Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [148]
“Dr. Sheppard,” Stevenson interrupted, “may I say something?”
“Of course.”
“While I’m working under you, you can count on me to give you my complete dedication as a resident. I’ll follow any orders or procedures you ask of me to the letter. I’ll learn everything you have to teach me. But beyond that,” he said, now facing him directly, “I don’t want to hear a goddamn word out of your mouth.”
Sheppard turned to look at him, taking in his furious expression, his raised finger between them, then glanced away because he was smiling. He couldn’t help it. He was on the verge of laughter. Something about the man’s melodrama seemed so rehearsed, his righteous anger having no more impact than a whiffed punch. He felt oddly embarrassed for the both of them. Above the sink, in the reflection in the window looking into the surgical theater, he saw Stevenson turn away from him and scrub brutally at his hands, and then he saw his own smiling reflection, but his smile reminded him of a drunk’s, with an enormous gap between his expression and what was in his brain. A drunk would smile as easily at an insult as a word of praise. Was that what suddenly disgusted him so much? (His revulsion was suddenly so sharp he wanted to run out of the room.) Was it that he had no response to Stevenson’s demand except to smile? Or that his first reaction to something so serious, which involved other people’s hearts, was the most damning? You care about nothing, he had thought.
Even now, sitting on the patio, the memory made him wince.
The kids came out during dessert, only seconds before the first fireworks started, as if they each had their own built-in clock set to announce the celebration. Chip sat on his mother’s lap but Sheppard signaled him over, took him between his knees, and explained how the explosives worked and how the lovely shapes were formed. The shell on top of each rocket was stuffed with black powder and explosive stars, each one a light you see in the sky, the bursting charge down the middle timed to go off after the rocket reached a certain altitude, thus igniting the powder and throwing the stars away from it with uniform force and in prearranged patterns—flowers or concentric circles—and those bursting half a second later in brilliant color. “Those are chain reactions you’re seeing.” And whether or not Chip understood, he looked on attentively and, when the show reached its crescendo, the explosions rattling the silverware on the table, he clutched Sheppard’s legs, his little fists bunching the corduroy.
“I always get depressed when it ends,” Nancy said.
Don gathered up their kids to take them next door and put them to bed while Nancy and Marilyn cleared the dishes. Before leaving, he turned on the radio; the Indians were up by one in the middle of the seventh. Sheppard stayed seated on the patio, watching the crowds peter out below, smelling the smoke and powder that wafted off the water. Did battlefields smell like this at nightfall?
He slept.
When he woke, Chip was tugging at his arm. He looked at his watch. It was half past ten.
The boy was in his pajamas, with a balsa-wood airplane, a glider, in his hands. “Dad, will you please help me fix this?”
Sheppard looked at it. The wing was broken on the left side, split but not shorn away. The boy almost never came to him for help. “It’s past your bedtime,” he said, rubbing his hair, “but since you asked like an adult, yes. Let’s go see what we can do.”
By now Marilyn and Nancy were seated in front of the television, talking lazily, Nancy lying on the couch. Don sat by the radio, the top of his head pressed against the wall and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, staring so