“There’s some indication of a slight infection but honestly I’m not convinced this is bacterial,” he started, cautious. “Unless it develops further there’s really no indication that an antibiotic is going to do anything more than give him a stomachache, on top of the cold. I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Grisholm; it’s probably viral. In a couple of days I think you’ll start to see some improvement.”
The horrible mother didn’t go for it. He had known she wouldn’t. “I came down here,” she informed him, her voice rising. “I came all the way down here and all you can do is tell me he’s sick? That’s ludicrous. And you know I’m going to be charged for this, there will be a copay, or a deductible, and I didn’t want to come anyway, I said, ‘Just give me the prescription!’ And your nurse—whatever her name is, on the phone, she was the one who insisted he had to be seen by a doctor and now I came all the way down here to be charged for nothing? Are you kidding me? I mean, seriously, are you kidding me?”
“I’m giving you my best advice,” Kyle began again.
“Your best advice is not what I want,” she informed him. She took a step forward, reaching out to snatch her child back from Kyle’s now-suspect care. Startled by the suddenness of her move, he took a step backward and relinquished the boy without argument. “I want to see another doctor,” the woman announced. “I want another doctor!”
She had not yet made it out the door, but her voice was loud and had already breached the privacy of the examination room. Kyle knew that she was well within her rights to ask for a third or even fourth opinion on this matter, and that as soon as she had stepped out into the hallway with her impatience and her complaints, the nurses and aides on shift would scurry about and do her bidding, avoiding his gaze as they bowed to the patient’s right to usurp his authority. He also knew there were two other doctors present in the building who would have little trouble issuing a scrip for Zithromax, which is the easiest thing in the world, without even examining the child.
“Could someone help me here?” she yelled. It was excruciating, watching her swing that kid to her shoulder just roughly enough to startle tears and a wail of anxiety out of him. She tossed a contemptuous gaze back at Kyle, as if to accuse him of making her child cry, and turned the doorknob uselessly, while she struggled to bend over and pick up her purse, a brown-and-black designer sack which clearly cost a fortune while simultaneously looking like knocked-off sophomoric junk. He had known girls in college who carried bags like that, from which experience he also knew that women who carried designer bags were not to be messed with. In addition, he was aware that if he didn’t issue the prescription and someone else did, the office manager, Linda, would make note of it in the daily report she emailed to the local headquarters of the HMO which administrated their practice. And then that report would worm its way through seventeen levels of health care bureaucracy, before winding up as a reprimand in the file they kept on him and examined every six months when his performance came up for review.
The kid was wailing. The horrible mother was hissing a long string of complaints under her breath as she struggled with the kid, the designer bag, and the doorknob. It wasn’t worth the headache. “I’m happy to give you a prescription, if that’s what you want,” Kyle said, without inflection. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a pen. “I just wanted to make sure you understood the drawbacks.”
“I understand the drawbacks for you, if I don’t get that prescription,” she snapped back. He stopped, pen in midair, and stared at her. If he was going to be bullied into writing a scrip against his better judgment, he was not going to let her be hateful about it. They stared at each other for the briefest of instants before she smiled tightly and nodded. “Sorry. I am just really on my last nerve. You know how it is when your kid is sick! Just everything wears you out.”
“Of course,” he said, pulling out the prescription pad and scribbling silently. He ripped the top page off and handed it to her. She took it with little grace, but then, he offered it with none. With his left hand he reached behind him and opened the door for her with the careless ease of a magician. The casual gesture revealed her wild struggle with the doorknob for what it was: cheap drama.
Completely fried, and it was only two o’clock. His shift went until seven. Most of the young patients of Pediatrics West were brought in by women like this one, upper-middle-class suburbanites who didn’t have the good grace to be thankful for the money and the schools and the parks and the half-acre lots every single house stood on, much less the immediate access to health care anytime some kid looked sideways, or sneezed. The whole northwestern suburban sprawl around Cincinnati was a veritable slap in the face to Betty Friedan and the seminal revelations of The Feminine Mystique. It was 2012, and these women were perfectly happy to have their husbands run off to high-paying jobs halfway across town, leaving them bored and alone with children whom they didn’t like and who didn’t particularly like them back. As long as the money came in and they didn’t have to do anything for it aside from wiping noses and making lunch, they were content in a kind of nasty, she-devil way. Again Kyle felt a pang of guilt as soon as the snarling judgment flitted through his consciousness—there were plenty of women whom he knew personally who were vastly more caring than this harridan—but he had little time with which to berate himself for the quick spite of his exhausted brain. In the waiting room, the bedraggled crowd of infected kids was stacking up. He had to stop thinking and move on.
“Kyle?” A voice behind him shook him out of his tailspin and he turned, the gentle, practiced smile which was his physician’s calling card at the ready. The woman who stood before him returned it with a good-natured sincerity which shamed him in its innocence. “I thought that was you! Do you work here?”
“Mrs. Moore, hello!” Kyle felt a fast and fierce jolt in his heart, which he quickly moved past as he shook her hand with his best presentation of calm competence. “Yes, I’m doing my pediatrics residency here. What, what are you doing here?” He looked around quickly to see if she was somehow attached to any of the sick children—or the young mothers—in the waiting room but she laughed and shook her head. “Howard has been having some trouble with kidney stones, and he is really in a lot of pain; it’s been horrible, he can’t keep the painkillers down, he just vomits up everything,” she said, assuming like everyone that any doctor must be interested in the most intimate facts of even a near-stranger’s health. “He’s been seeing Dr. Drake, in the urologist’s office down the hall, but he couldn’t even get out of bed this morning, so I had to bring in the urine sample.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Kyle told her, sounding sorry.
“My daughter Megan—do you remember Megan?—she’s due with twins in two months and she’s been looking into different pediatricians and I thought I’d just stop by here. I told her that there’s a big pediatrics office right down the hall from your father’s urologist, you should look into that too because that’s so close! I didn’t know you were here, I’ll tell her I saw you.”
“Please do.” Kyle both wanted to flee and couldn’t bring himself to move. Just standing there and listening to Mrs. Moore’s chatter brought back for him a rush of affection for this woman, who had fed him dinner, served him tea, listened to his dreams, and kicked him out of her house more than once during four long, tumultuous years of his youth. “It must be so nice for your parents to have you right in the neighborhood!” Mrs. Moore continued. “Your sister is still here as well, isn’t she? I think I heard from Louise Breslin that she saw your sister, she’s living in Clifton!”
“Susan is a nurse, she’s over at Good Sam,” he reported.
“Your parents must be so proud,” Mrs. Moore noted. Then, quickly, a shadow of some grief passed over her face; she was not the kind of woman who knew how to hide feelings; she never had been. “You know, until Megan moved back, not one of my children stayed in Cincinnati. Not one! Last year, I was so mad at all of them!” She laughed self-consciously, as i
f to let him know that this wasn’t the life-crushing disappointment she had just admitted it was. “The Dilmeyers, did you go to school with any of them? Ten children and all of them stayed here! Margaret Dilmeyer can’t stop bragging about it, she has twelve grandchildren already, I hear about it all the time. I don’t mean to complain; I’m not complaining! Well, I’m glad that Megan’s here, at any rate. She just moved back! So that’s nice. Your parents must be so happy, to have you both living in the same city.”
“I think they enjoy it, yes,” Kyle acknowledged. He was touched by her confession and leaned back on his left foot, acknowledging with that simple gesture that he didn’t really have to run off; he had a few minutes to chat. “But everyone’s well?” He wanted to suck the words back into his soul as soon as he had uttered them.
“Oh, they’re all great. Just great!” she bubbled, a conscious brittleness entering her tone. “Jeff is in Germany, of all places, on a Fulbright. He’s got all this research with DNA. Nobody knows what he’s talking about half the time but he’s successful. He’s always being published in big science magazines. Nature. He’s got an article in that one, coming out, he’s really proud.”
“Well, I don’t actually know a lot about research publications but I know that a Fulbright is a big deal,” Kyle said, grateful that she had had the good grace to pretend that he actually cared about Jeff, her patently favorite son. Both of them knew there was really only one of her eight children in whom he had any interest at all. But he really had to get out of these waters before they got any more perilous. The nurse at the desk had raised her eyes impatiently more than once, and he could tell from her familiar tics that she was about to butt in and embarrass him for taking five minutes off to chat with an old friend, when the waiting room was turning into a veritable petri dish of infected toddlers. “It’s great to see you,” he told her. “Please tell Mr. Moore I hope he feels better. Kidney stones are no fun.”
“Alison’s still in New York!” she announced. He wished he could have kept his heart from hammering in his chest, but barring that, he could at least control any sign of interest in this line of discussion. He had known as soon as he saw Alison’s mother that he would not get out of this conversation without hearing about her, but that didn’t make it any easier when it finally happened. He forced a nod which he hoped carried with it an air of professional disinterest.
“Yes, I had heard that,” he said politely.
“She’s still crazy about this acting thing, but she hasn’t had much luck yet,” Mrs. Moore continued. “A couple of auditions. It’s a big deal, apparently, even getting into the hallway outside the auditions. She has lots of stories, it’s a big adventure, I understand that, but I finally said to her, don’t you have to actually get in something, a television show, or something that pays you something, isn’t that the point? Well, that wasn’t the right thing to say, obviously. But I’m worried. You can’t blame me for worrying. She has no money. She was working in an office for a while but she didn’t like that, I guess there were a lot of people there who were really unethical and they expected her to do things that just bothered her too much. She wouldn’t tell me anything specific. Anyway, she finally quit that and now she’s waitressing for some company that does private events. So she makes a lot of money when they call her but they only call her once in a while and I think she should get a real job, something with health insurance, but she says she went to New York to act. But she’s not doing that either! At least in Seattle, she wasn’t making any money but she was acting, which I thought you won’t get anywhere by acting in Seattle, but in New York she’s not even doing that much.” All of this information was excruciating to Kyle. He stared at the floor and nodded diligently, hoping that she would somehow understand that she was making him miserable, and do the decent thing and shut up. She did not. “She hasn’t asked for money,” the woman continued, again offering up the most private details imaginable, at the top of her lungs, in the middle of a waiting room full of strangers. “She’s too proud for that! She was always too proud, no one could tell her anything. Her father says she’s going to have to come to us sooner or later. I wanted her to fly home for the weekend a couple months ago, just to get out of that city, and she said she couldn’t afford the plane fare! And fares are low now. But she doesn’t have any extra money at all. She just can’t keep going on with nothing! Her father is really disappointed. She did so well in school, he really thought she might go on and do something with herself. He said to me, it just seems like a waste, a total waste of her time and her twenties. I don’t know, maybe she’ll get tired of it and come home.”
He knew she was offering this possibility to him as a hope. Kyle thought about what to say, as he looked at the floor. There he found something resembling courage and raised his eyes. “I don’t,” he said. “I hope she finds everything she wants there. Okay, where’s Heather?” he asked, glancing at the name on the file in his hand and tossing his question confidently back toward the nurse at the desk.
“She’s in four,” the nurse replied, sour. Kyle tipped his head toward Mrs. Moore with a quiet nod of respect and left. If you gave that woman any more leeway, he thought, she’d keep talking about nothing for the rest of the afternoon.
three
“GUESS WHO I saw yesterday!” Rose asserted cheerfully, holding the telephone with one hand while stirring the spaghetti sauce with the other. The pot had been on the stove for two days and the whole house smelled like tomatoes and garlic. There was a pleasant steam floating over the burners.
“I don’t know, who?” said Alison. She tried not to sound too much like she couldn’t give a shit, but her mother frankly did not make it easy. Rose seemingly could call only when she had some bit of news to report about bumping into some girl whom Alison had gone to high school with, and how well that person was doing, how many children she had or the nice car she was driving. Buried not too deeply in the conversation would be cautious questions about how things were going for Alison in her newly adopted city, Gomorrah.
“I was at the urologist,” Rose told her, suddenly feeling the need to draw this out a little. “Because your father was really feeling bad, and they needed a urine sample and he couldn’t even keep the pain medication down, he could hardly get out of bed, he was feeling just awful. So I had to take in the urine sample for him. I said, if you’re in this much pain you need to go in and see him, but you know your father, he won’t be told anything.”
“So you saw someone I knew at the urologist’s office?” Alison prodded her, trying to get this story back on course.
“Kyle,” Rose said.
Really, it felt like a slap, only inside her chest somewhere, an abrupt physical moment of something very much resembling violation. She made note of it in her head: Someday I might be able to use that somewhere. She had been to so many acting classes over the past five years, it was ingrained in her thinking now, a sort of double consciousness. Record your emotions. They are your tools. “Kyle,” she noted lightly, recovering with a practiced sardonic edge. “What was Kyle doing at Dad’s urologist?”
“Well, he wasn’t at the urologist,” Rose said, stirring the pot both literally and figuratively. “He was at the pediatrics office, down the hall.”
“You just happened to stick your head into the pediatrics office, while you were running around Cincinnati with Dad’s urine sample?” Alison asked. “This story is starting to sound a bit improbable, Mom.”
“Well, it’s what happened,” Rose informed her, with a slightly superior tone. Alison really did always sound like she thought she was smarter than you, and this time she wasn’t. “Your sister Megan is looking into pediatricians and I told her that I’d stop in for a brochure, and there was Kyle. He looks great. He was wearing one of those white doctor coats.”
“Wow, he was wearing a white doctor coat! Maybe that’s because he’s a doctor.”
“Well, I thought he looked handsome. And the office was crowded, I think they do well o
ver there.”
“Did you ask him what he was doing in a suburban doctor’s office outside Cincinnati? I thought he was going to go to South America and work with war victims in refugee camps, that was always his plan,” Alison noted dryly. She hated the sound of her own voice making fun of Kyle’s passionate beliefs, which were beautiful and, she knew, deeply held. But she was also angry with him. She had not seen or spoken to him for almost a year, and the anger had not abated. “What happened to going to the Navajo nation to take care of dying beggars with a bunch of nuns?”
“I didn’t ask,” Rose said. “Mostly we talked about you.” Alison felt her heart start up again. Honestly, she thought, if this phone call goes on much longer I’m going to die from it. “Look, Mom, I have to go, I have a big audition tomorrow and I have to prepare,” she announced. No matter how much she wanted to hear about the man who had completely unmoored her for years, she simply could not let this go on.
“Well, he was interested in hearing about you,” Rose continued. “I told him what you were doing up there in New York and I could see how much he wanted to hear about it. You were so foolish to let him go. That boy loved you. I think he still does.”
“That boy is married, Mom,” Alison snapped. “Did he mention that, while you were chatting him up in the waiting room of his pediatrics practice?”
On the other end of the line, Rose fell silent. “No—why, no he didn’t,” she said. She was mortified. And heartbroken. “Is that true?”
“He got married last month. Next time, check for the ring.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Rose said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t— Seriously, Mom? I just cannot, I cannot talk about this.”
“Oh, Alison,” her mother said, honestly woeful.
Alison wanted to slam down the phone and break her mother’s unthinking eardrum. This was going to take hours to get over and she really did have a big audition tomorrow and she had not prepared for it yet because she’d had three catering shifts back to back, none of which she had the luxury of passing on at this financially precarious moment in time. “Look, I have to go,” she finally said. “I really do, I have to go.”
I'm Glad About You Page 2
