What We Find (Sullivan's Crossing, #1)(63)

“Do you still want a family?” she asked bravely.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think so. If it’s not too late.”

“Men can have families forever,” she said. “They can have ’em so old it’s like having their own grandchildren. I worked with a guy who’s on his third wife and just had a baby at the age of sixty. He’s happy as a pig in mud.”

Cal laughed. “God bless him. Men are all a little obsessed about when it goes away—the erection. Is it at sixty? Sixty-five? Didn’t Groucho Marx or someone reproduce at ninety?”

“Really? Men never let on, do they...”

“Never. But hardly anything trumps erections. I guess brain tumors and heart attacks, but...”

“So do you think about whether you’d actually be alive to raise them? These children you’ll have if it’s not too late?”

“If I’m pushing that envelope, I won’t have them. On purpose, anyway. But, Maggie, I think there’s still time to consider this. I fully intend to be at least ninety. And I’m not just being ridiculous. That’s completely reasonable for a healthy male my age.”

“Huh,” she said. “I never think about that. How long I want to live. I wonder why I never think about that. Especially since I had this crazy, irrational fear of dying alone.”

“You did? When was that?”

“Oh, right before I came here. I’d been under a lot of pressure. I certainly wasn’t the only one—the whole hospital was under a lot of pressure. We had a new administrator, a change in chief of staff, a scandal, a tragedy followed by a lawsuit... I was hardly the only one affected. I think I was the only one who’s looking at bankruptcy. But while I was trying to figure out how to proceed I suddenly felt completely isolated. Well, Andrew broke up with me. Dumped me when I was inconsolably depressed. That probably contributed.”

“Dying?” he asked.

“I thought about dying. No particular way, no particular age, just random lights-out. And I thought about being so alone. It was the last straw. It might’ve been the fact that all those combined stresses made me feel pretty unloved. Know what I mean? So I ran home to Sully and he surprised me with a heart attack.”

Cal found it interesting that the fear of death threw her into a panic. For him it was the fear of living.

“Are you over that now?”

“Oh yes, completely. I shot at Dumb and Dumber, didn’t I? Even though it crossed my mind I could be in real trouble. I just have steps to take before I move on in my life. Step one—get beyond this suit. Then I have to figure out if I can ever make those life-or-death decisions again. Simple, no?”

“Lawsuits can take years,” he said.

“We’re having a preliminary hearing in a week. The judge is going to hear the lawyers, has all the pretrial motions, will get a list of evidence and witnesses from both, they’ll decide on judge or jury resolution, mediation might be suggested, but doubtful... It is my dream that the judge looks at the lawsuit and says, Get outta here.”

“My dream, too,” he agreed. “I can go with you,” he said. “I can find a suit to wear.”

“Thanks, but I want to go alone. I’m going to stay over, go visit Phoebe and Walter on my way home.”

“If you change your mind at the last minute, I have a white shirt and a pair of dress pants...”

She was still leaning against him, not looking at him. “I’d like to ask you a personal question. If you can’t talk about it just say so and I’ll ask again later. How did you meet your wife?”

He chuckled softly. “I saw her sitting in a coffee shop, studying. She was so pretty. She looked so intense. She’d get a line between her eyebrows when she concentrated. I approached her and said, Excuse me, can I buy you a cup of coffee? And she said, As you can see, I have coffee. And I’m too busy to be picked up.”

“She was onto you...”

“Oh, from the start. So I waited outside for her to come out. I waited forever. She finally came out and I asked her if she had time to be picked up now. She laughed at me and said that as a matter of fact she hadn’t been picked up in a while, so what the hell. We went back into the coffee shop, had more coffee and I asked her a million questions. She said she felt like she was being grilled and asked me if I’d been stalking her. I could tell she didn’t believe that I’d just seen her for the first time. Against her better judgment she agreed to meet me again, same place. I was an hour late for work, that’s how gone I was. I didn’t think she’d keep our date so I went to the coffee shop two hours early—I figured I’d catch her escaping. But she was already there, eating a muffin, drinking coffee, book open. So I went right to her and said hi. And she said, You’re two hours early and I’m busy. Go walk around or accost some other girl until it’s time. And I did.”

“Oh, I like her,” Maggie said.

“Yeah, she was fierce. And soft—she was so soft. She was a law student and she could be so powerful. I loved watching her.”

“You fell in love with her instantly.”

“I think so, yes,” he said. “But in the end, she asked me to marry her. I mark that as one of the great victories of my life.”

“Was it good, then? Being married?” she asked.