And Irene found herself telling Sam things she hadn’t told anyone else at the hospital, or really anyone at all. She explained—or rather he dug from her, bit by bit—how she told her parents one evening when she was very young, when her mother was still alive and her father held down a respectable job, that she wanted to become a doctor. Her mother had smiled in that sarcastic way she had, but her father had nodded gravely and said she would make a good doctor, she had a calm head on her shoulders, and she should study very hard to make this dream a reality. How later that night, she’d overheard her mother telling her father that he shouldn’t indulge the girl like that, it was ridiculous to imagine that Irene could become a doctor. Why not? said her father. He’d seen plenty of women doctors, there were several medical colleges that now accepted female candidates. Because she will want a family one day, her mother said, and then all that education would go to waste; because children had a way of demanding your attention, of diverting this abundant river of female energy and ambition into themselves.

Irene didn’t remember how her father answered this, or whether she even really heard his response through the walls of the house. Possibly the conversation never even happened, she admitted to Sam, sipping her coffee, and this was only the way she remembered her parents’ reactions to her ambitions, like a composite drawing, a convenience of memory. Either way, she did study hard. She took all the difficult classes, algebra and trigonometry, chemistry and physics, and graduated at the top of the class of well-bred girls in the private school her grandparents had paid for. She had just finished her first year of premedical studies at Berkeley when her grandfather died, and his estate went into probate where it was entangled by lawsuits, and there was no more money for such frivolities as college. They ended up in Los Angeles instead, she and her father, because it seemed like a fresh start. That was a year and a half ago. Her father was still looking around for steady work, which was why he was away. As soon as they could afford it, she was going to start that nursing course.

She sat back. Her coffee cup was empty. Sam had also finished his breakfast and his coffee, and he leaned on the arm of his chair and stared at her in a peculiar way, made all the more peculiar because Sandy had fallen asleep on his shoulder, sort of wrapped around the base of his neck and held there by static, possibly.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Sam said at last. “You were just a kid.”

“She was sick a long time. It wasn’t a shock or anything.”

“Was that when your dad started drinking?”