A Friend of the Family Read Online Free Page A

porch, and steps lightly to her car. She swings her purse at her side. It breaks my heart to see her go.

CHAPTER TWO
    L OOKING BACK, AS my circumstances often suggest that I do, I see my thirties and forties as a vast steppe; only occasionally did the landscape bulge or dip. Bert Birch had brought me in because he was heading into his midfifties and his wife had been warning him for twenty years that she’d leave him if he didn’t find a partner and take a vacation with her once a year. In 1982, Bert was fifty-five, an old-fashioned kind of doctor in an old-fashioned kind of office with one nurse, one secretary, and half a day off on Wednesdays. He kept
Popular Mechanics
in the waiting room; occasionally, quietly, he made house calls. He ran a comfortable, neighborly practice, and although he was based at Round Hill Medical Center, most of his patients came from the less swanky communities down the valley: Bergen-town, Hopwood, Maycrest Village. They were teachers, postal clerks, cops, hairdressers. Bert took care of generations of the same family, celebrating their births, mourning their deaths, bringing home, at Christmastime, fruit baskets or homemade sheet cakes or bottles of lambrusco. He’d been at it for twenty-seven years, had taken over the practice from his own father, who remembered when cows used to graze where the Sunoco now stood.
    During the decade we worked together, we got along very nicely; I know for sure Bert felt fatherly toward me despite his sometimes gruffdemeanor. He made bad jokes. He threatened to take me golfing. His wife, MaryJo, often invited Elaine and me over for operatic Italian dinners; she was from four generations of North Jersey Sicilians and referred to her impeccable tomato sauce as “gravy.” In the warm light of the Birches’ rambling center-hall colonial, Elaine and I would scarf down platters of scungilli marinara,
trippa fra diavolo,
rigatoni, meatballs in gravy. There were five Birch children and six Birch grandchildren and often they’d cram in at the table right next to us. Elaine and I never wanted children quite as badly as we did during our drives down Maycrest Avenue, full of MaryJo’s decadent cooking, arms still aching from the warmth of one Birch grandbaby or another.
    As I grew more comfortable in Round Hill, I began branching out, joined the JCC, started making connections with the other local docs. I was interested in developing a good reputation, and although I had no problem with your everyday checkup, your diabetic accountant or petit mal secretary, what I longed for were the specialty cases, the sleuthy diagnoses nobody else had been able to figure. I’d caught the Sherlock Holmes bug during a medical school rotation, when I intuited a case of Goodpasture syndrome in a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who thought he was having a mind-blowing asthma attack and a hangover. I had just finished a unit on nephrology, so my mind was in the right place, but still, because I was paying excellent attention, I probably spared the kid a lifetime of dialysis. I’ll never forget him—his name was Paul Chung, he was studying to be an architect, and we shared the same exact birthday. For maybe four years after, he sent me Christmas cards.
    Anyway, during those first few seasons, I’d stay late at the office, taking patients long after Bert had packed it in, then go home to curl up in the downstairs study and pore over
JAMA,
the
New England
Journal,
journals for specialties I hadn’t pursued. I’d become an internist because I liked the diversity of cases, because I liked primary care, and because I didn’t feel like spending any more time in training. My brother, Phil, was already making fifty thousand dollars right out of NYU Law; I wanted to start earning, too. As an internist—a sort of jack-of-all-trades — I could peruse articles on subjects from gastritis to hemodialysis, learn how to tell Crohn’s colitis from ulcerative. I would refer the exotic