Prizes Read Online Free PDF Page B

hurling her arms around him as he entered her apartment. “You’ve done it—you’ve saved my father!”
    Suddenly she was kissing him on the lips.
    It was unexpected, but far from undesirable. He’d been happy to begin with, but this amorous gesture added a new dimension.
    Which he welcomed wholeheartedly.
    The next morning, Toni put her arms around him and pleaded, “
Now
will you tell me why you took ballet?”
    “Two reasons. To begin with, my mother was the pianist for the class and I joined as an act of loyalty. Also it was a way to hurt my father for the shabby way he treated her. I punished him—imagine an Indiana steel-worker having to tell his buddies that his son was a fruitcake who pranced around in tights.”
    “Well, I can vouch for your masculinity,” she said, beaming. “And I’ll be happy to sign an affidavit. Anyway, what happened to your mom?”
    “She died when I was twelve. He killed her.”
    “What? You can’t be serious.”
    “She was trying to bear him another kid, and she got toxemia in the late stages of pregnancy.” His anger was emerging now. “I mean, it was a heartless thing from start to finish—when she got into trouble, he bullied the doctor to hold off delivery to make sure the baby shewas carrying would live. In the end they lost both of them.”
    “Who took care of you?”
    “I took care of myself.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    “Yes. I found that out. So, unlikely as it sounds, I took up a sport—platform diving.”
    “Ah-ha,” she replied with admiration. “I guess you wanted to flirt with danger, huh?”
    “Sort of. But it meant that for at least a couple of seconds—in my head—I could be completely alone, thirty-three feet above the rest of the world.”
    “I knew you were a kindred spirit,” she murmured. “We’re both closet loners.”
    She continued her interrogation at breakfast.
    “Did your dad ever find out you were really a daring young diver?”
    “Yes,” Adam said, his face revealing some of his deeply repressed sadness. “He was studying the only section of the paper he ever read, and discovered I was competing in the state championships. He showed up with two of his drinking buddies. But they had never been to a meet, and cheered in all the wrong places. It made me so nervous, I dove like a whale and really screwed up my point total.”
    She could tell from his eyes that the memory of his failure still plagued him.
    “After that, all I wanted to do was get the hell away from home. And at that point my only chance was getting an academic scholarship. My grades were better than my diving. Ever hear of Shimer College?”
    “Frankly, no.”
    “Nobody has. But it’s a small, progressive offshoot of the University of Chicago. They believed if you could pass their test, you were ready for college. It was a kind of incubator for premeds anxious to save a few years. I was so keen to be a doctor that I worked as an orderly in Michael Reese Hospital in the summers—whichgave me a respectable excuse for not going home. I channeled my anger into studying, and by some miracle I got into Harvard Med.”
    “No doubt with the goal of keeping women from dying of toxemia,” Toni suggested gently.
    “And saving babies,” Adam added. “I was a grand old man of nineteen. I may have been academically prepared, but I was a social misfit. Especially among all those smooth Ivy League graduates who’d never even heard of Shimer. I suppose that’s why I only felt at home with the other lab rats.”
    “Is that how you met Max?”
    Adam nodded. “I finally found a father I respected. While I was finishing my residency in OB/GYN, Max wangled me a research fellowship. He didn’t just teach me immunology, he taught me life. I mean, the first time I was invited to his house for dinner, I knew that Max and Lisl had the kind of relationship that gave marriage a good name.
    “She’s a Kleinian analyst—does wonders with children. They took me under their