“Right?” He laughed. “But Florrie isn’t having it. She tells me she didn’t get dressed and put on her makeup just to drive around in circles. She tells me she has a plan and if I can get over these minor inconveniences, I’m welcome to follow her. Dude, she led me to the oldest, most broke-ass Dairy Queen in Nevada, and proceeded to order half the damn menu. Two Blizzards. She ate two Blizzards all by herself while telling me stories that had me cry-laughing and I—fuck.” He shook his head at the ceiling. “One of her favorite songs came on and she made me get up and dance with her. We were dancing in the middle of the Dairy Queen. It was the best date of my life. I fell in love with her that night. Not all the way, but a lot.”
Maybe it was the dehydration or the headache from hell, but I didn’t understand why this was the story he wanted me to hear. I broke a cracker into quarters and then broke those pieces in half. I ate a bit and waited for my body to reject it.
“I was never afraid of falling for Florrie,” he continued, “and I was never afraid of making a fool of myself for her. I wasn’t afraid of any of it and maybe that’s why I jumped in headfirst. Maybe I ignored the signs, the red flags. Maybe I should’ve stopped to look around before leaping, but I don’t regret any of it.” He rolled an electrolyte drink toward me. “I don’t regret anything that I did with Florrie, not even now that it’s over.”
“Why not?”
“Because I loved that girl, even if it didn’t last. She loved me too, even if she wasn’t made for married life. I wouldn’t trade any of that away.”
I ate another fraction of a cracker. Paused to find out if there’d be an eruption. “Okay.”
He fiddled with the cap on his drink. “And I’m dumping all this on you because I’ve figured out that it’s worth going after the good times even if they don’t last.”
I rubbed my brows. I didn’t know what the hell he was getting at here. “Okay.”
“Some of us will have shitty endings. My marriage ended. Your parents’ marriage ended—badly. But there are tons of people who get together and figure it out, and it doesn’t end badly for them.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” I said, “but weren’t you drunk and hostile over finding your wife in bed with someone else not that long ago? And then checking off the rebound-sex box withWhit’s sister? Sorry, but I’m having a hard time believing that you’re suddenly cool with it all.”
He stared down at his palms, laughing. “I’m not cool with it. Like you said that night, it’s gonna take a little while to be anywhere close to cool with it. But I need you to know that just because this happened to me doesn’t mean it will happen to you.”
Was this what my patients felt like when I strolled in at five in the morning to check their incisions and ask if they’d pooped when all they wanted was to find a few minutes of peace in their post-op misery? Because I had some newfound sympathy. “I’m aware of that.”
“Are you? Because it seems like you’ve hit one rough patch with Whitney and convinced yourself it’s all going to hell.”
“That’s what happened.” I pointed at him with half a cracker. “I don’t think I convinced myself of anything.”
“You had one fight.”
“More like a slow-moving train wreck where I hurt her feelings in a way that I don’t understand at a time when she was already in a low place, you told her I’d jump out a window to avoid commitment, and then this guy at work called her out in front a lot of people about the ethics of being with a resident when she’s an attending—and she takes ethical stuffveryseriously so I doubt she ever wants to speak to me again.”
Mason grabbed some of the crackers and shoved them all in his mouth at once. “When did I say anything about you jumping out a window?”
“That was the effect. You were drunk. Very drunk.”
“You had one fight,” he repeated. “One rough night where everything went wrong. My wife has been sleeping with a bunch of guys while I’ve been away at work. Plus the ones you told me about and I’d ignored. Those things aren’t the same.”
“I know?—”
“Then fix it. If you want this, if you want her, stop moping around and fix it.” He shrugged. “If it’s worth fixing.”
I closed my eyes because I felt my stomach sloshing around again and the only thing I could do was concentrate on breathing evenly until it passed. A few minutes went by before I said, “It is.”
There wereno sick days for a surgical resident. In order for me to take a day off, I had to be the oneonthe operating table. Though I did miss pre-rounds because I was sitting on the second-floor landing in my apartment building while I repeated, “It’s just a virus” for thirty solid minutes.
The walk to the hospital zapped what little energy I had and I headed straight for the elevators. As luck would have it, Whitney slipped in right before the doors closed.
Her golden brown hair was loose this morning, not tied back in those twin braids like usual for surgery. She wore a long dark coat with a little scarf around her neck. It looked silky and mostly decorative. I wanted to run it between my fingers and press it to my face to breathe her in. Her trousers were a creamy coffee color and her shoes matched, and she froze when she saw me.
“Hi,” I said from my corner of the car, where the walls were holding me up.
She blinked several times. “Hello.”
“You never got back to me about throwing Cossapino down some stairs.”
She went on blinking. “I thought you said you’d trip him. Throwing seems less plausibly excusable.”
“I’d make it look like an accident.”
