He stands up when she reaches the table and gives her an awkward half hug. “Whitney, this is my wife, Mia. Mia, this is one of my patients, Whitney. Just discharged what—” He turns back to her. “Two days ago?”
“Yep, and feeling great, thanks to you.”
“How’s Gabriel?” Harrison asks.
“Really good,” she says. “Just found out his band is playing in the Christmas parade. First one Hope Springs has ever had.” Harrison slides his eyes to me and I smile, thinking of Caroline.
“Little drummer boy,” Harrison quips, his attention back on Whitney.
“I’m sure he’d love if you’d come watch.”
“Tell him I wouldn’t miss it,” he says.
I just sit, observing the exchange, struck again by how little I know of Harrison’s work life. He shares bits and pieces, of course, stories of funny or crazy things that happen in the ER when he’s on call, or really weird or tough cases he gets, but he sees upwards of fifteen patients a day—and those are just the ones that come into his clinic—so the minutiae of each one I’m just not privy to.
A waitress drops off a basket of bread and asks for our drink order, prompting Whitney to bid us farewell. “I should get back to the bar. I’m waiting on someone.”
“Only two glasses of wine,” Harrison says to Whitney, with a parental glare. “And water in between each.”
“Aye, aye, Doc,” Whitney says. “Nice to meet you, Mia.”
“You, too.”
I order a bottle of Chianti from the waitress, and then Harrison and I are alone at our table again. His face has fallen and I know the energy that pulsed through him as he talked to Whitney was a put-on, a facade for her benefit. I eye him, waiting.
“Perforated diverticulitis,” he says, nodding in Whitney’s direction, his voice quiet.
“What?”
“I told you about her a few weeks ago. So bad, I had to send her up to ICU before I could finish.”
It sounds vaguely familiar. “She bounced back quick.”
“Yeah, she’s got a colostomy bag, though.”
“Really?” I surreptitiously glance to where Whitney now sits at the bar. I look for the telltale bulge on her stomach, but her blouse is loose and I wouldn’t know if Harrison hadn’t told me. “Gabriel’s her son?”
He bobs his head. “Middle schooler. Cute kid.”
The waitress comes back with the wine bottle and opens it at the table, pouring a splash into Harrison’s glass. He tosses back the red liquid and nods, and she fills both our glasses then asks if we’re ready to order. I get the bucatini and close my menu.
“Spaghetti alle vongole,” Harrison says.
I jerk my head toward him. “That’s clams.”
“I know.” He hands his menu to the waitress and she walks off.
“I can’t believe you’d order clams after what happened to me in Maine.”
He grins, crinkling the skin around his eyes. “Mia.”
“What?”
“For the thousandth time,” he says, patiently, “that was not food poisoning.”
“It was! I must have eaten, like, fifty of those clams oreganata—” I pull a face, still unable to even think of them without getting a little nauseous. We were at a fancy wedding in Maine—the daughter of one of Harrison’s patients, a big-shot Philadelphia lawyer whose life Harrison saved with a triple bypass when he was chief resident. The wedding was huge—more than four hundred people—and the swankiest one I had ever been to, with Dom Pérignon for the toast and, like, eight forks at every place setting. “And then, the next day . . .”
I don’t have to finish because we both know—the next day, Harrison had to pull the car over at least seven times during the eight-hour drive home.
“You also had roughly fifty glasses of champagne.”
I smirk at him. “Not fifty.”
“Well, enough for you to start a conga line with the waitstaff.”
“It was not a conga line! It was the Macarena.”
“It was a conga line.”
I scrunch my face, trying to remember. I feel certain it was the Macarena. He cocks an eyebrow sternly, but he’s smiling.
“What were their names? Bert and Annie?”
“Beau and Annie,” he says. “Bert and Annie are Sesame Street characters.”
“Ernie.”
“That’s what I said.”
I grin and study my husband’s face, wondering at the curiosity and fallibility of memory—and not just the alcohol-induced fogs. Like most couples, Harrison and I have gotten in more than one disagreement about the way something did or did not happen in the past, our recollection of facts colliding rather than merging. But now I think maybe it’s not always necessarily a weakness, but a strength. The fact that we each carry different bits of the same memory, like pieces of a puzzle, so that when we put them together, we can form something that’s whole.
Later, when I’m reaching for the Parmesan cheese shaker on the table, I notice he’s looking past me, eyes narrowed. I turn in time to see a man in a short-sleeved lavender button-up, cargo pants and silver-framed glasses glaring at Whitney.
“Who’s that?” I ask, in a stage whisper.
“I don’t know,” Harrison says, slowly. “When we were evaluating her in the ER, she kept screaming that we couldn’t call her ex-husband for Gabriel. I’m wondering if that’s him.”
“You’re unbelievable,” the man says, his voice carrying across the room. “You’re on a fucking date?”
“My personal life isn’t any concern of yours,” Whitney hisses.
“Well, it might concern a judge—they don’t tend to award custody to whores.”
“Whoa,” Harrison says, taking the word out of my mouth, and then he’s up, closing the twenty-foot gap between us and the bar.
“Everything OK over here?” he asks when he reaches Whitney.
The guy eyes Harrison, nostrils flared, anger flashing in his eyes. “You her date?”
Whitney puts a hand up to stop Harrison from responding. “This is my doctor,” she says. “And you’re making a fool of yourself. Please just leave.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’m going to call the police.”