“No. I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t eat her sandwich. “The truth is, I don’t know what to do. What if I didn’t go back to it?”
“You’d hardly be the first. A good dozen of my colleagues from medical school gave up practicing. They found it wasn’t right for them for a variety of reasons. One went into business...didn’t do so well, as I recall. But another quit to write romance novels and she’s cleaning up.” He chuckled. “Another is living on a farm, growing organic vegetables and manufacturing salad dressing. Very good stuff,” he added, taking another bite. “Sully, this is a delicious sandwich.”
“We get a delivery from a greengrocer in Timberlake every couple of days. Enid makes the sandwiches and bakes all the cookies, brownies and muffins. According to Maggie, they’re going to kill us.”
“I’ll have to have one,” Walter said.
“Okay, now you’re scaring me,” Maggie said. “Why don’t you get it over with? Rip off that old bandage, Walter. Say it. Yell at me. You poured a fortune into me and now I’m threatening to walk away to bag groceries and...”
“I’ve never once raised my voice to Maggie,” Walter told Sully.
“Course not,” Sully said. “I do whenever I please, however, so she’s not being neglected in that area.”
“We’ve only had a few serious talks in my life and as I recall, they were so mild I hardly realized until afterward that you had any idea what you were doing. There was that time when I was a freshman in college that you came all the way out here from Chicago. You said you wanted to see the campus again—you’d seen it before I enrolled. But that was a ruse. You wanted me to change my major.”
“No, not exactly,” Walter corrected. “I thought you were too young to commit to a course of study. I wanted you to check a lot of different things while you had the chance. But I didn’t insist, did I?”
“No,” she relented. “But you had a good argument. And then there was that little talk we had before I married Sergei, the artist.”
“That one didn’t go as well, regrettably,” Walter said.
“You tell her to bail out while she could?” Sully asked.
“Not exactly,” Walter said. “I did suggest they had little in common and she might want to think on it a while longer. The kid was penniless. So was Maggie for that matter. But Maggie wasn’t going to stay penniless and I highly recommended a prenup. Nothing at all wrong with a prenup when one of the couple has great potential and the other doesn’t.”
“You have a prenup, Walter?” Maggie asked.
“We did,” he said. “It was Phoebe’s idea. It became null and void after a decade of marriage. That seemed reasonable. All that aside, you managed your situation very well. Sad but predictable.”
“I wasted a perfectly good marriage on him. And then there was the time right before residency—we had a very long talk about what it was going to be like, what kind of commitment I was making, how I had to be sure my personal goals matched my professional goals, that sort of thing. I’m still not sure what that means.”
“Now’s probably as good a time as any to think about what it means.”
“Listen, Walter, did you ever have second thoughts about important stuff? Like neurosurgery? Or maybe marrying a woman with a six-year-old? Or sinking all that money into a med student?”
“I’m a human being, Maggie. I’ve had second thoughts about everything. Giving important matters serious consideration and reevaluations is vital. I even have some regrets—but not about my practice, my wife or my stepdaughter. I was lucky in those areas of my life. At least, luckier than most men. Although I have to be honest—I think I’d rather have been a pilot.”
“Seriously? I never heard you say that before! But I remember your flying lessons. Didn’t you have an airplane for a while?”
“I was part owner of a Piper, but I didn’t keep it too long. Your mother wouldn’t go up with me. Such is life—we’re all different.”
Maggie took a bite of her sandwich, feeling a little more relaxed. “And, there was one other time. High school. Remember?”
“I remember,” he said, finishing off his sandwich.