Home Game Read Online Free PDF Page A

the howling patient for another three minutes. On top of the chicken pox, he found ear and throat infections, plus the fever I already knew about, plus a couple of unrelated, smaller defects. He was so efficient at finding diseases that I thought he would find she had the plague or something, but his work was so quick and self-assured that it was impossible to question any of it. Afterward, he sat down at our kitchen table and wrote out two long pages of prescriptions, all of them illegible, and said that he was certain she’d feel better once she’d taken a few of them. From start to finish, his visit took about fifteen minutes and cost less than forty bucks. Vive la France!
    I trundled the prescriptions together with Quinn across the street to the pharmacy—everything in Paris you might want to buy always seems to be just across the street—and came away with a huge plastic sack of cures. Then, with a truly fantastic display of heretofore unrevealed parental competence, I actually persuaded my child to swallow several of them.
    All this was perfectly thrilling, and not simply because there is an obvious pleasure in curing one’s child. Power was in the air. It was a rare fatherhood Al Haig moment: I was in charge here.
    Then Tabitha walked into the house.
    â€œWhat’s going on?”
    I told her everything that had happened, and as I did, tears welled in her eyes. Mistaking their meaning, I could not have been more pleased with myself. I assumed she was moved by my performance. At this difficult moment in our child’s life, when she would naturally look to her mother for comfort, her mother was away and unreachable. Plucked from the end of the bench and sent into the game with just seconds on the clock, I’d been told to take the final shot. I’d hit nothing but net.
    I waited for what I was certain would be a curtain call. Instead, there was only silence. I could see from her face that she wasn’t merely upset; she was irritated. She walked over to the sink and banged around some dirty dishes. With whom was she irritated? I wondered, neglecting the important truth, corollary to the rule about the fool at the poker table, that if you don’t know who your wife is pissed off at, it’s you.
    â€œWhy are you so upset?” I asked. “The worst is over—it’s all taken care of.”
    â€œI just wish I had been…here.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œIf I was here I could have asked the questions.”
    All of a sudden, my questions weren’t good enough. How would she know? She banged the dishes around a bit more, and then said, “Did you ask the doctor why he was sure all these medicines were the right ones?”
    â€œUh, no.” Of course I hadn’t. He was the doctor.
    â€œDid you ask him why, if it is chicken pox, she’s had these red spots before?”
    â€œShe has?”
    â€œDid you ask why they are only on her face?”
    Upon review of the videotape, my three-point shot was nullified, the team went down in defeat, and I was sent back to the end of the bench. I was unable to answer even one of the questions that a genuinely caring parent would have thought to ask. “The doctor said that the spots would spread to the rest of her body by tomorrow,” I said, answering one that hadn’t been asked.
    â€œI think we ought to call another doctor,” she said, then swept her child up in her arms and took her away to whatever place mothers take their children when they don’t want their husbands to follow. Once they’d left, I quickly, and for the first time, read the instructions on the medicine. The first two bottles I selected said, chillingly, “ NOT FOR CHILDREN UNDER 6 YEARS OF AGE .” The bottle I believed to contain a chicken pox ointment proved, on close inspection, to be a sore-throat spray. The gunk I’d been told to apply to the pox itself was not a spray, as the forty-dollar