She gives him a look as he leans across the table and says, “Just you wait. Give me a few months and a couple more surgeries. . .”
To this, Valerie says nothing, but she can feel her heart racing with gratitude and something else she can’t quite name, as she silently grants him all the time in the world.
9
Tessa
It is Friday night, and I am sitting in the family room with my mother, brother, and sister-of-law, all in from Manhattan for a weekend visit. We are dressed for our eight o’clock dinner reservations, enjoying a bottle of wine in the family room while the four cousins, freshly bathed and fed, play upstairs under the supervision of a babysitter. The only thing missing from the picture is Nick, who is now twenty minutes late and counting, a fact that is not lost on my mother.
“Does Nick always work this late on the weekends?” she asks, crossing her legs as she glances purposefully at the Timex watch she now wears in lieu of the Cartier my father gave her for their last anniversary.
“Not usually,” I say, feeling defensive. I know her question likely has more to do with her frenetic personality, and her inability to sit still for any length of time, but I can’t help taking it as a covert affront, a question along the lines of, Are you still beating your wife? Or, in this case, Are you still letting your husband beat you?
“He just needed to check on a patient—a little boy,” I say, feeling the need to remind her of just how noble Nick’s profession is. “He’s having his first skin graft on Monday morning.”
“Damn,” my brother says, cringing and shaking his head. “I don’t know how he does it.”
“I know,” my sister-in-law agrees with an admiring look.
My mother is not as impressed. She makes a skeptical face, then folds her cocktail napkin in quarters. “What time is our reservation?” she asks. “Maybe we should just meet him at the restaurant?”
“Not until eight. We still have thirty minutes. And the restaurant’s very nearby,” I say tersely. “We’re fine, Mom. Just relax.”
“Yeah. Chill out, Mom,” my brother says teasingly.
My mother puts her hands up, palms out. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, humming under her breath.
I take a long drink of wine, feeling as tense as my mother looks. Normally, I don’t care when Nick is late, just as I’m a good sport when he gets paged. I’ve accepted these things as part of his job and our life together. But it is a different story when my family is in town. In fact, the last thing I said to Nick this afternoon when he told me he had “to run into the hospital for a few minutes” was, “Please don’t be late.”
He nodded, seemingly understanding all the nuances of the instruction—that for one, we don’t want to give my mother ammunition to prove her point about his life taking precedence over mine. And for another, although I adore my older brother, Dex, and am very close to my sister-in-law, Rachel, I am sometimes a little jealous of, if not sickened by, what I perceive to be their perfect marriage and can’t help using them as a yardstick of our relationship.
On paper, the four of us have much in common. Like Nick, Dex has a stressful job, working demanding hours as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, while Rachel, too, gave up her legal career once she had children, first working part-time, then quitting altogether. They also have two children—Julia and Sarah (ages seven and four)—and like the dynamic in our house, Dex defers to Rachel when it comes to parenting and discipline (which, interestingly, does not rile my mother as it does when Nick takes a background role; to the contrary, she has occasionally accused Rachel of expecting too much of Dex).