Deep Down True (28 page)

“Dana.” Tony’s voice came from the hallway. “We’ve got patients stacking up out there. You almost done?”

A prickle of shame ran over her. “Sorry!” she called, and scooted out to her desk. He was squinting at a file and didn’t look up as she passed.

The phone rang and rang. Patients came in like refugees, shaking drops from their jackets and umbrellas, dampening the upholstery and the air. They left bracing themselves to face the strobes of thunder bursting amid the downpour.

“Dana!” called Tony from his office at about eleven-thirty. She cut short the parting pleasantries with a patient and hastened to his door.

“United Dental changed their policy on sealants—did I forget to tell you that?”

“Oh, I . . . I don’t think you mentioned it, but—”

“It’s my fault,” he muttered, waving off her impending apology. “Can you resubmit these?” He handed off the bills as he turned back to his computer screen. She took them and left.

Marie came out to the reception desk to herd the next patient to the operatory. Before opening the door to the waiting room, she caught Dana’s eye, tipped her head toward Tony’s office, and murmured, “Don’t take it personally. He’s just in a mood.”

Dana gave her a relieved smile. “I thought it was me!”

“If it’s you, you’ll know it.” Marie opened the door. “Mr. Kranefus?”

An elderly gentleman pressed his hands down on the arms of his chair, levering himself to a standing position. “This seems distinctly unsafe,” he grumbled at Marie as he slowly approached. “One is not supposed to use electrical appliances in a thunderstorm.”

“The building is grounded, Mr. Kranefus,” Marie informed him. “Dr. Sakimoto would never subject you to undue—”

There was a boom of thunder that seemed designed to rattle their rib cages, and then they were in darkness, the only light a gray cast filtering meekly in through the big glass exterior door. Another thunderous explosion lit up the office with a cold flash, briefly illuminating Dana behind her desk, Marie in the doorway, and Mr. Kranefus with his hands clasped before him. “Thanks be to the Almighty,” he whispered.

Marie helped him on with his coat and handed him his slightly misshapen fedora. He was gone by the time Tony came out of his office, cell phone pressed to his ear, saying, “Okay . . . all right . . . Tell them to stay safe out there.” He snapped the phone shut. “Blown transformer—the whole block’s out,” he told them. “I’m thinking we cancel the rest of the appointments.” He said this as if he were putting it to a vote, and they nodded their assent.

Dana used her cell phone to call the afternoon’s patients while Tony and Marie stowed equipment and gathered up instruments for sterilization. Marie left as Dana made her last call.

“I got through to most of them,” she told Tony when he came to her desk with his jacket on. “But there are three or four who only got messages.”

“No worries,” he said. “I was planning to come back after lunch anyway. I’ve got a camping lantern in my trunk, so I can get through the pile of paperwork that’s been dogging me for weeks. And if somebody shows, I can let them know what happened.”

“You’re going out for lunch?”

“Yeah, you want to join me? I figured I’d head over to Keeney’s for a burger. Seriously, why don’t you come?” He gave her an encouraging smile, but she could see the weariness behind it, and a sort of melancholy. Something was off. Maybe he needed company.

She had second thoughts as she followed him by car down the storm-battered streets toward Nipmuc Pond. She shouldn’t be spending money when she had a perfectly good yogurt, an apple, and a little bag of carrots sitting on the passenger seat next to her.
Too late to back out now,
she told herself. Besides, a burger sounded so good.

“This is on me, by the way,” Tony said as they took a table by the expanse of windows.

“Absolutely not.”

“Absolutely
yes,
” he insisted. “I’m the one who dragged you down here to eat greasy tavern food. Anyway, I’ll claim it as a business expense. We’ll say it’s”—he squinted up at the rafters—“ it’s your two-week review.”

“Oh, really.” She smirked. “Well, how’m I doing?”

“Excellent.” He smiled back. Then he looked at the menu and asked, “What’re you having?”

 

 

Their burgers came, and they chatted amiably, conversation wending around kids and patients and work. “By the way,” he said. “Don’t try to be friends with Marie.”

“Why not?”

“Marie is not about her day job. Don’t get me wrong—she’s a great hygienist. Thorough, efficient, the whole package. But I’m convinced she has some sort of alternative lifestyle going, and work is just something she has to do so she can go back to it afterward. She will not befriend you, so don’t take it like it’s some sort of failure on your part.”

This evoked such a variety of questions that Dana didn’t know which to begin with. What kind of alternative lifestyle? Why can’t she have friends at work and have her other life, too? But what came out was, “What makes you think I would take it as a personal failure?”

He gazed out over the rain-pitted surface of Nipmuc Pond, attempting unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. “Come on,” he said, turning back to her. “You like to be friends with everyone.”

“No I don’t.” This was patently false, so she followed it with, “And what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It just doesn’t work with someone like Marie, that’s all.”

Dana narrowed her eyes at him, and he let out a quick burst of laughter. “Well,” she said, “I guess you’re in a better mood now. Even if it is at my expense.”

His smile faded, and he said, “I was kind of a jerk today, wasn’t I?”

“Not really . . . You just seemed like you had something on your mind.”

He made a little grunt of acknowledgment. “I got a call from Abby last night.”

“Your daughter in medical school?”

“Yeah. Vanderbilt. Way the hell in Nashville.” He tossed the french fry he was holding back onto his plate. “Why’d I ever let her go so far away that I’d need a damned plane ticket to get to her?”

“What happened? Is she okay?”

Tony described the phone call he’d received late the previous night. Abby was sitting folded into the closet of a comatose patient’s room, crying in a whisper to him that she couldn’t take it one more minute. It was too hard and too demoralizing and if she had to manually disimpact one more constipated elderly patient, she was going to bash in her own skull with a bedpan. “She’s certain the interns sit around thinking up nasty things to make the med students do.”

“Poor thing,” Dana commiserated.

“It’s so frustrating, because I know if I could just
be there
—give her some TLC and a decent meal—I could make about half of it go away! Most of what she eats is from the damned vending machines, and now she has pimples for the first time in her life.” Tony’s hands reached out as if to hold his beloved daughter’s cheeks. “ That beautiful glowing face with pimples—I can’t imagine it!”

Dana felt her throat tighten. Possibly because she’d so rarely seen Kenneth show the same depth of emotion with Morgan and Grady . . . But no, it wasn’t that. It was her own face she imagined in those loving hands, attached not to Tony or Kenneth . . . but to her own father.

Dad.
In her mind it was almost a plea.
Daddy, reach for me.

But he never had and never would, though it didn’t keep her from wanting it, even now. Even in her forties, with her own children to care for, she would’ve given almost anything to feel her father’s hands caressing her cheeks, to see such selfless concern for her happiness in his gaze. The tension in her throat swelled up into her jaw. She pressed her lips together to subdue it.

Tony’s hands lowered onto the table, and she realized he was watching her. It was embarrassing, being caught speechless like this. She had to respond, so she took a breath to level herself and murmured, “You’re such a good dad.”

Then it was his turn to be bashful, giving a little one-shoulder shrug and saying, “I don’t know about that . . .”

“Of course you are,” she said quietly. “Anyone can see it.”

“I just miss them.” He picked up his fork and moved the last few french fries around the chipped plate. “They’re their own people now. They’ve gone out into the world to do good things and find good people to be with.” He looked up at Dana. “But sometimes—God, do I
miss
them.” His face was calm, but the sadness was so palpable that Dana felt as if it belonged to her.

And staring back across the table at him, over the condiments and cold remains of lunch, she felt she could see the expanse of his fatherhood—the exuberant, giddy joy, the soul-chilling worry, flashes of anger and laughter, puzzlement and surprise, a love so elemental and indelible that it was written in his every cell. She nodded and barely managed to stop herself from reaching out to give his hand a squeeze—of recognition, or solidarity, or maybe it was sympathy. Morgan and Grady were still with her, after all, and she could no more fathom their being gone than she could imagine her own death.

The intensity of the moment caught Dana off guard, and she pulled herself back from it, turning to watch a birch tree bent low over the pond. The surface of the water, in constant motion from the pelting rain, seemed to make endless attempts to jump up and touch the dangling leaves. She glanced back at him with a less intimate smile. He followed her lead.

“So,” he said, tossing his crumpled napkin onto his plate. “What’s up for the weekend?”

It was Kenneth’s turn for the kids, she told him, and Alder had joined the Wilderness Club at school. She’d be hiking Mount Frissell, the highest peak in Connecticut, on Sunday.

“And now I know what everyone in your family is doing this weekend except
you,
” he teased.

“Oh, not much. Catching up on all the stuff that doesn’t get done during the week anymore,” she said mildly. “Also, I have a date.”

“Oh?” Tony nodded encouragingly. “Same guy as before?”

“Same guy.” She shrugged, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it. It felt strangely uncomfortable to talk to Tony about Jack.

Tony didn’t take the hint. “So you must like this guy,” he probed genially. He asked how they’d met and where they’d gone on dates. “And what do you like about him? What’s your favorite quality?”

“Well,” said Dana, struggling to come up with something other than,
He really likes me.
“He’s very . . . positive. When there’s something he enjoys, he goes for it. He doesn’t overanalyze.”

“Good,” Tony said, nodding. “And what do you like
least
about him? That’s harder, I bet.”

It wasn’t actually that hard.
He’s kind of a bull in a china shop,
she almost said. But that didn’t sound very nice. And she certainly wasn’t going to mention how entertained he was by making the reflected light from his watch crystal flick around a room, especially when she talked for too long.

“Well, I suppose he’s a little on the boyish side,” she finally admitted.

“Boyish?” said Tony with a wave of his hand. “If
that’s
the worst you can come up with . . . Gimme a for-instance. What’s so boyish it bothers you?”

She didn’t like the way Tony dismissed her concern so easily. “Okay,” she said, crossing her arms, “he likes to run over things with his truck. Like, if there’s a soda can or a piece of trash in the road, he’ll swerve to hit it. And then when he does, he says, ‘Two points!’”

Tony was quiet for a moment. “Really?” he said. “I guess I could see how that could be kind of . . . But, hey, it’s not
that
bad—and every guy’s got his stupid little habits, right?”

Oh, really,
she wanted to say.
What are yours?
But then the waitress came with the check, and she realized she didn’t want to know about Tony’s faults. She didn’t want anything to ruin the image of him wishing so desperately he could hold his daughter’s face in his empty hands.

W
ITH MORGAN AND GRADY AT KENNETH’S FOR the weekend, Dana filled Saturday with errands, house-cleaning, shrub pruning, returning phone calls, and an overdue oil and filter change for the minivan. To her dismay, all of this was accomplished by midafternoon.

Relax,
she told herself.
Get your book.
But there was a notion circling on the horizon of her consciousness that the house was too quiet and somehow it might get stuck that way if she didn’t keep moving. She went to her closet and reviewed everything hanger by hanger.
Too small . . . Keep . . . Completely out of fashion . . . Keep . . . Old but comfortable . . . What was I thinking? . . . Keep . . .
She was bundling up the outcasts to take to Goodwill when Alder came in.

“Wow, did
you
sleep late,” said Dana.

“I was up in the middle of the night for a while.” Alder raked her two-toned hair—bike-tire black on the ends, gingerbread brown at the part—into a messy nest at the back of her head and secured it with an elastic band. “Can we go shopping? My underwear’s all stretched out.”

Dana was happy to have another activity, another problem to work on that was easily solved. As they drove to the Buckland Hills Mall, she thought of Connie’s dire prediction that her daughter would be swept up into—what had she called it?—a little suburban, Abercrombie & Fitch fantasy. But Alder didn’t seem the least bit spellbound by it.

“What store do you want to go to?” Dana asked. “Or we can shop around if you want.”

Alder blew her warm breath at the window and wiped jagged switchbacks into the condensation with her finger. “I don’t really care. Wherever’s cheapest.”

They ended up at Macy’s, and Dana took the opportunity to purchase a lacy ivory bra from the clearance rack to go with her new blouse. Alder met her at the register with a three-pack from one of the displays. “No color?” asked Dana. “They have some really cute prints on that table.”