I'm Glad About You(66)

They ticked away, unspoken, in the silence of the phone. He managed to keep his voice impersonal and cheerful. “Is it a problem?”

“Would it matter to you if it was?” He could hear the baby gurgling in her arms, and behind, Maggie chattering away with the cooler tones of Van’s mother, who was in town. The happy contentedness of the life he was providing for all of them breathed through the airwaves. If he had come home for dinner, everyone would tense up and hide and burst into tears over nothing, and she was complaining because he figured out how to give them all a night off?

“Of course it matters, Van, come on,” he said, allowing his voice to sound suitably conciliatory. “I just thought you’d like to have the time with your mom.”

“So what’s the plan, Dennis is going to cook for you?”

“No, we’re going to meet downtown, maybe at La Cucina or something.”

“Maybe? You don’t know?”

“Yes, we’re meeting at La Cucina, he was going to call ahead and get us a reservation.” This of course now sounded like a lie, because that’s what it was. He opted for more conciliation, rather than ratcheting things up. “I can come home,” he said. “You sound upset. Did something happen?”

“It’s fine. It’s fine,” Van announced, clipped.

The gurgling happiness of background noises had been silenced by all this. “I’ll come home if you want me to,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No. You should go out. One of us at least should have a life.”

“Well,” he said. “I won’t be late.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

How had it come to this? He no longer even tried to sort it out and simply pulled up his calendar to get a sense of his late-afternoon workload. You couldn’t cure everything online; the insurance company still allowed Pediatrics West to offer evening hours twice a week. Sometimes kids get sick at night, and a number of parents were juggling two careers and daytime appointments were impossible to schedule when Mommy’s real estate practice was taking off while Daddy had to go to a conference in Dubai. He glanced at his appointment sheet; ten patients back to back, no breaks. Some of them you’d be able to get in and out in less than a minute, but no parent was going to stand for that after sitting out there in that waiting room for more than an hour.

The kids, honestly, were great. Sniffling, feverish, lethargic at one end of the spectrum and bursting with life at the other, they all seemed preternaturally present, their innocence and energy presenting its own kind of wisdom. You wouldn’t suspect that these adorable creatures were going to evolve into the greedy and largely dim-witted race which had spawned them, although there was a creeping arrogance which showed itself when they got a little older.

His next appointment, luckily, was a four-year-old, Caleb. Wide brown eyes and a yogi-like slouch. Red curls. He looked up at Kyle with mournful expectation.

“Am I going to have to have a shot?” he whispered.

“I don’t know, what’s wrong with you?” Kyle asked him, matter-of-fact. He touched the kid’s forehead lightly. Definitely hot.

“We think it’s the chicken pox,” the mother announced. A slender woman in a skirted suit, she pocketed her iPhone quickly and gave Kyle her full attention. This one wouldn’t be snarling about a short appointment, she clearly wanted in and out. “Or at least that’s the hope.” Oh, boy, he thought.

“Then can I assume Caleb has not had his immunizations?”

“Okay, I know some of you don’t approve, but this is an ethical issue for my husband and I,” the mother announced. “We don’t want that stuff in him.”

Kids dying all over the world, and she thought vaccinations were unethical. Caleb looked up at him with those eyes. “I don’t want a shot,” he informed Kyle. His little cheeks were flushed, and now that he had gotten a second look, Kyle could see that the poor kid’s collapsed posture was probably due to muscle pain. Kyle had to resist the urge to pick him up and cradle him. The little boys, especially, seemed so vulnerable.

“No shots,” he said, trying to sound neutral, although he really hated the careless way these people endangered their children, and everyone else’s too. How not to judge that. Yet another mystery. “Let’s see if we can just make you feel better.”

After two hours more of this, he finished, poured himself into his car, and drove over to the back streets of Clinton, the site of Dennis’s elegantly crumbling apartment building. There were plenty of high school cronies who had settled, over time, in Cincinnati, but none of them somehow had the staying power of his pal, who had self-destructed in such a spectacularly public way. Dennis’s excessive drinking had cost him his job at Procter & Gamble, and to “teach him a lesson,” his father had told him in no uncertain terms that he was “on his own.” That meant that the monthly allowance Dennis got was really not anywhere near as large as it could have been. It was also not small enough to force him to get another job. Instead, he invented his own peculiar brand of thrift. His Victorian apartment was small—eight hundred square feet—and because it was in the back of the building, inexpensive. The place was crumbling, but it was not a dump; instead, he had managed to choose a few pieces wisely, culling them from attics of relatives and family friends. A gorgeous bedspread, an antique lamp, leftover pieces of Limoges china, the detritus of weddings long gone by. He lived in two rooms which were, truth be told, elegant and fluid with the touches of decadence. The only thing he had paid for in the whole place? A sixty-two-inch TV.