Silent Treatment Read Online Free Page A

what
really
happened out there.”
    “I already—”
    “Harry, I was halfway around the track from you and I could see the color drain from your face.”
    “It was nothing.”
    “You know, I spent years learning how to ask nonleading questions. Don’t make me regress.”
    For the purpose of insurance application forms or the occasional prescription, Harry and Josephson served as one another’s physician. And although each persistently urged the other to schedule a complete physical, neither of them had. The closest they had come was an agreement made just after Harry’s forty-ninth birthday. Harry, already obsessive about diet and exercise, had promised to get a checkup and a cardiac stress test. Steve, six years younger but fifty pounds heavier, had agreed to have a physical, start jogging, and join Weight Watchers. But except for Josephson’s grudging sessions on the track, neither had followed through.
    “I had a little indigestion,” Harry conceded. “That’s all. It came. It bothered me for a minute. It left.”
    “Indigestion, huh. By indigestion do you perhaps mean chest pain?”
    “Steve, I’d tell you if I had chest pain. You know I would.”
    “Slight correction. I know you
wouldn’t
. How many men did you lug back to that chopper?”
    Although Harry rarely talked about it, over the years almost everyone at the hospital had heard some version of the events at Nha-trang, or had actually composed one themselves. In the stories, the number of wounded he had saved before being severely wounded himself had ranged from that his doctor had killed a three—which was in fact the number for which he had been decorated—to twenty. He once even overheard a patient boast hundred Vietcong while rescuing an equal number of GIs.
    “Stephen, I am no hero. Far from it. If I thought the pain was anything, anything at all, I’d tell you.”
    Josephson was unconvinced.
    “You awe me a stress test. When do you turn fifty?”
    “Two weeks.”
    “And when’s the date of that family curse?”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “Harry, you’re the one who told me about it. Now, when is it?”
    “September. September first.”
    “You’ve got four weeks.”
    “I … Okay, okay. As soon as Evie’s situation is straightened out I’ll set one up with the exercise lab. Promise.”
    “I’m serious.”
    “You know, in spite of what everyone says about you, I always thought that.”
    Harry stripped and headed for the showers. He knew that Steve Josephson, in spite of himself, was staring at the patchwork of scars on his back. Thirty-one pieces of shrapnel, half a kidney, and a rib. The design left by their removal would have blended into the pages of a Rand McNally road atlas. Harry flashed on the incredible sensation of Evie’s breasts gliding slowly over the healed wounds in what she used to call her patriotic duty to a war hero.
When was the last time?
That, he acknowledged sadly, he couldn’t remember.
    He cranked up the hot water until he was enveloped insteam. Two weeks until fifty.
Fifty!
He had never experienced any sort of midlife crisis that he could think of. But maybe the deep funk he had been in lately was it. By now the pieces of his life should have fallen into place. Instead, the choices he had made seemed to be under almost constant attack. And crumbling.
    He thought about the day halfway through his convalescence when he had made the decision to withdraw from his residency in surgery and devote his professional life to general practice. Something had happened to him over his year and a half in Nam. He no longer had any desire to be center stage. Not that he minded the drama and intensity of the operating room. In fact, even now he truly enjoyed his time there. But in the end, he had realized, he simply wanted to be a family doc.
Simply
. If there was one word that was most descriptive of the life Harry had chosen for himself,
simply
might well be it. Get up in the morning, do what seems right, try to help