It didn’t look like she was going to need any help at all since she wasn’t going to have any patients.

Mabel was on her feet. “She’s got a bunch of degrees, Hallie. She knows what she’s doing.”

“I’ll talk to my momma.” Hallie practically ran the other way.

Yep, her day was not looking up.

How was she going to live if no one would come to the clinic because she wasn’t one of them? They had to give in at some point, right?

“This is insane.” She dropped the file on top of the others she hadn’t needed. “I can handle a well-baby checkup.”

“I told Doc it might not work.” Mabel was roughly sixty years old with raven-colored curly hair with wispy hints of silver at the temples and a tiny but mighty body, from what Lila could tell. She was dressed in scrubs and hadn’t stopped moving once since they’d opened the clinic at noon. Mabel had answered phones, swept the break room, prepped the two exam rooms, done a thorough inventory of their supplies, and generally made her feel like a slacker. Mabel had done everything except actually help treat a patient.

“Why?” The sheriff had mentioned this could happen. Her sister had mentioned it. She still didn’t get how she was throwing the town into a tizzy.

“First off, we’ve never had a nurse practitioner in here before,” Mabel explained. “They don’t understand that you’re as good as a GP. Now, I think we can fix that, but it’s going to take some time and you’re going to have to let folks get used to you. I know what Hallie’s momma is going to tell her. She’s going to tell her to take that baby into New Orleans.”

“She would rather drive four hours round trip than let me do my job?”

A triumphant look came over Mabel’s face. “And that’s where we’ll get her. She’ll go once or twice. Maybe until the baby is a year old or so, but she’ll get tired of it. And when she has another baby, she definitely won’t like that drive.” Mabel nodded. “And we’ll be here. We’ll be waiting.”

She was missing the salient point. “No, we won’t because if no one comes in we won’t be able to stay open.”

Mabel waved that off. “Oh, this place has never once been financially solvent. Don’t worry about it. Once a year Doc goes fishing with Rene Darois and he funds us for the year. If we need a new piece of equipment, we hold a bake sale. Well, I hold a bake sale. Doc wasn’t good at baking. He was good at poker. We got that ultrasound machine from the casino up the road.”