I had always thought he got it from Grandpa Frank.
“I was twenty-four,” Dr. Hale said quietly. “A first-year resident. Ruth was volunteering here that summer as a candy striper. Before she went off to college. She’d come around with her little cart of magazines and flowers. She was the funniest person I’d ever met. She’d sneak me cookies from the cafeteria and tell me the most ridiculous jokes.”
He smiled. Just a little.
“We fell in love,” he said. “Just like that. Stupid and young and completely sure that nothing could ever go wrong. And then in September she went back to college, and in November she called me crying, and told me she was pregnant.”
“What happened?”
His face changed. The smile went away.
“Her father found out,” he said. “And Harold Calloway came to see me. In my apartment. He sat at my kitchen table, and he told me that if I ever spoke to his daughter again, he would end my career. He was the chairman of the hospital board. He said one phone call, and I’d never practice medicine anywhere in the state of Ohio. Maybe anywhere in the country.”
