That uncomplicated happy stayed with me as I rang up a family’s selection of gourds, helped a woman decide between two nearly identical shades of orange spray paint, and fielded questions about whether we carried battery-operated tea lights—we did. Aisle four.
The bell over the door announced Ray Whitfield. He wore civilian clothes, which always made him appear slightly less like himself. Without the white coat, he was just a large, white-haired man in a flannel shirt. The kind you’d peg as a retired farmer or a high school football coach. He moved toward the pumpkins in the front display with the focus of a man who took this seriously.
When I’d finished with the gourd family, I moved in his direction. “Dr. Whitfield, Happy Halloween.”
He looked up and smiled the smile of a man who seemed genuinely glad to see me. “Ellie. You look well.”
“I feel well.” And couldn’t stop smiling to prove it.
Something in his face softened further. He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something mix of relief and fondness and maybe a little bit of something elseunderneath it all. “I’m so glad,” he said. “Truly. When Gus first came to me with this whole— “ He stopped.
I waited.
He looked down at the pumpkins.
“With this whole what?” I said.
“Nothing.” He crouched down to examine a medium-sized pumpkin with excessive concentration. “Just glad things have worked out. You and Daniel seem incredibly happy.”
“Ray.” Because in this moment, he was Grandpa’s friend, not his doctor.
“This one’s a good shape, do you think? Symmetrical.”
“Ray.” I came around the display table. “What did you start to say?”
He straightened up with the pumpkin under his arm and the deer in the headlights expression of a man who’d just realized that he’d made a significant tactical error. Whatever mental calculations he made, he evidently realized his options were limited.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I just meant that when Gus—when he was in the hospital, and things were uncertain—I didn’t know how it would all?—“
“You said this whole something,” I said. “What whole something?”
Ray Whitfield had been a doctor for thirty-four years. He’d delivered bad news and hard truths and sat with families through the worst moments of their lives, and he’d done all of it with a composure I’d always found deeply reassuring. The utter failure of that composure as I continued to stare at him was becoming increasingly informative.
“The scheme,” he said finally, with the defeated air of a man dropping a heavy thing he’d been carrying too long. “Gus’s scheme. I’m sorry, Ellie, I assumed you knew by now. I thought he would have told you.”
“What scheme of Gus’s?” I enunciated each word slowly.
Ray looked at the pumpkin under his arm. Then at me. Then at a point somewhere over my left shoulder that appeared to contain nothing of particular interest.
“The stroke was real.” He blurted it, like getting that part out first would help. “I want to be crystal clear about that. He did have a stroke. The imaging was genuine.”
“But,” I said.
“But the prognosis I gave you wasn’t—“ He stopped. Started again. “The extent of it was less severe than I may have indicated. He was never quite as close to… There was never quite as short a window as I suggested. He asked me to—“ Another stop. “He was very persuasive, Ellie. You know how he is. And I’ve known him for forty years, and he was lying in that hospital bed telling me that all he wanted was to see you happy before he—“ Ray exhaled. “I’m not proud of it.”
Somewhere in aisle four, someone was comparing tea lights. The bell over the door chimed as a customer left. I registered this dimly in the back of my mind as I processed the halting explanation.
“He wasn’t dying,” I said finally.
“Not imminently, no.”
“You told us he was dying.”
“I implied he could be dying,” Ray said, with the precision of a man drawing a fine distinction that didn’t hold up under scrutiny. “At his request.”
I looked at him for a long moment. He looked back at me with unvarnished guilt, his whole posture slumping beneath the weight of an action he obviously felt terrible about.
That didn’t make it any better.
