I'm Glad About You(6)

He knew she was offering this possibility to him as a hope. Kyle thought about what to say, as he looked at the floor. There he found something resembling courage and raised his eyes. “I don’t,” he said. “I hope she finds everything she wants there. Okay, where’s Heather?” he asked, glancing at the name on the file in his hand and tossing his question confidently back toward the nurse at the desk.

“She’s in four,” the nurse replied, sour. Kyle tipped his head toward Mrs. Moore with a quiet nod of respect and left. If you gave that woman any more leeway, he thought, she’d keep talking about nothing for the rest of the afternoon.





three





“GUESS WHO I saw yesterday!” Rose asserted cheerfully, holding the telephone with one hand while stirring the spaghetti sauce with the other. The pot had been on the stove for two days and the whole house smelled like tomatoes and garlic. There was a pleasant steam floating over the burners.

“I don’t know, who?” said Alison. She tried not to sound too much like she couldn’t give a shit, but her mother frankly did not make it easy. Rose seemingly could call only when she had some bit of news to report about bumping into some girl whom Alison had gone to high school with, and how well that person was doing, how many children she had or the nice car she was driving. Buried not too deeply in the conversation would be cautious questions about how things were going for Alison in her newly adopted city, Gomorrah.

“I was at the urologist,” Rose told her, suddenly feeling the need to draw this out a little. “Because your father was really feeling bad, and they needed a urine sample and he couldn’t even keep the pain medication down, he could hardly get out of bed, he was feeling just awful. So I had to take in the urine sample for him. I said, if you’re in this much pain you need to go in and see him, but you know your father, he won’t be told anything.”

“So you saw someone I knew at the urologist’s office?” Alison prodded her, trying to get this story back on course.

“Kyle,” Rose said.

Really, it felt like a slap, only inside her chest somewhere, an abrupt physical moment of something very much resembling violation. She made note of it in her head: Someday I might be able to use that somewhere. She had been to so many acting classes over the past five years, it was ingrained in her thinking now, a sort of double consciousness. Record your emotions. They are your tools. “Kyle,” she noted lightly, recovering with a practiced sardonic edge. “What was Kyle doing at Dad’s urologist?”

“Well, he wasn’t at the urologist,” Rose said, stirring the pot both literally and figuratively. “He was at the pediatrics office, down the hall.”

“You just happened to stick your head into the pediatrics office, while you were running around Cincinnati with Dad’s urine sample?” Alison asked. “This story is starting to sound a bit improbable, Mom.”

“Well, it’s what happened,” Rose informed her, with a slightly superior tone. Alison really did always sound like she thought she was smarter than you, and this time she wasn’t. “Your sister Megan is looking into pediatricians and I told her that I’d stop in for a brochure, and there was Kyle. He looks great. He was wearing one of those white doctor coats.”

“Wow, he was wearing a white doctor coat! Maybe that’s because he’s a doctor.”

“Well, I thought he looked handsome. And the office was crowded, I think they do well over there.”

“Did you ask him what he was doing in a suburban doctor’s office outside Cincinnati? I thought he was going to go to South America and work with war victims in refugee camps, that was always his plan,” Alison noted dryly. She hated the sound of her own voice making fun of Kyle’s passionate beliefs, which were beautiful and, she knew, deeply held. But she was also angry with him. She had not seen or spoken to him for almost a year, and the anger had not abated. “What happened to going to the Navajo nation to take care of dying beggars with a bunch of nuns?”

“I didn’t ask,” Rose said. “Mostly we talked about you.” Alison felt her heart start up again. Honestly, she thought, if this phone call goes on much longer I’m going to die from it. “Look, Mom, I have to go, I have a big audition tomorrow and I have to prepare,” she announced. No matter how much she wanted to hear about the man who had completely unmoored her for years, she simply could not let this go on.

“Well, he was interested in hearing about you,” Rose continued. “I told him what you were doing up there in New York and I could see how much he wanted to hear about it. You were so foolish to let him go. That boy loved you. I think he still does.”

“That boy is married, Mom,” Alison snapped. “Did he mention that, while you were chatting him up in the waiting room of his pediatrics practice?”

On the other end of the line, Rose fell silent. “No—why, no he didn’t,” she said. She was mortified. And heartbroken. “Is that true?”

“He got married last month. Next time, check for the ring.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Rose said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I can’t— Seriously, Mom? I just cannot, I cannot talk about this.”

“Oh, Alison,” her mother said, honestly woeful.