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By Root 898 0

’s-get-it-done way. They’re quick because they can’t hold back. After, she smokes a cigarette, helps herself to the bottle under his front seat, laughing about nothing. God, did she and Rick ever laugh about anything? If so, she can’t remember. He was always so superdutiful, and then he started getting superparanoid about her and the kids, accounting for everyone’s whereabouts. Glancing back at the house, she thinks she sees the curtain twitch in the window. But Mickey knows better. Rita will snatch that girl bald-headed if she’s spying on her. She pulls Larry’s head to her breasts, thinks about the dinner she’ll cook in her new apartment the first time she has him over. Something good, but not too fancy. Candles on the table? No candles, she decides. Very casual, maybe even take-out pizza. She has the man she wants, not the one she’s supposed to want. It was trying to be good that made her bad, leading with her brain instead of her heart. If she lets herself have what she really wants, it will be easier to be good this time.

Chapter Nineteen

The last student on Clem’s schedule this morning is very young, very pretty—and destined for failure. These things are not related, not directly. But her youth and her beauty have protected her for much of her life, and this girl—Clem sneaks a look at his appointment calendar, Amanda something, he can’t read his own handwriting, he’s the ultimate doctor cliché—cannot quite believe that these attributes will not get her through medical school as well. She got in, didn’t she? Besides, based on what Clem has gleaned, she was a legitimate admission, not an affirmative action reach or a legacy. She had good grades and MCATs. She is earnest and hardworking.

But she’s not meant to be a doctor, not unless she chooses a field like pathology, where her ineptness with people won’t matter. Oh, doctors can be cold, brusque, high-handed. Many are. But they at least need to understand people on some level, which this girl does not. Inevitably, she wants to be a pediatrician. She thinks children like her. No one likes her. Clem tries to imagine a child wretched enough to deserve her “care,” and his mind slides across an image of little Go-Go Halloran, which shocks him. He doesn’t harbor any ill feelings toward the boy. He pities him.

“Dr. Robison?”

“Yes, Amanda?”

“What do you think I should do?”

Quit. But his instincts about people, which are excellent, tell him not to be direct with this young woman. There is something a little dangerous about Amanda. He’s not going to flatter himself into thinking she would sleep with him to improve her situation, yet she clearly wants something from him. She almost vibrates with neediness. She is used to people volunteering to help her, figuring out what she requires even when she doesn’t have a clue herself.

“We would have more options if you had come to me before you received a failing grade,” he says.

“But I wasn’t failing until I took the final.”

“You were marginal throughout the year. You had to know you were skating by, that you were rolling the dice.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. Her mannerisms are so childish. Perhaps she has confused her own immaturity with an affinity for the young.

“You could take a semester off,” he says. “Come back at midyear, retake the class. Plead special circumstances.”

“Such as?”

You’re not very intelligent. “That’s not for me to say. Amanda”—she brightens at the very sound of her name, like a dog or a small child—“tell me—why do you want to be a doctor?”

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.” She is slipping into a speech, a performance. She has recited this story before, probably to much nodding approval. “When I was four, I opened a hospital for my toys. And I really fixed them—put dolls’ arms back in their sockets, sewed on a teddy bear’s eye.”

Ah, but the toys couldn’t complain.

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. I can’t imagine anything more rewarding than taking care of children. Especially babies, who can’t tell you where they hurt or what’s wrong.”

“I’m not sure being a doctor is supposed