“Absolutely not,” he said. “Professional courtesy.”
“I’m sorry I—”
He waved off my apology. “You have nothing to be sorry for; you’ve made the right decision.”
“I have?”
“This is your decision, which means it is absolutely the right decision. There’s no rush. Think it over.” He raised his two fingers, imitating a pair of scissors. “Dr. Snip It will still be here.” He laughed and patted my shoulder as he departed.
It had been my decision. Eva remained somewhere high above the United States, headed to Boston, I believe. As an airplane pilot, Eva was usually high above someplace. When we first started dating, I kept a closer tab on her schedule, but as time passed I’d paid less attention. The cockpit was her office; it just happened to be an office that could be in one location in the morning and three thousand miles across the United States in the afternoon. In our first few months together, I would fly to meet her for a weekend in Boston or New York, or she would surprise me at my home late at night, sliding beneath the covers and pressing up against me, but the frequency of those getaways and late-night surprises had, with time, diminished. The demands of my own practice had also increased. When Eva arrived home late, she usually stayed in the guest bedroom so she wouldn’t disturb me.
As I drove north on the El Camino Real, I wondered if Eva would be as understanding as Dr. Snip It. She expected to come home to a man no longer able to fertilize her eggs, at least not after shooting off the cannon another twenty-five times—the number of ejaculations Dr. Fukomara said would be necessary to expunge the billion or so sperm still actively on the hunt.
“Still locked and loaded. That’s the good part,” he’d said during the consult. “Lots of sex.”
When Eva and I first started dating, we could have knocked out that number in a month. I had joked before I dropped her at the airport the other morning that it might take us six months to clear the chamber. She didn’t laugh. She kissed me lightly and got out of the car.
“I’ll call you if I don’t get in too late,” she’d said.
I parked in one of three reserved parking spaces at the back of my building on Broadway Avenue and took the rear staircase to my offices on the second floor. When my father had his stroke, my mother refused to sell his pharmacy practice or the building he had purchased with it. Money was never a factor in my mother’s decisions, and it had not been her reason to keep both the practice and the building.
“Your father put his blood, sweat, and tears into that pharmacy,” she’d said.
So, years later, when my business partner and best friend, Mickie, and I were looking to open an ophthalmology practice together, I purchased the building and kept Broadway Pharmacy as the ground-floor tenant. My mother had wanted to give me the building as an early inheritance, but I had refused her generosity.
“You’re going to get it when I die anyway,” she’d said when we broached the subject one Sunday night over dinner, something I tried to do every week, usually on a night when Eva was traveling.
“Yes, but that won’t be for decades, and you might need the money to pay for your own retirement care,” I’d said. “Otherwise I’ll have to put you out on the street with a ‘For Sale’ sign around your neck.”
“Decades? I hope not. I’ll throw myself in front of a bus before I allow myself to see ninety.”
“I might push you in front of that bus if you remain this cantankerous.”
“Don’t be insolent, Samuel.” She cleared my plate, signaling that I had finished eating. “Fine. Make me a fair offer.”
“I’ll call Jerry Conman in the morning,” I’d said, referring to my high school classmate who had, despite his unfortunate last name, carved a pretty good career in commercial real estate. Conman and I met for beers the following week at Behrman’s Irish Pub on Broadway, and he told me over a Guinness what I had already suspected. “Your father’s pharmacy has very little goodwill as an ongoing business. It’s losing customers to the chain drugstores. You’d be better off selling it.”