A Family Affair(36)

She looked at her Instagram account and Facebook page to kill time. Actually, she killed time this way far more often than she would like to admit. It wasn’t usually satisfying. In fact, it was often disappointing or frustrating. Like now. Bertie Newsome, one of her colleagues, was engaged and was planning a wedding to her future husband to take place in December; it was a never-ending catalog of photos of everything from the diamond ring and possible wedding cakes to the townhomes they considered buying. Jordan Hillerman, a classmate from med school, was having twins! Priscilla Silver was posting pictures from her honeymoon in Aruba.

The whole world was marching on while her life was agonizingly stagnant and there was no good reason for it. When she listed her attributes in her head, it seemed she had everything. She lived in an upscale community in a luxury town house, she was a doctor in a thriving practice. She was an associate in that practice and would probably make partner in another year. She thought her nose was a little small for her face but she was so often complimented on her beauty that she had decided the nose wasn’t a problem. She was smart, self-supporting, an overachiever...and so lonely. Even now in her new relationship with Patrick, even with his attentiveness, she was lonely. They couldn’t go out every night or even spend the night together every night, what with their busy schedules, but when they weren’t together he would call. It had great promise. She just didn’t understand why it didn’t feel like quite enough.

It was no doubt her father’s death that weighed her down. That left a gaping hole in her heart. After all, her father had been the first man in her life to let her down. She strove all her life to make him proud and he said he was, but it was unconvincing. He clearly enjoyed Michael and Bess more; Mike because he was a boy with similar interests and Bess because she was the baby and Dad had doted on her.

Really, Jessie felt she had always been left behind. Even now, waiting for her date, scrolling through the Instagram lives of her friends and seeing their joy. Why didn’t she ever have joy?

Quite by accident, looking at Tina’s Facebook page, she saw pictures of a beach gathering. Volleyball, bonfire, laughter at a beach bar, many people some of whom she knew from the hospital. And Jason. With his arm casually draped around Tina’s shoulders. Tina was a colleague, a pediatrician. She was very popular, though she wasn’t all that pretty. In fact, she was so far from perfect. She was a short, roundish blonde with a smile too wide, large blue eyes and a double chin. But she had a wicked sense of humor that people loved. Jason had always liked her and perhaps these days he was liking her more.

How dare he get on with his life so easily.

“There you are,” Patrick said, leaning down and giving her a peck on the cheek. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He sat, looked immediately at the menu. The waiter was instantly at the table. “Ah, Miguel. How are you today?”

“It’s a good day, thank you.”

“I’ll have a cerveza and plate of loaded nachos for a start. Jessie?”

“You can bring me that wine now,” she said. Then despite her wish to be more accommodating, she put on a little pout.

Patrick seemed not to notice. He talked about a cervical laminectomy he performed first thing that morning, a meeting he had with a surgeon about a heart-lung transplant that was scheduled and some kind of issue with his assistant and the accounting department about billing.

Then he took a break to drink some of his beer and shovel a few nachos in his mouth. He pushed his plate toward her but she just shook her head. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You were very late.”

“I apologized,” he said. “I had Cheryl call you. If you didn’t want to wait, you didn’t have to.”

“Did it occur to you to call me yourself?”

He appeared momentarily frozen. He dabbed his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I felt abandoned.”

“Though of course you weren’t. I was tied up. We got a little behind schedule and there was a patient who had come a long way to see me, so I made sure to see her.”

Jessie lifted one brow. “Oh? And what was so important?”

His jaw clenched. “A fifteen-year-old girl, with her parents, came all the way from Reno. She has a glioblastoma, temporal lobe, and I’ll be operating on her on Tuesday. She’s frightened, as anyone would be. There were a lot of questions. As expected. I wasn’t about to cancel or reschedule. Or cut her short.”

“Oh,” she said, contrite. “Well, I had a hard day, too.”

“I didn’t have a hard day, Jessie. I was running late.” He drank some of his beer. “Do you want to talk about your day?”

“No, I just want to eat,” she said. “Maybe it’s low blood sugar...”

He granted her a small smile. “Then let’s get you fed.”

And she thought, Oh God, I’m doing it again! What is the matter with me?

She forced herself to be pleasant, to laugh at the right times, to show empathy when it would count, to ask him questions that would get him talking and take the pressure off herself, to have a lovely dinner. She was rewarded for this effort by having him ask if she’d like to come to his place and she said yes, thinking that the pleasure of lovemaking would take some of the pressure off her poor head.