Page 36 of Doctor Dilemma

You win, I thought. You finally broke me.

And I picked up.

“Hello,” I said.

“Well, hello, stranger,” she said. Someone who didn’t know us might have heard a friendliness in her voice, but underneath that thin layer of levity was an undercurrent of spite that I could hear right away. She was mad. Very mad. But she knew enough to keep that anger at bay now that I’d finally answered the phone.

“I didn’t expect you to pick up,” she said.

“Yeah, well…” I drifted off. Truthfully, if she hadn’t called at exactly that moment, maybe I wouldn’t have. In fact, I almost certainly would have let it go to voicemail. If it weren’t for that message asking me if I was sure I wanted to delete her from my phone and block her, then I may not have even seen the call. But alas, I couldn’t go all the way through with it. In a way, it felt like chopping off a limb. That’s how attached to her I’d felt.

But I guess the limb was back.

“You just up and left, Leo,” she said. “You couldn’t even face me like a real man.”

Part of me still felt a little bad about that. Truthfully, I worried that, in a very literal sense, Hannah needed me. But she was still here and at least well enough to belittle and emasculate me, so she couldn’t have been too bad off.

“My mind was made up, Hannah,” I told her.

“Your mind was made up?” she asked. “What about me? Don’t I get to have a say in this? Or did the two years we spent together mean so little that you could just walk away without even sending a postcard? You’re so selfish, you know that, Leo?”

Yeah, I was the selfish one. The one who devoted his life to helping people. Not her, the stay at home parasite.

“You want to talk to me?” I asked. She was getting under my skin, and I felt the anger starting to come out. Nobody was better at this than Hannah. “You’ve got me on the phone now. Talk.”

“Ugh, not over the phone,” she said. “In person, so I can see your face and have you look me in the eyes.”

“And then what, Hannah?” I asked. “I’d just tell you that I’m leaving and not coming back. Would you take it any better that way?”

“Maybe,” she said, “maybe not. But it’s not about that. I get that you were angry, but I need finality,” she said. “And taking Bagel with you? That was a low blow. I need to say goodbye to her, too.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “Are you at the house?”

“Oh, you get to know where I am, but I don’t get to know where you are? How is that fair?”

She was absolutely exhausting.

“I’m taking Bagel for a walk now. I’m a couple of blocks from The Tea Pot. You want to meet me there to get your finality?”

“Right now?” she asked. “Why does everything always need to be on your clock?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes and leave after another twenty. That’s my offer. Bye.”

I hung up my phone and turned it off. Already, I could feel my heart racing like I’d done something wrong or something bad was about to happen. If I had half a brain, I would have just told her no. Of course, if I had half a brain and a full set of balls, I would have blocked her the second I left the house. And I certainly wouldn’t have picked up the phone if she tried to call.

That wasn’t the case, though. And, in order to be fair, I was going to give her that finality. It would be in a public place so she couldn’t make a scene. Putting a full set of walls between us and the outside world gave her an unfair advantage. With onlookers, she’d keep calm and act normal. And maybe, maybe with just a little luck, I wouldn’t need to deal with her ever again.

* * *

I ordered my coffee — one cream, no sugar. It was later in the day than I’m usually comfortable drinking caffeine, but I knew I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, so it didn’t seem to be worth it to deprive myself of the simple joys in life when I needed them most.

True to my word, I sat and planned on waiting for Hannah for another twenty minutes. As it turns out, she was there in five. Her makeup was rushed and she clearly just threw something on, but that was my small gift to her. If I’d scheduled something in the future, she would have prepared every little bit she could for it and driven herself nuts. All for a conversation that had no chance of going the way she wanted it to go.

“You look good,” I said. And it wasn’t a lie. For all of Hannah’s issues, her appearance was not one of them. She was very attractive. More than a few heads were turning our way, trying to steal a glimpse of her.

I felt like turning to one of them and saying, “You want her? You can have her.” But that wasn’t Hannah’s MO. She wanted what she couldn’t have. Walking out on her probably only made her want me more. And showering her with love only made her take you for granted. It was a lose-lose situation.

She knelt down and started petting Bagel, who was happy to see her, wagging her tail even if she was a little confused. As Hannah petted Bagel, Bagel looked to me for reassurance.

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