Read Deep in the Valley for Free Online

went to work.
    “He do anything else?” June asked. “Besides logging?”
    “Framing. Sometimes.”
    New construction was up, too. People were flooding to small, out-of-the-way coastal, valley and mountain areas, giving up on the big, dirty cities in search of the quiet, clean country life. How else could Grace Valley account for almost doubling its population in ten years?
    “That is quite a drive you have to take. I’m more than happy to see you through this pregnancy, Christina, but did you know Dr. Lowe is right on your wayto Fort Seward? You could probably make appointments on the way to or from work.”
    “I know. But I heard you was real good.”
    “Oh really,” June said, smiling in spite of herself. How stupid to smile at that, she thought. This girl didn’t know what good was. Still, it gave June enormous pleasure to know she was liked. “That’s nice.” And she looked back at the chart. Christina was not healthy and should see a specialist. June had high hopes of hiring John Stone, which would resolve so many similar problems.
    “I’m going to see that you leave here with an extra supply of vitamins, Christina. I want you to double up and try to put on a little weight.”
    “Gary don’t much like chubby girls,” she said.
    “Well, if Gary wants to be a daddy, he’d better develop a taste for them. That baby needs nourishment.”
    “Yes, ma’am, I know it.”
    This was the part of country doctoring that was so hard. Grace Valley was a quaint village with some special shops and a few restaurants that drew people from other towns—people who drove nice cars. Most merchants did well here, and relocated yuppies who didn’t seem to need money had moved in and raised the standard of living even more. Their taxes were welcomed by the schoolboard and roads department. Plus there were some successful farms, orchards, vineyards and ranches around the valley. But there was plentiful abject poverty, as well. Poor people who might not be seen in the Vine & Ivy, a quaint restaurant and gift shop at the edge of town. But June sawthem. They didn’t shop at The Crack’d Door—an upscale gallery that had opened six years before—but she could run into them anywhere, even her own living room at dawn. You could look at the houses in town, the bed-and-breakfasts that had opened since the late eighties, the local tasting rooms, some of the new architecture, and begin to think of this place as upscale country. An affluent village. But there was an underside here, not visible to the casual eye, that concerned only the police, medical and social welfare people: battered women living in isolation on rundown farms; a roadhouse called Dandies that was not quaint and did not welcome tourists.
    And any new doctor June brought into this clinic had better understand the two faces of this town.
    When she took Christina’s chart to the front of the clinic, she saw that the young girl had been her last patient for the morning. The waiting room was blessedly empty.
    “You have plans for lunch?” Charlotte asked.
    “Just to avoid George Fuller.”
    “I heard he sent some people out by your house at six in the morning and they caught you naked, just gettin’ out of the shower,” Charlotte said.
    “My God! This town is amazing! Why do we bother with a newspaper?”
    Charlotte shrugged. “For good fiction, I imagine. Bet you wished you’d plugged that cordless phone in for once, don’t you.”
    “Has my father been here?” June demanded, shocked.
    “No, but your aunt Myrna called…and asked couldyou come out to lunch today, and if you can, would you bring her some more of that blood pressure medicine.”
    It was remarkable to June that, living in a town where everyone knew everyone’s business, her aunt didn’t realize that her blood pressure pills were placebos. Myrna was in astonishingly good health.
    June had been out to Myrna’s a lot lately, evidence that her aunt was bored or lonely or restless. Myrna,