Honeydew: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

helping her only sister—their mother was dead. When not busy with that task she followed Joe, obeyed him, adopted his ideas. Sometimes, though, she just lay down and listened to the birds.
    “My house is too quiet,” she explained.
    “Mine isn’t.”
    Acelle’s flat held three people at its most crowded; Joe’s was occupied always by a festival of relatives. Even the basement had been taken over. The only real silence was in the doc’s place on the third floor. Joe could go there anytime, even when it was empty; and when Zeph was there it was as good as empty.
    For a few hours each day these children waded, climbed trees, chased rabbits, dissected worms, and built a kind of teepee, which they called Castle 2.
      
    There were three entrances to Castle 1. The wide one, designed for horse-drawn wagons, was now used by ambulances. Another served the parking lot, and had become willy-nilly the main entrance. The former main entrance, with its five arches—four windows and a door—welcomed people who came on foot or by bus, who walked up the numerous stairs to the door or were wheeled up a winding ramp by a feeble relative or, if their arrivals coincided with his, by Zeph.
    This was the access that Zeph preferred. At dawn the morning after the party, he climbed the stairs, carrying a knobby walking stick, his legacy—his only legacy—from his father. He went through the big doorway into the old beamed hall and then into an old-fashioned elevator like a cage, and then down to the surgical suites, thoroughly up-to-date. He began the ritual of changing his clothes and scrubbing up. Zeph had a limited wardrobe—he was still paying off college and medical-school debts, would be doing so for years—but he always wore a jacket and tie to work. You would expect these garments to smarten him up. In fact they made him seem more shambling and unaware: a tall loose-limbed guy carrying a stick for no apparent purpose.
    “Your stick—maybe there’s a sword hidden inside,” a resident had suggested.
    “I’ve never looked,” he fibbed.
    As for his head: he had brown hair, too much of it, a blunt nose and chin, and a habit, during conversation, of fastening his gaze on one side of your neck or the other. “Make contact,” his preceptors had urged. “Look at me,” pleaded women of all types. Contact? Look? Not in his repertoire. He had been self-sufficient all his life. He’d gotten through medical school by virtue of a good memory and deft fingers. And despite that continuing interest in the sides of patients’ necks, he didn’t flunk bedside manner; the soft voice and the thoughtful answers to their questions told patients he was in their corner even if he didn’t meet their eyes. Some patients may have even preferred the averted glance.
    Zeph’s eyes, if you did get a glimpse of them, were dark blue. When he was giving general anesthesia—he occasionally got nonregional assignments—he leaned over the patient and asked him to count backward from ten and there was a kind of cobalt flash just before seven. But mostly Zeph’s job was regional, continually administering exactly the right amount of blocking drugs to exactly the right nerves, and delivering a little sedation too. The less stuff given, the better, but there must be enough of it to keep pain at a safe distance. Zeph considered all pain his mortal enemy, all patients of either gender his suffering mother, all surgeons dragons indifferent to the cruelties they were practicing. The patients’ conversation during this partially sedated state included long sleepy pauses between phrases and sometimes between words, but the talk only occasionally turned into jabberwocky. The dialogue began in a confidential mode and soon acquired a tone of intimacy, though the topics were unromantic. Bird-watching. Jazz. Immigrants, too goddamn many. Zeph’s responses were invitations to say more, continuing the palaver while his hands and eyes kept busy. What color is the