Silent Treatment by Michael Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

charges. You been to see Mom?”
    “Tomorrow. How do you know how much this cost?”
    “I don’t. That’s my total lifetime gross income. I went down to the home last Tuesday. She didn’t know who I was.”
    “I guess that’s the upside of having all those strokes.”
    “Very funny.”
    Phil studied his older brother.
    “Harry, you okay? You look terrible.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Well, you do. Bags under your eyes. That thumbnail chewed down again.”
    “I’ve got a lot on my mind, Phil.” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’ve only got a couple of minutes before I’ve got to see patients.”
    “So what are you so worried about? Evie? When’s she going to have that operation?”
    “In a few days.”
    “She’ll do fine. She’s made out of … um … ah … steel.”
    “Don’t start, Phil.”
    “I didn’t say anything bad.”
    “You were about to.”
    “Why should I have anything bad to say about my sister-in-law? She calls and asks me to help her talk my brother into accepting this pharmaceutical-house job he’s been offered. I tell her that even though it’s a grand-sounding title, and maybe more money, I think my brother ought to decide for himself if he wants to give up his medical practice to push pills and design magazine ads. She calls me a selfish bastard who’s threatened by my brother’s moving up in the world. And she says maybe a dozen words to me since. Why should I have anything bad to say about her?”
    “She was right, Phil. I should have taken the position.”
    “Harry, you see people when they’re sick and you help them get well. Do you know how wonderful that is?”
    “It’s not enough anymore.”
    “Hey, you’re forty-nine. I’m forty-four. It’s my turn for a midlife crisis. You’re supposed to be through yours already.”
    “Well, I’m not. I don’t know, Phil, it’s like … Ispent too much time just accepting things as they were in my life. I didn’t set enough goals or something. Now it seems like I don’t have anything to push against. I should have taken that job. At least there would have been some new challenges.”
    “You’re doing fine, Harry. It’s that birthday coming up that has you rattled. The big five—”
    “That’s okay, Phil. You don’t have to say it.”
    Harry had discussed the Corbett curse with his brother, but only once. Phil’s dismissal of the theory was as emphatic as it was predictable. On a September first their paternal grandfather, just a few months past his seventieth birthday, had dropped dead of a coronary. Twenty-five years later—
exactly
twenty-five years later—their father had
his
first coronary. He was precisely sixty years and five weeks old on
that
September first. That he didn’t die on the spot was both tragic and, to Harry, immaterial. The two years he lived as a cardiac cripple were hell for everyone.
    September first
. The date had been circled on Harry’s mental calendar since his father’s heart attack. But after one particular lecture at a cardiology review course, he had highlighted it in red.
    “It may be due to societal factors or to genetics,”
the cardiologist had said.
“Possibly both. But we frequently see a pattern in families which I call the Law of Decades. Simply put, a son’s first cardiac event seems often to occur precisely ten years earlier than did his father’s. Obviously, there are exceptions to the Law. But check it out. If you have a fifty-four-year-old man with a coronary and a positive family history, there’s a good chance his father will have had his first event at age sixty-four. Not sixty-three or sixty-five. Ten years on the button.…”
    “But physically you’re feeling all right, Harry,” Phil said. “Right?”
    “Sure. Sure, Phil, I’m fine. It’s probably just that I haven’t had a two-week vacation in almost three years, my car is falling apart, and—”
    “Hey, believe it or not, that’s actually one of the reasons I stopped by. I have a