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!”