“Tell you what. How about, as a special treat, sort of a remedial educational service, we watch the World Series together? The opening game is on Wednesday. I’ll explain everything, teach you the mechanics of the game.”
“Wow. That sounds . . . tempting.” My brothers have tried -episo-dically over the years to educate me about baseball. They share a block of season tickets for the Nationals, Washington’s wildly popular franchise. Every once in a while—when enough time has elapsed that I’ve forgotten what torture it is to sit through nine innings—they persuade me to come along. Tony buys the beer while Martin devotes himself to explaining, for the umpteenth time, the difference between a player’s batting average and his on-base percentage. I remind him that I haven’t even mastered which is left field and which is right field. The only useful piece of information I’ve picked up is that section 109 is home to an outpost of Ben’s Chili Bowl, which sells a mean Half-Smoke.
“So we’re on for Wednesday?” Will was waiting for an answer.
“Sure. Okay. But not at some sports bar. Your place?”
“No, let’s say yours.”
“Deal.” Yes, that would be better. I could cook. I’d still be stuck watching baseball, but at least we would eat well.
“I’ll bring scorecards, show you how to track all the stats.”
“Now you’re pushing it.”
He grinned and pushed back from the table. “At the risk of boring you further, would you excuse me a second? I’ve got a few voice mails I need to respond to. Be right back.”
I watched him walk away with some relief. I needed a moment alone, to collect myself. What on earth was I doing here? With Will Zartman? With my physician, for God’s sake, in an Atlanta hotel, flirting over predawn pancakes? Clearly I was not myself. The last twenty--four hours had brought a tumult of contradictory emotions: one minute found me weeping; the next, gobbling up jalape?o poppers and giggling like a schoolgirl. I wasn’t sure what I felt anymore, other than raw. It would take time to process everything I’d learned yesterday.
And now this thing with Will. It was true: he wasn’t my type. But that didn’t seem to be preventing my feeling attracted to him. Will, the earnest, solicitous doctor in Washington? Him, I could resist. But this less predictable man, who’d flown to Atlanta on a whim and then kept me up all night—well, he was intriguing. I studied him as he wove through the restaurant, absorbed in his phone conversation. He was wearing the same Levi’s and cashmere sweater as before. The jeans hugged him in interesting places; maybe I liked the boot-cut look after all. This would be a ludicrous time to start a relationship. My whole world had just been upended. But no one ever argued that laws of reason and logic apply to the chemistry between a man and a woman. Will caught my eye from across the room and winked, held up one finger to indicate he would be just another minute.
I winked back. It had been a while since I’d had a crush. You would think I’d be too old for such nonsense, that at thirty-seven I would have graduated to responding less like a teenage girl and more like a sensible woman approaching middle age.
It was a pleasure to discover this was not the case.
PART THREE
Washington
Twenty-one
* * *
Sibley Hospital is a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility set deep in well-tended lawns. It’s the kind of place that makes you grateful to live in twenty-first-century America. No one wants to suffer dire illness or injury, but should it happen—it’s reassuring to know that the best medical care money can buy exists right up the street.
I’d never visited Sibley before. The elevator deposited me on the fifth floor. Hushed, carpeted corridors. A closed-in smell of disinfectant and dust, as though the air had been recycled many times. It must have been years since someone had thought to throw open a window. I found my way to the Division of Neurological Surgery, where the dimly lit, blue-and-green waiting room felt vaguely aquatic and was presumably meant to be calming. At three o’clock sharp a sturdy-looking nurse in scrubs called my name. We went through the usual routine, checking my weight (steady, despite the cheeseburger frenzy), my blood pressure, my temperature.
“All right, then.” She peeled the pressure cuff off my arm and indicated for me to climb down from the examination table. “Let’s get this CT scan done and then you can relax a bit, while Dr. Gellert reads the results.”
I looked up, startled. “A CT scan? Do I really need that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Apparently you do.” She was already holding open the door to the hallway.
“But . . . hang on. I already got an MRI.”
“CT’s different. Uses X-rays.”
“I already got an X-ray, too.”
“Not like this, you didn’t. This one, you lie flat and slide in. Then they take loads and loads of pictures. Slices. The doctors stack the slices on top of each other, and we can see your whole head in three-D. It’s cool, you’ll see.”
I felt a stab of frustration. The afternoon would slip away; I had a pile of mail waiting at home for me, not to mention piles of laundry and no food in my fridge. “How long will it take?”
“You’re gonna like this.”
“I doubt that,” I whined.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds?”
“New machine. I told you, it’s cool.”
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