“I can’t believe this,” Patsy interrupted. “This was all going on while we were living together? While I was right there, in the same apartment?” Her eyes filled with tears. “That makes me feel like absolute shit,” she said. “We’re going through the exact same thing, and you don’t once mention it?”
“I wouldn’t call it the exact same thing,” said Pru. She was annoyed with Patsy for interrupting her when she was trying to make a point. And could they for once have one little conversation about Pru, not about her?
“Excuse me, but we were both in love with guys who happened to be married to someone else. How is that not the same?”
Pru didn’t want to say how, so she said, “I’m not in love with him.”
“Stop that,” Patsy said. “The question is, does he know that you are, or not?”
Pru opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Do you really think I need to spell it out for him?”
“In my experience, you usually do. And I do mean you you. I mean, I didn’t really think you were even that into him, until you reacted that way, back in the shop.”
“Really? I feel like every time I look at him, there are goofy little hearts twirling around my head.”
“Nope. I wouldn’t have said what I did if I had thought that, you know. About fucking him.” Overhearing them, the man with the one eye looked over at them.
“Keep your voice down, Patsy, honestly.” She noticed that the ankle she’d fallen on was beginning to swell up. “Anyway, I don’t see what good it would do.”
“Try not to think of it in those terms,” Patsy said. “Maybe it’s not supposed to do anything.” Before Pru could ask her what the hell that meant, a nurse came through the swinging doors and called her name.
The nurse helped her down the long hall and into one of the examining “rooms,” essentially a bed and some machines separated from other “rooms” by a white curtain on a U-shaped track. Pru sat on the paper-covered table, and listened to the moaning of an elderly woman nearby. “Ma’am!” the woman cried out, every five seconds. “Ma’am!”
Pru’s curtain was being pulled aside and the doctor came in. He was bent over her chart, reading, but Pru recognized him immediately. She almost jumped off the table. It was Jacob, looking not nearly as surprised to see Pru as she was to see him.
“Hello, Prudence Whistler, foot trauma,” he said, pleasantly. He squinted at her chart. “Is this right? You can’t be thirty-six!”
“Can’t I see someone else?” she said, almost desperately.
“This isn’t a restaurant, Pru,” he said, tossing the chart aside. He spoke with a doctor’s assertiveness. “Lie back, please, so I can look at your foot.”
The gauze bandage she’d been given was almost entirely soaked with blood. She thought of the crowd out in the waiting room, and lay back on the bed. She felt as stiff as a plank. Jacob unwound the bandage. She could feel him carefully pry open the wound with his fingers. She felt it all the way up inside her belly.
“What’d you do here?”
“I fell on some glass.”
“Yep. I see it, right there. It’s in pretty deep.”
“Can you get it out?”
“Well, of course I can, silly. I’m a doctor!” He put his fingers on her ankle and the pain that shot through made her gasp. “Sprained, but not broken,” he said, after some probing.
He put his face right up against her foot, to peer inside the wound, and she found herself wondering if she’d showered lately. “First, though, you have to tell me how they’re doing,” he said softly.
She was so astonished that, for a moment, she couldn’t speak. When she collected her thoughts, she said, “You’re bribing me? Can’t I sue you for that?”
“Probably,” he said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve got an eighty-three-year-old woman who no doubt has many long stories to tell me, waiting in the next cubicle,” he said. There was no trace of a smile behind his words. “I could go do that first, or I could just get this little guy out in about two seconds, and you’d be on your way home.”
“They’re fine,” she said, tightly.
“Did Annali ever learn to swim?” He was talking conversationally, as if they were old family friends who happened to bump into each other in the produce section.
“This isn’t funny,” Pru said. “Just take it out and let me go.”
He held up the tweezers, showing her the piece of glass he’d removed from her foot. “Silly,” he said, “I took it out five minutes ago.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, awkwardly. It all seemed so absurd that she was wondering if he was actually licensed. Could she complain to someone? The head of the hospital, or someone?
“I’ll need to stitch you up,” he said. “You really gashed yourself. Here’s a little something for the pain.”
The “little something” stabbed, then burned. Tears came into her eyes. Jacob worked quietly for a while, then said, in a more serious voice, “Does she ever ask about me? Annali?”
“No.”
“Okay, what about your sister, then? Patsy,” he said, and Pru was surprised to hear something in his voice that sounded like regret.
“No. Not really. Both of them got over you pretty quickly.”
He clipped the thread. The sight of it obviously still attached to the bottom of her foot made her stomach tighten. “You sure know how to hurt a guy,” he said.
“You hurt yourself.”
“Very true,” he said, standing up and taking off his gloves. “I will miss them every day of my life. Please tell her that. I’ll get them to discharge you soon.” And with that he was gone. She could hear his voice in
