It's Complicated (31 page)

“We’ve met before, Grandpa, actually,” Alex said without relinquishing her hand, the steady pumping of their embraced palms slowing until Alex was just holding her hand for no reason other than she let him.

Their eyes locked and Ed crossed his arms over his chest and gave them a puzzled look. “Then why did Josie pretend she hadn’t met you?”

She could feel the rush of blood to her cheeks and knew that she was blushing, but couldn’t pull her eyes away. Finally, she did, tearing them as if fibers had been ripped in half by warring impulses. Ed’s very amused, red-rimmed orbs met hers.

“Because I’m afraid I’ve been quite rude to your grandson,” she said, filled suddenly with a perplexing shame. As if not answering a guy’s calls and texts made her a disappointing child. It was funny how grandfatherly figures brought that out in her, as if she ceded authority to them simply because of their age. You would think that working on an Alzheimer’s unit—and a research trial, no less—would disabuse her of that tendency. In fact it had strengthened it in her, leaving her helpless at times, feeling completely not up to the task of carrying the moral weight of being a good girl.

It was no surprise that she
wasn’t
up to the task of carrying that moral weight around; she’d accepted that a long time ago. So shame shouldn’t make sense to her, and yet it was still there. Laura once told her that it was probably the result of not being parented enough, that she had some of that too when it came to older men, as if they had no sense of what normal was in interacting with a father figure or a grandfather figure.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Perhaps blowing off the one guy who had rocked her world more than any other was hitting her now, and as two separate parts of her collided, Alex being Ed’s grandson, she started to feel like the hand of fate was somehow involved and that she had been smacking it away in defiance.

Alex was persistent, she had to give him that. It must have taken guts to come here in spite of her ignoring him.

Why?

Why would he go to so much trouble, especially for her? He could have just about any woman he wanted—being a young, eligible bachelor doctor tended to lead to that outcome. So, why pick a woman who had only recently managed to go from scrawny to skinny in the appearance category, who had gained weight along with her pregnant friend as a form of camaraderie, a companionship through culinary means that had made her shapely for the first time in her life but, even then, still quite slim and boyish?

Men played around with women like her—they didn’t
chase
them. So, when Ed cleared his throat she realized she was in some sort of trance and then quickly lifted the clipboard lying limp in her hand and said, “So, let’s get on with the appointment, shall we?”

Ed gestured gallantly to the small room where her short interview would take place. “Ladies first,” he said, leaving Alex in the waiting room without a backward glance. Ed seemed relaxed and grounded today, really on his game—aside from forgetting her name, such a small lapse that it didn’t trouble her. The handful of steps into the tiny interview room gave her just enough time to wonder about that level of comfort.

Routine was so important with Alzheimer’s patients…if Ed were this fine and grounded, then coming here with Alex must be his routine. How long had Alex been bringing him? And how could she have missed such a fine man right in front of her face?

Alex felt like a drowning man holding on to her hand as he shook it, as if it were a life preserver or a last-minute attempt to pull him out of troubled waters. In reality it was neither. The expression on her face said that what had started out as a polite gesture—a farce, really—for Ed’s benefit had turned into an acknowledgment of the attraction that he so keenly felt.

A million questions peppered his thoughts and nearly threatened to come out in a rush. Why had she ignored his phone calls? Why had she ignored his texts? What had he done to turn her off? What could he do to turn her back on? Did she remember him from these appointments? From the shocked look on her face he guessed not, which made him feel fairly pathetic. How could she be so memorable to him when she found him so easy to overlook?

Maybe he wasn’t her type on the deeper level that he’d thought, and he was making more of this than there really was. Surface-level attractions could probably be as hot as their connection had been, and surface-level explanations were often enough.

He didn’t
really
believe that, but some part of his bruised ego needed to think it through and at least contemplate it, because why else wasn’t she jumping into his arms right now? What made her hesitate? Why would someone so interesting and quirky—and so passionate only a week ago!—be so measured in her reaction to him?

Measured—that was a hell of a euphemism he was coming up with, wasn’t it? She wasn’t measured. She was blowing him off.
She’s just not that into you, Alex,
a voice said.

At that moment he knew he was a goner because even thinking it felt like someone had punched him in the throat hard enough to cause his vision to be filled with gray spots, the pain so real and so great, it trickled down into his toes. Waiting for his grandfather felt like his life peeling away, the minutes like hours. He felt what he had thought he had to hope for, what he thought he and Josie had, slip from the context of what had been and thrown away. Ready to be incinerated and recycled into everything else and nothing else.

There was not enough in the waiting room to distract him from his thoughts, either. Reading the latest article in
The New Yorker
or checking out new recipes in
Good Housekeeping
were his only other options. He had his smartphone, but he wasn’t the type to haunch over texting people, or to read BuzzFeed articles or check his nearly non-existent Facebook feed. He had seventeen friends and fourteen of them were family.

He was rather used to being at this sort of loose end. Few typical distractions engaged him—his interests were medicine, Grandpa, and quite a bit of philosophical contemplation over a macchiato as he tried to figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

Med school had been the big goal, then internship, and now residency. He was solid in his knowledge that delivering babies and providing women’s health care was exactly where he needed to be. It was a vocation and not just an occupation. So, he knew he was capable of making a massive life choice and settling into it with great happiness, contentment, and intellectual curiosity that would always drive him to go deeper and further.

Outside of work, though, life was a giant hole, occupied occasionally with friends, a game of basketball that he picked up here and there. Could he fill that hole with something as satisfying as medicine? Could life away from work actually balance, complement, his work? Could finding
someone
be the same? Could you really find one person, like one career, with every element you needed in one package, an anchor for your sense of being, unswayed by drama or volatility? Was it possible to love someone and have them love you back, not 50/50 but 80/80?

Alex didn’t know. He gave up entirely on the magazines in front of him and gave in to an
Angry
Birds
app on his phone. His brain was exhausted. Flinging little red, round electronic renderings of real-life animals was easier than navel-gazing.

“Josie, are you dating anyone?” Ed asked, reaching across the table and placing his hand on hers, the gesture grandfatherly and not at all a pass.

She decided to turn it into a joke anyhow. “Why, Ed? You looking for a girlfriend?”

Mirth filled his eyes and the boom of his laughter carried, she imagined, out into the hall. “Oh, no! Don’t you dare even imply it,” he said, laughing, his hands slapping the table. “I have a girlfriend, honey. I’m taken.”

“Bummer!” she said, snapping her fingers in a gesture of frustration.

Ed just shook his head, those brown eyes filled with a kind of wisdom and focus that she didn’t get to see very often in her patients. “My girlfriend and me, we’ve been together for two years, and Josie, honey, if she thought you were coming on to me she’d come in here and rip your head off.”

“Really?” Josie answered, slapping her palm against her chest. “You got yourself a sweet young thing who could beat me up?”

“I got myself a sweet
old
thing who’s been around the block a few times and could take a whippersnapper like you down like snapping a twig.”

Josie stood and Ed picked up on the body language, standing as well, understanding that the session was done. It was a small test, but one that she used for almost every appointment, along with a few other nonverbal social cues to see how aware her patients were. Ed was doing well—not as well as she had hoped, but reasonably well for a man his age and with his level of Alzheimer’s advancement.

Her sense of empathy broadened, blossoming, carrying out to cover Alex. She didn’t know which of Ed’s daughters was Alex’s mother, but all three of them had come in here at various times with their dad, loving and supportive though busy. The worst patients were the ones who were dumped off, left alone, the caretaker or the home health aide or occasionally a family member absent. Just a body in the driver’s seat of the car waiting. Patient outcome or disease progression for those patients weren’t nearly as positive as for those who had a strong family support network.

Ed would do fine compared to some of her other patients, but the whole family had a long road ahead of them. She suspected that Alex probably had a lot to do with enrolling Ed in the program. The older man didn’t strike her as the proactive type, and, frankly, neither did his daughters. The driving force behind all of this must have been Alex. She’d seen it before; a fair number of patients in the trial had family members who were in the medical profession. In many ways, it was a perk of having a relative who was a nurse or a doctor or a physical therapist.

The downside, though, was that for the millions and millions and growing who didn’t have that advantage, new medications, new procedures, new ideas went untapped. Thinking about this was depressing her, all of it floating through her mind in seconds, as she took Ed down to the prize closet.

Most patients
loved
the prize closet, especially those who’d grown up poor or who were currently poor. Even if they hadn’t, or weren’t, the prize closet seemed to be a nice little place where folks could indulge. She opened the slim door and there, before them, were three shelves. On the first shelf was a smattering of gift cards to local restaurants. The most popular had surprised her—a local coffee shop, not a chain, and after the fifth or sixth person in a row chose to take the $25 gift card as a “thank you” for the monthly meeting, she asked why.

“Every morning, before 9 a.m.,” one of her patients explained, “seniors can get a dollar coffee. This will give me coffee for most of the month, and it’s a real nice place. You get to sit there and just chat with people.”

The next time the administrator went to order gifts for the prize closet, Josie had made a point to let them know about patient feedback and she found herself gently steering some of her older, lonelier patients to pick that, imagining a group of them sitting in this local coffee shop, sharing a cup of joe in the morning, finding the companionship they needed.

That could be you,
she thought, the voice invasive and melancholy.

Pushing that thought aside, she returned her attention to the closet. The second row was covered with books. Large-print books leaning more towards Nora Roberts and Tom Clancy than anything else, though some of the women
delighted
in the romance novels, clutching them to their chests and covering the book cover as if it were a clandestine gift.

The men, though, tended to go for the third shelf, which had mostly sporting goods: golf balls, tennis balls, swim goggles, and kites—things designed to be played with a grandchild or to be enjoyed by the more active seniors.

Ed’s hand went straight for the gift-card shelf and then stopped.