Spencer never prayed openly in front of patients or the OR staff unless patients like Bogart invited him to join them. He otherwise hid in one of the OR supply rooms. This was in part because he didn’t want to offend folks of other faiths or of no faith at all.
But it was mostly because, as a surgeon, he knew that one of the surest and quickest ways to invoke a crisis of confidence among patients and staff was to demonstrate the need for the intervention of a higher being. After all, could he imagine wanting to board an airplane after watching its captain perform the sign of the cross at the gate? Or don a yarmulke and recite Hebrew prayers? Or kneel on a carpet in the direction of Mecca? No way.
Praying: that’s how he’d met Rita.
Not that Rita was religious. She wasn’t. Not in the least. She’d never given religion any real thought, ever, despite her having lost two parents at a young age. She didn’t even know if she was an agnostic or atheist. She didn’t care, and Spencer hadn’t minded. Lack of faith had never been a deal breaker for him when dating women. He’d come across more than his share of women who professed faith but actually had none, or who did but expressed it in ways he found weird, disturbing, or both.
She’d spotted him praying one morning before an operation, almost two years ago, crouched behind tall racks of equipment in the supply room.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked, as he’d stood up and crossed himself. She hadn’t been confrontational, just curious. That was Rita. She didn’t explain to him, then or later, what she’d been doing back there in the otherwise empty supply room, and for some reason he’d never asked.
He’d told her (he’d never been self-conscious about his faith), and they’d struck up a conversation. He’d seen her around the OR, but they’d never met. He couldn’t recall what they’d talked about. All he could remember was how taken he’d been with the trim surgeon confidently planted in front of him, hands on hips, chin thrust forward, her long black hair pushed away from her lovely face by her surgical cap. The cap had seemed set back on her head at a jaunty angle. How could a shapeless paper surgical cap be jaunty? But it was jaunty on her.
Spencer had never believed in love at first sight. Still didn’t. He thought it was bullshit. Great for cheesy songs and movies. But real life? No way. You could want somebody right away, sure. Lust after them. Spot them from across a room and experience an instantaneous attraction.
But love? Love wasn’t that easy. It took time, and effort. Up to that point in his life, Spencer had been in love only once, during college, and maintaining that relationship had felt like constant work: as if feverishly writing a term paper he could never seem to finish. And he’d watched his parents, who loved each other more than just about anyone else he knew, soldier through plenty of tough times.
So all he’d known for certain after his five-minute-long conversation in the supply closet with Rita was that he’d wanted more than anything to get to know the attractive woman with the jaunty cap better. So he’d asked her out to coffee.
She’d said no.
Hadn’t even bothered to sugarcoat it.
No, thanks.
End of conversation.
She’d spun on her heels and stridden away, calling out something like nice meeting you or see you around the OR over her shoulder. That had been it.
Except that it hadn’t.
Because he hadn’t been able to get Rita out of his mind. She’d burrowed into it and stuck there, like a splinter under his fingernail.
Her confidence: That’s what had hooked him more than anything, as surely as a fish biting down hard on a baited line. He’d always found confident women appealing. He’d decided that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. In this sense, he’d modeled himself off his parents. He knew the same had happened to his father after he’d first met his mom in a bowling alley near the small college in eastern Washington where they’d both been students. According to his parents, the bowling alley had been the hub of their social universe. Bowl was what the kids did because apparently there hadn’t been much else, especially in winter. Bowl and drink. Probably screw, too, which was left unsaid: Spencer didn’t like to dwell on that because it was his parents, after all.
His mother was outgoing, popular, and vivacious; his dad was taciturn, but with a wicked sense of humor. His mom and dad agreed that at first she’d given dad the cold shoulder. She’d thought him an arrogant ass because he’d had so little to say. But dad had kept at it; and it was, she liked to say, his sweet perseverance that had worn her down. Spencer, being an only child, and thus the one person benefiting most from their eventual union, felt grateful for his dad’s sweet perseverance.
So Spencer had persevered (sweetly, if he did say so himself) until Rita gave in and agreed to go out with him.