Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [147]
“Dinner in five,” Marilyn called.
He told the children to clean up. Sheppard was sweating himself and went upstairs to wash his hands. The breeze off the lake was stronger and cooler now, and he felt chilled. Trembling, his teeth chattering, he grabbed his corduroy jacket off the back of his bedroom door, then went downstairs. Nancy and Marilyn were at the last stages of setting the patio table, Don already in his chair, the cottage ham and green beans and rye bread set out, the blueberry pie baking in the oven, the aroma annihilating all other thoughts in Sheppard’s mind, the children served already and seated in the kitchen, far enough from earshot for adult conversation but close enough to be heard if need be. Neither Marilyn nor the Aherns had heard him come downstairs, and Don, who installed ventilation systems for hospitals across the state, was in the middle of a story about Hoversten. Sheppard stood by the television for a moment and listened.
“He’d be a liability and a half if Sam took him on. You know how he lost his last job, don’t you? At Grand View Hospital?”
“No,” Marilyn said. “Sam wouldn’t say.”
“I want to hear this,” Nancy said.
“He got frozen out by every single female member of the hospital staff.”
“Frozen out? As in what?”
“As in ignored. Rendered invisible. Literally annulled. I mean, from secretaries to orderlies to the nurses themselves. He’d groped so many of them, said so many lewd things, that after several senior women complained to the administration and were rebuffed, one day they just stopped working with him. One of the chief surgeons told me it was the damnedest thing he’d ever seen. He figured they must’ve had a meeting the night before, because the next day literally every woman on the staff agreed to pretend Hoversten didn’t exist. It was that coordinated. He walks in the hospital, asks for his surgery schedule, and the secretary walks away from her desk like he’s a ghost she can’t see. Hoversten figures she’s either crazy or playing a joke, so he gets his rotation himself and scrubs in but can’t get a single nurse to help him with his gloves or gown. When he calls out, it’s like they’re all deaf. They won’t even glance in his direction. He walks into the theater for a routine tonsillectomy and nobody’s there but him and the patient. Of course, the chief of staff is furious once he gets wind of what’s going on—and that’s within minutes, because Hoversten’s standing in surgery screaming his lungs out. So he pulls the head nurse aside and orders her back to work, at which point she lays down her ultimatum: It’s us or him. Either Hoversten goes or the whole hospital shuts down. So the chief, who’s had to put up with his goosing nurses and ogling patients for months, sits him down in his office, explains the situation, and tells him to pack his things.”
Marilyn covered her mouth.
Nancy clapped her hands and laughed. “Who says there’s no justice?”
They all went quiet as soon as Sheppard entered.
“At ease,” he said. “I’m not mad. Quite honestly, it’s news to me.” He turned to Marilyn. “Where is Les, by the way?”
“He went golfing,” Marilyn said. “In Kent.”
“Who with?”
She hesitated. “Dr. Stevenson.”
Nancy looked at her.
Don, a little late, rubbed his hands together and said, “Yum,” then began to serve himself.
“Is he going to join us?” Sheppard said.
“I think he’s gone for the rest of the weekend,” Marilyn said.
He couldn’t stand the silence but was too tired to be frustrated—at Hoversten’s negligence or everyone’s discomfort. “So,” he said, “more pie for me then.”
That too was before, he thought. And before was as much the people you surrounded yourself with as a state of mind. Perhaps Don was more right than he knew, and Hoversten was a liability not just for the hospital but also Sheppard’s own new life. Why honor the years they’d known each other, given everything that had happened? Why keep him near? Like everything else he wanted out of his life, why