The Doctor's Wife by Elizabeth Brundage Read Free Book Online

happen, but not to Michael. I can’t imagine that.”
     
     
    It’s my fault, Annie thinks. “Did he seem depressed, Hannah? Did he seem depressed at work?”
     
     
    “No, honey, he did not seem depressed. He loved his work. He always had, you know, a real good attitude. Unlike some of the other doctors. They get moody, you know, ’cause they’re so tired all the time. But not Michael. You never saw that in him. And his patients loved him, Annie, you should know that. They looked up to him. Especially in the birthing suite. They’d come in and they’d be all nervous and right away he’d get them calm. They’d be cursing and throwing things and he’d walk in and the whole climate would change and everybody would relax. He meant a lot to people. You could just see it, the way they’d look at him. Like he was their hero, you know?”
     
     
    “It’s my fault,” Annie whispers. “We were having . . . problems.”
     
     
    Hannah gives her a knowing look. “It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, is it?”
     
     
    “What?”
     
     
    “The doctor’s wife thing.”
     
     
    Annie shakes her head. She hates to admit it, but it’s the truth.
     
     
    “Look, honey, whatever happened, nobody’s perfect.”
     
     
    “He wasn’t home very much.”
     
     
    “Didn’t even take a day off, did he? Good ole Finney plays golf every Wednesday, but not your husband. Oh, no. Not Michael.”
     
     
    “You knew about the clinic?”
     
     
    “They don’t call it Smallbany for nothing.” Hannah smiles. “And between you and me? What Michael did on his afternoons off is none of the pope’s business.”
     
     
    Annie nods, grateful for Hannah’s admission. “We were getting threats,” she says. “They were giving Michael a hard time. Remember that doctor who got killed up in Buffalo? It’s the same group. And these people mean business.”
     
     
    “I can’t imagine they got too far with Michael. As I recall, he wasn’t exactly open to other people’s opinions, especially when it came to medicine. Some people thought he was arrogant, but he didn’t care. He liked his power. He’d fucking earned it.”
     
     
    “Well, it didn’t get him very far, did it?”
     
     
    “I suppose not.”
     
     
    They don’t talk for the rest of the way. Annie looks out the window at the red sky, the black trees. They drive through dreary towns where the people on the streets hunker under hats and scarves, hiding from the wind. A gray despair wanders in their eyes, the landscape sketched in gritty haste across the sky. At the Stewart’s in Nassau, they turn onto High Meadow Road, leaving the rest of the world behind. They pass the Hubbles’ dairy farm, winding down into the hamlet and past the post office, where Warren Hicks, postmaster, is closing up for the night. His buddy, Rudy Caper, waits loyally in his sheepskin coat, a boy in a man’s body, slow as winter sun, his feeble yellow dog sniffing at his heels. The same things every day, she thinks, like landmarks. Only today is not the same. Nothing will ever be the same.
     
     
    They cross the old metal bridge into High Meadow, the wide creek purple with frost. The trees stand in solemn witness to the rushing cold. Annie directs Hannah down slippery unmarked roads, nothing but fields and trees and sprawling horse farms. “It’s the next one,” Annie tells her. “Turn here.” Halfway down the road their house appears, a strapping white Federal with black shutters. Over the wide black door, wrought-iron numbers declare its age: 1812. Their dream house, Annie thinks.
     
     
    “I believe there was a war that year,” she remembers Michael saying.
     
     
    “A war and an overture,” she’d replied.
     
     
    They’d come upon the house that first afternoon by mistake, having gotten lost in a labyrinth of dirt roads. When they finally pulled over to consult a map, which did them absolutely no good at all, they saw a For Sale sign hanging in a bramble