gone away when he depended on her to help him help everyone else.
    He got ready to meet PJ, to go work with Nina, slammed his apartment door behind him.
    He always felt better leaving his apartment, leaving that fucking visual representation of the state of his own brain.
    He got in his car, drove slowly through his neighborhood, kids out in the street on their bikes or playing pickup, cars parked like they were hooked together at the bumper, on both sides of the street.
    He found comfort in the way everyone waved from every postage-stamp-sized yard, crammed with plaster statues of Mary, cement geese dressed in seasonal costumes, kiddie pools.
    And over all the houses, so close together nothing fit between them but gravel and chain-link fence, the bulky skyline of Lakefield, disorganized by dozens of architects over as many generations.
    He’d felt a similar