“And if she’s shortsighted, good for her. In many ways she had to grow up too soon.”
Maribeth assumed he meant losing her mother. If Mallory was twenty-two now, she would’ve been twenty when Felicity died. That wasn’t great, but twenty . . . it was better than four.
“She wants another tattoo but I can’t bring myself to fund one as a gift.”
“What else does she like?”
“She majored in public policy but with a minor in theater.” He smiled proudly. “So she likes performances: plays, concerts, dance. That’s what Felicity used to get her, tickets to opera or ballet, and they’d go together.”
“Why not do that?”
“I feel like I’d be intruding on their thing. And I hate opera.”
“What about a donation? Maybe to a cancer charity,” she said, mentioning the c-word intentionally this time, in a more sensitive manner.
They pulled into the massive parking lot and started searching for a spot. “Now you’re just trying to get out of going to the mall,” he said.
Maybe. It was packed, judging by the dearth of parking spaces. They circled twice before finally resorting to stalking a family back to their car.
“I feel like a cheetah tracking its prey,” Maribeth said.
“I know,” Stephen said, as he pulled to the side and put on his blinker while the family loaded shopping bags into an SUV. “If anyone takes the spot, you go out and eat them, okay?”
“Oh, no. I’m just here for gift advice.” The family was piling into the car now. “I’m actually good at it. I used to edit holiday gift guides.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Back in my other life.”
MARIBETH’S TEMPLES BEGAN to pound as soon as they got inside and saw the line for Santa’s Village snaking past the food court. The children, faces sticky with extorted cotton candy, were already sugar-high out of their minds, and their poor parents all seemed ready for a good long nap that would not happen for another month.
Ahh, the holidays. Maribeth was a little relieved to have no part in them this year. Not that she ever had much to say about Christmas, aside from buying Jason’s family their presents and organizing the trip to whichever one of his relatives they were celebrating with. “Well, it’s not really your holiday, is it?” Lauren had said a few Christmases back when Maribeth had suggested that maybe, just maybe, her buying five presents per twin was overkill.
They passed various stores, Maribeth calling out suggestions: Crate and Barrel for a knife set? Tumi for a suitcase? Kate Spade for a handbag? Stephen vetoed everything. Mallory didn’t cook. She traveled with a backpack. Designer bags were too bourgeois, and also, leather.
They were standing near the entrance to Nordstrom when Maribeth heard the strongest Pittsburgh accent she’d encountered so far calling, “Dr. Grant. Dr. Grant? Is that you? Look Donny, it’s him!”
An elderly couple in matching tracksuits barreled toward them. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the mall, they carried no shopping bags, only water bottles holstered into fanny packs.
Stephen plastered on a bright toothy smile. It made him look, Maribeth thought, like a doctor, just not her doctor.
“Don, Susan, good to see you,” he said. There was a round of back-patting and handshaking.
“Who’s your friend?” Susan asked.
“This is M.B. M.B., Don and Susan were my patients.”
“We had matching heart attacks,” Don said, smiling at Susan adoringly. “Five years ago, one after the other.”
“My heart attack gave him a heart attack,” Susan said.
“My doll baby.” Don’s line was accompanied by a dramatic clutch of the chest.
It was kind of sweet, this practiced shtick. It was also obvious by the way they delivered their lines to Maribeth that it occurred to neither of them that she might be a patient, that she too might have had a heart attack.
“You both look well,” Stephen said. “And I haven’t heard from you, which I take as a good sign.”
“Because you’re not at the practice anymore. We’re with that Dr. Garber now,” Don said.
“Don!” Susan scolded. She lowered her voice. “We don’t like him as much. We would’ve followed you to the new place but we didn’t know and then all of our records and insurance are with the old place.”
“It’s fine,” Stephen said.
“I don’t want you to think that we thought . . .” Susan trailed off. “It was all just so sad.”
“I appreciate that,” Stephen said, though Maribeth noticed his doctorly smile was fraying at the edges. “You’re here doing your walks?”
“We come three times a week,” Susan said. “Just like you told us to. Usually it’s not as crowded.”
“I said it would be,” Don said.
“I thought it would be worse if we came early,” Susan snapped.
“You look well,” Stephen said again, starting to pull away.
“We are. And my cholesterol, you wouldn’t believe,” Don said. “It’s at 140 and my LDL is very low and my HDL is high. What were the numbers, Suse?”
“That’s wonderful,” Stephen said.
“You should see the grands,” Don said, pulling out a battered billfold.
Maribeth sensed it, then, his discomfort, his need to get away, and above all, his sadness. She’d been curious about what had happened with his old practice but had resisted trying to find out. Now, she was glad not to know. It felt, somehow, like protecting him.