Work Text:
The original email, and indeed, the six follow up emails, had all come from Andrea Connaught, contributing features editor at the Pittsburgh Tribune, and he had, in the way of all emails, ignored them way past the point when it was acceptable to respond. He had in fact, completely forgotten about them, consigned them to the background noise that makes up the administrative task burden that follows him constantly as ER chief, waiting until Gloria shouts at him enough to actually read them.
In this case, it was an easy job to resolve the question. He replied to the original email thanking her for her interest, but that he would not be doing any press.
Job done.
“No, you’re doing this one,” Gloria says, an hour later, leaning on the hub while he charts. He suspects she waits until he’s sitting so she can tower over him for a brief moment. “I’ve accepted on behalf of all the senior staff who served in PittFest. You need to organise a time.”
“I don’t think the hospital will like what I have to say,” Robby says, diverting his frustration into the keys until they squeak.
“I know,” she says. “That's why I want you to do it. Look, you think I like saying no to budget increases? You think I like any of this bureaucratic bullshit? I’m a doctor too, remember.”
“Debatable,” he says, which is unfair, because she had a very respectable career as a hepatologist before selling her soul to management.
She glares at him and beckons him into a free room.
“Look, the board is going to accept the management company offer at the next meeting,” she says. “I know you don't want this, we know you don't want this, hell, I don't want this. I would not be doing this if there was any other way. We have to press the nuclear option. We have to get public pressure against selling the ER off. So, against my better judgement, I need you to go and be a nuke. But,” she puts her hands on his biceps and squeezes, threateningly, “do it positively. Sell the heart of this place. Make the case for the ER continuing as it is.”
He is stunned, so he just nods.
“I’m on your side, Robby,” she says. “Show them the human side of medicine.”
“Are you sure you don’t want Abbot to do this?” he asks, desperately.
“He already has,” she says. “I’ll forward you the link. You might be able to learn something, but it wasn't enough. You know I wouldn’t ask this unless it was the last ditch choice.”
Thankfully at that moment Dana knocks on the door to tell him that a couple of the citizens of Pittsburgh are on their way having shot each other so he is spared any further conversation, but when he checks his email the next week, there is an email with a link to the interview with Jack that ran three sundays ago in the Pittsburgh Tribune.
It's a half-page thing, part of a series about the response to PittFest, and immediately upon reading it Jack’s charm jumps off the page. He’s humble and passionate and Robby wants desperately to tease him for it but he can’t, because its nice, and accompanied with a very flattering picture that Jack should consider making his dating profile picture, all bulging biceps and that easy smile, his scruff the perfect length, his eyes mischievous as he looks out of the window at the world passing by.
However, Gloria was right, there is very little about the hospital or even about PittFest. He goes back through the series and reads the other profiles, surprised no one had mentioned that Shen, Walsh and Dana had all been profiled over the summer, all with glowing photographs taken above half-page descriptions of their roles in the event and descriptions of their perfect sunday, and their honest, if impersonal and sanitised descriptions of the problems of the system, all of which are careful to not assign too much blame to any one person.
He decides to call Jack before making his final decision.
“Gloria wants me to do an interview with that reporter,” he says, when Jack answers.
“Well, I don't think you should ever talk to the press, as a rule,” Jack says. “Why does Gloria?”
“Because apparently she thinks if I humiliate them in the press the board will have to give us what we’re asking for? They’re going to sell the ER, it's been decided. I'm not convinced that's how it works, but…”
“I don’t think you’re wrong, but at this point, what harm can it really do?” Jack says. “Whoever our new overlords are can’t fire you because you have tenure, and the board knows it. Maybe it's worth a try, it's always amazing how they can find money when they need to. Should be for us for a change.”
“Okay,” he says. “But I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ready for public consumption.”
“It's not an interrogation,” Jack says. “It was fine. The interviewer and I just went out for a coffee, we talked for a couple of hours, a man took my picture, she sent me the version for final approval, and then they put it in the sunday paper barely anyone reads anymore.”
“I read it,” Robby says. “Online, I mean. And the internet is forever, as Santos keeps reminding me.”
He can hear the shrug in Jack’s voice. “I mean, I didn’t say anything controversial.”
“Apparently not, if Gloria thinks they need to use the nuclear option,” Robby replies. He rubs his face. “Ugh, okay. I’ll do it. What’s the journalist like?”
Jack chuckles. “She’s nice, really nice. Really nice.”
“Oh god, you slept with her didn't you?” Robby teases, and then feels a pit open in his stomach when Jack laughs warmly and sheepishly confirms that yes, he did.
“You dog,” he says, slightly stunned.
“You'll probably have a different person, being the boss,” Jack reassures him. “I only had Drea because there was a childcare mixup. The big boss is Fiona Calla-something. She did that profile of the mayor, you know the one.”
“Oh, I'm fucked”, Robby says, aghast.
“That's the spirit!” Jack replies, and says goodbye.
Robby replies to the email and makes arrangements to meet Fiona Callaghan on his next day off, figuring that the longer he waits to draw it out the worse it will be. They plan to make a day of it, not just a couple of hours.
The day comes and…
Well.
Uh.
It goes…well, not well, but not terribly.
It all was a blur, really.
He never should have had that third beer.
It all went downhill after that.
He doesn’t want to think about it.
So he doesn’t.
He wakes up the next morning with sore ribs that have been expertly taped and a headache that makes him wish he was dead, sixteen missed calls from Jack and three from Gloria, none of which he returns. There’s a cowboy hat on the coffee table and a paper bag from the pharmacy with sixteen vicodin inside an orange plastic tube. He swallows two, mostly for his ribs and partly for the chasm of awkwardness that he feels inside.
He goes to drive into work, and remembers that his car is…elsewhere. He considers calling out sick, but he’s never called out with a hangover before and he isn’t going to start now, so he forces himself into the brisk walk to the T station and arrives at work at 6:55, grumpy from having his ribs jostled on the train, and when Jack asks him how he’s doing, just glares at him until he puts his hands up in surrender.
The day is mostly quiet, one of the normal ones that don’t emboss themselves on his brain, which he is infinitely thankful for. They don’t lose anyone, and he manages to dodge Gloria like it's an olympic sport and he’s going for gold, and manages to leave at seven on the dot for the first time in years.
When he wakes up the next day he feels almost normal again, as long as he ignores the spreading half-moon bruise on his ribs. Eventually, even that fades, and the whole experience becomes a memory tucked in the past, safe where it belongs, with all the other humiliations this job has visited upon him.
That is until a month later, when he’s woken at 6:15 on his day off by Jack Abbot banging on his door.
“Have you read it?” he demands.
“Read what?”
From behind his back Jack produces a bundle of newsprint, creased and folded so that the full-page spread of his interview is front and centre.
“Oh.” he shakes his head. “Uh, No.”
Jack frowns. “They didn’t give you final approval?”
Robby thinks about his 12,000 unread emails. “I don’t think so?”
Jack pushes the article into his hands. “I’m going to get breakfast. Read this. I will be back. Then we’ll talk.”
“I have coffee…” Robby protests.
Jack fixes him with one of his patented stares. “Read,” he says, firmly, and then leaves, grabbing the spare set of keys on his way out.
So Robby, powerless against the piercing glare and feeling too nauseous to drink coffee before knowing what this is about, retreats to the couch and starts to read.
The Last of the ER Cowboys
By Fiona Callaghan
Chief Features Editor | [email protected]
In the last of our series commemorating the one year anniversary of the PittFest massacre, our features editor spends a day with a man who has haunted the other stories in the series like a particularly inscrutable ghost, Doctor Michael Robinavitch, chief attending doctor of the PTMC ER.
I meet Michael Robinavitch not at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre ER reception, where we had made arrangements for him to take me on a tour, but by the side of the road a mile away, with his head under the hood of a sports car that even to my uneducated eye had broken down dramatically, smoke spilling across the street in luxurious billows.
Robinavitch, or Robby, as he insists I call him, when he greets me with a handshake and the hope that I might be the mechanic he has called, is a tall man in his 50s with kind yet exhausted eyes, a millennial-pleasing dad bod and the kind of bomb-disposal specialist calm achievable only through sheer force of will. He is wearing what I have come to appreciate is the unofficial uniform of ER doctors everywhere: Carhartt work pants with at least three light layers on top; all the type that can be easily discarded, laundered or swapped out for scrubs and carried home to join the endless laundry that all the doctors we have interviewed have consistently complained about. He has a thick beard flecked with grey, an easy, nervous smile, and absolutely no idea how the internal combustion engine of his 1977 Ford Mustang works.
He insists on me having a look under the hood with him, and together we spend the first hour of our day together googling the various components of an engine and trying to brute force fix the car, before eventually a passing mechanic takes pity on us and solves the problem in 30 seconds flat.
“Doctor stereotype,” he says sheepishly, as he opens the door for me to get in, but by the time he’s come round to the drivers’ side he’s changed his mind. “More like a mid-life crisis stereotype. I’m considering buying a motorcycle. At least when that goes wrong I'm just dead, not stranded on the side of the interstate for all the judgemental dads to see.”
He looks at his watch. “I haven’t had breakfast, and I need to eat before we go on the tour.” He doesn’t wait for my response, and instead throws the car into drive and pulls out into traffic. He is a good driver, but it is obvious that this is not a car that has survived the years without problems. Nevertheless, we make it across downtown to somewhere I note is far away from the hospital to ensure there will be no prying eyes or gossipy ears to hear anything he has to say.
Over coffee and a bagel, Robby nevertheless seems to almost vibrate with nervousness. “I really don’t want to be doing this,” he says, up front, “but Jack thought it would be a good idea, and he tends to know more about making good decisions than I do.”
Jack in this case is Jack Abbot, Robby’s deputy head of the ER, who was profiled by our own Andrea Connaught back in June. While I have read that profile, I have not met the man, but over the next hour I learn a hell of a lot about Jack Abbot. He seems like an interesting guy, veteran, widower, ER hotshot who Robby would trust with his life. All attempts at working through my list of questions are twisted immediately onto ‘what would Jack Abbot do/say in this situation’, which while fascinating, would have been far more useful six weeks ago when we were working on his profile.
It is when he starts to get his phone out to get Jack on speakerphone, I snap.
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Doctor Robby,” I ask, exasperated, after he goes on another tangent about something Abbot said, and he flushes, and mutters an apology. I feel bad, so I order us another round of coffees, but I seriously consider making mine Irish.
What I manage to get out of him is not much more than what others have told me, but it is at least a start. Robby is a Pittsburgh native from Russian-Jewish stock, his parents arrived from the USSR to work hard for the American dream and died tragically too young to enjoy it, his father first of a heart attack when Robby was 7 and his mother of bowel cancer when he was 16. He was raised mostly by his grandmother, who raised him in an observant, ‘joyishly Jewish’ household, but for most of his adult life he has not considered himself to be a practicing Jew. This is starting to change, after PittFest, and he has since been attending services sporadically, as his schedule allows.
He attended the University of Pittsburgh for both undergraduate studies, where he was pre-med from the start, and medical school. His only significant amount of time outside of Pennsylvania was the four years he spent doing his ER residency in New Orleans. He thought he might stay, but the hospital he worked at, Charity, was badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina and closed. He speaks eloquently and movingly about being in the doomed building with the other hospital staff, sheltering from the storm and trying to tend to those they could not move as the levees broke and the city and seemingly the world shattered around them.
He tears up for the first time recounting this, which surprises me. He notices, and grimaces. “Grief leaving the body. I have a lot of grief, and my own levees are fucked these days.”
He moved back to Pittsburgh in late 2005 to do his fellowship at PTMC, and befriended Montgomery Adamson, the legendary chief of the ER, who offered him a job, a purpose, and the father figure he was sorely in need of. Adamson died in September 2020 from COVID; the PittFest Massacre occurred on the fifth anniversary of the day his ventilator was turned off. Naturally, for a man who seems to be followed by the kind of tragedy that only befalls heroes of Russian literature, Robby was the one to make the decision and pull the plug, and who watched his mentor and surrogate father die.
“All the best ER cowboys have daddy issues,” he jokes, but the laugh I give him is one that is tinged with my own sorrow. I tell him the story of my own mother’s death in May 2020 at Presby, alone, and he reaches across the table and grips my hand in solidarity.
Ice broken, we decide to get started on our planned tour, but the unreliable old Mustang once again refuses to start, and so, being a nice day, we begin to walk towards the hospital.
PTMC is an unassuming building among the architecture of downtown, unlike some of the more impressive of the University buildings. The Pitt, which Robby insists is its true and correct name, is a tier-one trauma centre, and Robby explains to me that this means they do it all, and they do it at scale. In any given 24 hour period on average they see upwards of 1,000 patients across a team of around 100 clinical workers per shift: doctors, nurses, certified nurse assistants, patient care technicians and medical assistants, not to mention the medical students and student nurses, as PTMC is a teaching hospital, nor forgetting the technicians, social workers, cleaning staff, security, administration and members of other departments who come in and out of the Pitt for consultations and admissions. The work day is split into two twelve hour shifts, because the ER never closes, it never has a day off, it never sleeps. It will treat you whether or not you have insurance, though they would prefer it if you did.
There is a lot of waiting and a lot of frustration, and a lot of people are angry about this. For Pittsburgh residents, a visit to the Pitt is as inevitable as death, taxes and your favourite sports team crashing out of the championship.
As we walk, the conversation drifts to the reason we are here: the events of Friday the 12th September, 2025. “So nearly Friday the 13th,” he says, bitterly.
The way he tells it feels like the story he tells of Katrina: a once in a lifetime of a terrible shift well before the massacred patients started to flood in; a perfect representation of everything wrong with American healthcare. We’ve all heard it before: the lack of money that means there are always borderline levels of understaffing. Physical violence against nurses, the tragic effects of fentanyl, the fury of the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, all alongside the ever present threat of physician burnout, but it is astounding to hear his telling of it, of everything that happened on that day. Of management caring more about numbers, wanting the impossible from him and his staff, for them to make it work under impossible conditions, then maybe, just maybe, we might give you more money. But since you’re making it work…why bother?
“What will it take?” he asks, frustration and defeat dripping from his words. “Do they think that the cowboys are just going to ride in to the rescue forever?”
The thread of him being an ER cowboy comes up again and again, but it doesn’t feel like a point of pride, or even a joke. It feels more like a sore tooth, one he keeps worrying with his tongue.
“Do you believe you’re a cowboy?” I ask him, feeling more like a therapist than a journalist.
He stops in his tracks, and I have to turn back and walk to him again. He’s frowning, thinking about this with his deliberate, intense way. “I don’t know,” he says finally, then starts walking again, continuing to think. “I watched Brokeback Mountain while I was on leave. I related to them, to cowboys, more than I expected. So much of emergency medicine is the same thing over again, thankless work no one really cares about, mending fences, keeping the peace, stopping small incidents from becoming big ones. Lonely, ephemeral work, but every so often a predator enters the paddock and it's all hands on deck. You don’t save everyone. You can’t. But you have to try, because these creatures, these people, they depend on you, they are vulnerable and they need your skills to keep them alive, and you’re alone. Only someone else who has been on that mountain can know what it's like.”
“Was there a specific character who you related to?” I can’t help but ask.
“Heath Ledger,” he says, without having to think about it, “and yeah, before you ask, Abbot is absolutely Jake Gyllenhaal.”
I look at him, surprised, and he realises what he’s said and blushes. “Not like that. No. It's not like that between us.”
“Do you wish it was?” I ask, because I am a journalist, but I almost immediately regret it, because there’s a true panic on his face.
“I just realised, they never had any cows in that movie, did they?” he says, the blush looking so florid it must hurt.
“That's because they were shepherds, not cowboys,” I point out.
“Oh.” he says. “Well, I don’t know then. I’ve never ridden a horse, anyway. What kind of cowboy doesn’t know how to ride a horse?”
“Would you like to?” I ask him, and his eyes light up.
That is how we end up at Allegheny Stables and Riding School (obligatory disclaimer that is familiar to readers of this august publication: my husband runs these stables and both he, I and our daughter have our own horses stabled here), Robby immediately takes to a small mare grazing on the edge of the paddock, one who readers of my work will know well.
“What's his name?” he says, stroking her nose carefully. He looks besotted.
I bite my lip. “It's Ennis,” I say, and he looks at me like he can’t believe it.
(I’m sorry, Doctor Robinavitch: her name is actually Dancing Lights. Please forgive me. I really should have warned you.)
He smiles at her, and I step away to make two calls. The first is to our staff photographer, because I already know we need to take his photograph astride one of our horses, and the second to my husband, who is the right size for Robby to borrow some of his riding clothes.
While we wait, we watch the riding classes and have a drink. He looks like he wants something stronger than the riding school’s signature lemonade, but when I offer him a beer he demurs.
We finally get to talk about the year since the massacre. I had heard from other interviewees that he took some personal time, that there were some other personnel changes on the ER day shift, but maybe it is the lemonade or the excitement of the promise of soon getting on the horse, he confesses that he has had some dark moments, that he has been to therapy, but that he finds himself drifting back to the ER every time.
“I tried to go skiing with my sister and her kids,” he explains, “but the whole situation was cursed: my plane was delayed, and then by the time I got there both boys had broken their arms, so we spent 12 hours in a rural Colorado ER and then went straight back to the airport.”
Instead of taking time off, he’s been watching a lot of movies, focusing on catching up on twenty years of Oscar winners, hence why Brokeback Mountain is at the forefront of his mind. He has become something of a film buff, speaks movingly of how much he enjoyed Moonlight and rails for a good few minutes how A Single Man should have won more. “Colin Firth was robbed,” he says, fiercely. The Power of the Dog made him cry, but he isn’t sure whether he relates to the young medical student or the taciturn isolated main character more.
There is a thread connecting these movies, but he does not seem to realise it. I don’t push the question.
“Maybe I should have that beer,” he says, but that’s when my husband arrives with our costume change and his steed for the afternoon.
Sadly the cowboy boots he brings are too small but we manage to rustle up a pair of leather boots that fit from one of the other stablehands. Robby is a big man, bigger than he seems once out of his ER uniform and hoodie and into a shirt, jacket and jeans. The photography assistant and I exchange appreciative glances, and the makeup artist dusts his skin with powder and combs his beard. The hat is the final touch, but it is his idea to wear a scrub top under the jacket instead of the shirt; turns out he has one in his bag at all times, and then we go to find the ER cowboy a steed.
While it would be far more accurate to have Robby ride an American Quarter Horse, the dependable steed of cowboys, this is a narrative and a newspaper, so we break out the big guns: Raffles, the pitch black Friesian beauty. Robby is impressed, and as the sun sets, the city in the background, he sits stoically on his back, his fingers stroking Raffles’ majestic mane absently as he adjusts in the saddle and smiles for the camera, and maybe it's my own biases, but it's the first time that day that he looks truly relaxed.
After, Deryk, my husband, gives him a lesson, shows him the basics of controlling and speaking to the horse as they walk, then trot, then canter around the paddock, and I watch them together and have some indulgent thoughts that probably should not be mentioned in this publication.
“I think it's time for a beer,” Robby says, clasping my husband’s hand in his when he jumps off, taking off the cowboy hat and smiling wider than I’ve seen him smile all day.
It is a sad fact of life that stereotypes are useful because they are broadly true, and in the case of journalists and doctors, the prevailing stereotype is that they are hard drinkers. My husband joins us, claiming to be able to keep up, but he lasts an hour before admitting defeat.
It doesn’t take long for our conversation to return to PittFest, and this is when Robby finally starts to talk. He tells me about the true tragedy, the breaking point. That he was supposed to be there that afternoon, spending time with his stepson, but had gladly given up his ticket so that he could take his new girlfriend instead, and that said girlfriend turned up on the trauma table, her heart torn to shreds by a high velocity bullet.
His stepson has not spoken to him since.
“I don’t blame him,” Robby insists, leaning down to speak clearly into the recorder. “Please make sure you say that I don’t blame him. Not at all. It should have been me, not her.”
He shakes his head, as if dislodging something. “We reopened to patients ninety minutes after she died,” he says. “Do you understand? We never stop. We can’t. Life never stops. This isn’t profitable care, it is vital, it is everything. I could barely catch my breath. I still feel like I haven’t, a year later.”
Then it comes out; that he had retreated to the roof of the hospital that night, and Jack Abbot had had to talk him down from the edge.
“I wasn’t going to jump,” he says, then with the honest pause of the drunk, shrugs away the half-lie. “Or, I probably wasn’t. Sixty-forty odds.”
“I don’t know if I have much left,” he sniffs, wiping his eyes on his cowboy shirt sleeves. “I think if it wasn’t for J- for some people, I would have left a long time ago. I have ten years left, is this what I want for them? Another decade of death, of being a dog kicked by its owner with nothing to show for it?”
He wipes his eyes. “Sorry.”
My heart breaks. “Do you want to pet a horse?” I ask him, and he nods, and with his long face and big eyes, he looks just like one.
It is dark when we get back down to the paddock, but horses are like humans, prone to insomnia. We walk into the stables and sure enough, there are a couple of them still awake.
The big friesian gelding Robby rode earlier that day is fast asleep in his stall, but Dancing Lights is up and very excited to see us.
“I’ll get some treats,” I tell him, gesturing towards Dancing Lights, “though she loves butt scratches, so you’ll make her day if you indulge her.”
He chuckles and I hear the sound of fingernails on horsehair, and go to get the treat bucket.
I only turn my back for a second, but it's enough. I hear a low ‘oof’, followed by a sound of a large man crumpling to the floor.
I call my husband. “Call an ambulance. Dancing Lights has done her trick again.”
Perhaps it is fate that we ended up here after today; in the ambulance bay of PTMC, Robby on a gurney, heading into The Pitt.
I get my first glimpse of Jack Abbot as Robby is being wheeled into the ER, the paramedics far more professional than I would be in any equivalent journalistic situation. Abbot asks me to wait outside in somewhere called chairs, but a nurse, upon learning that I’m the journalist profiling Robby, allows me to sit with them in the hub, somewhere where I can watch as the gears of the ER move around one of their own with ruthless efficiency.
It is hypnotic to watch. I am reminded of an orchestra, all the instruments coming in together under the watchful grace of the conductor, who keeps everyone in time, brings in the stragglers, all in service to the music, to the glorious harmony of the piece. I watch the thud of Robby’s heart on the monitor and feel like I am in there with them, watching the steady drip of the IV into his vein, feel like I can see through his skin the way the X-Ray does.
They wheel him away, and Abbot comes out and frowns when he sees me.
“This is not what I meant by ‘go sit in chairs’,” he says, sitting on the desk next to me. I can see the metal rod of his prosthetic ankle where his pants have ridden up. “It's good news, we suspect he has a broken rib, but no head injury, though we’re doing a CT just to be sure, but it is unlikely he has come to any true harm. He’ll have one hell of a hangover, but that seems to be the price of admission to your paper.”
“Do you have anything you want to be included in the article?” I ask, and he fixes me with a long, thoughtful gaze that makes me momentarily forget I am a happily married woman.
“Just that we love him here, that he is our heart.” He looks at me, and I see it, I see everything Robby has said about him. “You know what they say about the heart, Ms Callaghan?” he asks, and waits for me to shake my head. “It doesn’t realise that it spends its life beating itself to death.” He takes another breath, as if he is going to say something else, but we are interrupted by a nurse informing him an MVA is three minutes out, and the moment is lost.
“Thank you for bringing him back to us,” he says, shaking my hand, and then he’s gone, off to the next crisis that rolls in out of the dark.
I think about him as I wait for my taxi in the cold night, the first time I feel fall after the burn of summer. I think about everything we have heard from those who lived after PittFest, from those first on the scene to those who will never leave, whose blood is part of the showgrounds forevermore. I think about how Robby was right when he described this city as needing the shepherds and cowboys who keep the fences up and who are there when predators breach them, who are always there, prepared to deal with a stone in a foot or a torn apart heart, and to approach both with the hope that they can be repaired, whether easily or at great cost. How much there is to understand, to acknowledge, about the everyday efforts that are invisible until they fail, and how cheap it is to say that we appreciate it, that we understand, that we would be so much poorer if you weren’t there.
I want to go back inside, put my head inside the CT machine and cry out: Doctor Robby, Pittsburgh hopes you never find a way to quit us.
Instead, I get in a taxi, and go home.
When Robby finishes, his cheeks are wet, and Jack is back, standing in front of him with a bag of breakfast sandwiches and a question written broad across his handsome face. Robby has no idea how long he has been standing there.
“Did you mean it?” Jack asks.
“Jack, come on, it's early…”
“Did you mean it, cowboy?” he says, and oh, the heat…
“Yes.” he swallows. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
Oh. “Right.”
Jack shakes his head. “Oh, for fucks sake. We are ridiculous.”
Jack puts down the bag and comes to stand between Robby’s knees, then leans down and fists his hair in his hand, his fingers strong against his scalp, and stares him down for a long moment before Robby groans and wraps his arm around the small of his back and pulls him into his lap and then they’re kissing, open mouthed and voracious, with bite and fury and frustration that burns itself out quick so it becomes just the desperate lick of relief, the graze of teeth that says more than words can, more than the written word could ever convey.
They tumble together, and in the great tradition of cowboys everywhere, ride off into the sunset, though keen observers will note that there are no horses present at any time, though Robby does, much later, wear the hat.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Save a Hospital, Ride an ER Cowboy
[This email originated from outside of Pitt-Tribune.com.]
Dear Fiona,
I wanted to thank you for everything you and the Tribune have done for us at PTMC ER. The board recently voted to reject the offer from Equipoise Capital Management and increase our budget 7%, with a 1% rise each year, which was directly down to the humanising and honest reporting of your whole team, but especially thanks to your editorial that accompanied my interview. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for helping us save the ER so we can be there to rebuild the fences for generations to come.
Your husband mentioned that he would be willing to arrange riding lessons. Can you please pass my number onto him? Jack would like me to say he is also interested.
Best wishes,
Robby
ps. thank you for getting me back on the horse.