14.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
NEW YORK CITY
MARCH 3, 2011, 7:15 A.M.

The call early the previous evening from his grandmother Sally had jolted George back to a place nearer his usual moorings. One day before that, he had found Pia in the hospital cafeteria with Will McKinley. Lesley Wong had been there too, but George had fixated on the fact that Will McKinley had worked his way to Pia’s side for a month’s elective. Although George considered himself reasonably facile with women, in that he got along with most, Will was a more practiced seducer with fewer scruples. George wouldn’t have imagined Pia would be interested in a guy like Will but what did he know? Jealousy was a cruel emotion and while the four of them had sat together he’d suffered through believing Will was reveling at the scale of George’s discomfort. Will had never made any secret of just how attractive he found Pia. More than once, he’d asked George what he thought Pia saw in him. George secretly enjoyed Will’s rude question because it implied that he as well as others saw him and Pia as some kind of couple.

George knew his grandmother well enough to know she would disapprove of Pia. Or, rather, she would find his continued interest in her to be unhealthy for him. With all that he had on the line, George wondered for the thousandth time what he was doing continuing his pursuit of Pia’s affections. It wasn’t so much the time that it took up, though it took up enough, it was the amount of emotional energy he expended on her, dissecting her words and actions, thinking of strategies to win her affections, worrying about her well-being. He needed to conserve that energy for his studies. More than anything, he wanted to be the best doctor he could be.

George knew how much his family was pulling for him to succeed. They had suffered so many reverses, and it seemed like they were sliding down a one-way slope like so many middle-class families. If he didn’t make it, he knew his mother and grandmother might put a brave face on it but be devastated inside.

George also knew his mother, Jean, had money issues. She’d moved into a much smaller house in the same Baltimore neighborhood a few years before and still didn’t seem to have any extra cash. Jean had had the misfortune or lack of foresight to work in decaying industries after George’s father died. She had been a bookkeeper at the Bethlehem Steel works at Sparrows Point for a while, then she found and lost a job at the General Motors plant. She always said she was fine when he asked about her finances, and refused to let him look at her bank statements. Although George was on a full scholarship, she never failed to send him a twenty-dollar bill whenever she could.

“You’re a student, George,” she told him. “You concentrate on your education!”