The Mountain Midwife Read Online Free PDF Page B

words came to him. Questions crowded his head as they had all the way from Clarendon. With Dad a dozen feet away turning a glass of Pellegrino between his fingers, staring at the fizzy water as though it held answers like some pagan scrying bowl, Hunter’s mind went blank.
    Then the news flashed a picture of him in the doorway of his townhouse, looking disheveled and annoyed, and the video of the rescue and explosion that had gone viral on YouTube, and Dad clicked the remote to turn up the volume.
    “Other than a brief statement outside his townhouse earlier this morning, McDermott has managed to elude reporters thus far,” the reporter was saying. “Further attempts for information have been unsuccessful; however, we do hope for an interview soon. Stay tuned to this station . . .”
    Hunter rose far enough to push the Off button on the set. “That will be the day when I give them an interview. I am no hero. I simply did what any responsible citizen would do.”
    “Apparently not so many would have picked up a strange child.” Dad set his glass on a side table and speared his fingers through his shock of salt-and-pepper hair. “We like to think we raised you right, even if we were away from home more than we were here. Sometimes the lure of money overtakes one’s life and one forgets what’s important.”
    “I always knew you loved me.” Hunter spun the soda can between his hands, making the crackling inside more frenetic. He didn’t look at his parent—the man he always thought of as his parent. “You managed to attend most of my choir concerts and basketball games.”
    At least one or the other of them had. Rarely did both parents appear. Both had attended his high school graduation, but only Mom had managed to attend his graduation from MIT because it fell in an election year and Dad was swamped with work.
    “We didn’t do enough.” Dad rose and headed for the door. “Let me see if I can help your mother. She’ll have three trays of food, if I know her.” His footfalls were silent on the thick carpet as he headed toward the back of the house.
    Hunter rose and covered the distance to the French door in three strides. The long window opened onto an expanse of brick too elegant with its groupings of wrought-iron furniture and potted plants to call anything but a terrace. Beyond the fairy lights running along the edge of the covered area, flowering shrubbery gave way to lawns and gardens, all kept immaculate by two full-time employees. Hunter had liked helping the gardener dig bigger holes for new trees. Perhaps that was where his pleasure in digging tunnels began. Few holes in the ground took more engineering skill than carving a massive hole through a mountain without bringing millions of tons of rock down to destroy landscapes and lives. It wasn’t the occupation his parents wanted for him. He was supposed to be an attorney like his siblings and parents. Perhaps the fact that he rarely saw any of them due to their sixty- and seventy-hour work-weeks, even with Mom spending many of those hours in the house with him in the early years, had sent him running in the opposite direction. At least he was outdoors most of the time, breathing in fresh air and feeling the sunshine, even if he sometimes worked as many hours as his family did. Or maybe he showed no interest in the law and politics because he was more different from the rest of his family than he had known.
    The sugar and caffeine of the Coke unsettling his otherwise empty stomach, he retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the fridge and returned to his seat just as the rattle of dishes and murmur of voices sounded in the hallway. He set water and soda on a side table and stepped to the door to remove the laden tray from Mom’s hands. “I can’t eat half this, you know that.” He set the tray on the coffee table. “But it all looks delicious.”
    “Well.” Mom laughed a little shrilly. “Your dad and I haven’t eaten yet either. We’d just