Requiem for a Realtor Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t understand. Sure, I’ll tell her I’m not seeing you anymore, but…”
    She missed him when she threw the wineglass, and he was outside pulling the door closed when the heavy ashtray hit it. He hurried down to his car.

8
    David Jameson’s father had been a barber with a four-chair shop at a time when men got their hair cut once a week. The helpers he hired came and went, there was always a plentiful supply, and business was good. First, there was his location, on Dirksen and Fourth, right in the heart of the business district. A man could make an appointment, get his hair cut, and be back at his desk in half an hour. Jameson Sr.’s hair was thin, and he slicked it back on his head with witch hazel. David had his mother’s hair but his dental office was not unlike his father’s shop.
    He had two assistants, young men who were paying off their student loans and had not yet opened their own offices, a species of apprentice, and older dentists who wanted to keep their hands in part-time. There were seven dental chairs, three of which were David’s. He scheduled patients in bunches and was able to attend to three simultaneously, thanks to a very efficient dental nurse and a succession of technologists who were trained to do the preliminary work and to wind it up afterward. He used up a dozen pairs of latex gloves an hour, flitting back and forth, but he himself bade each patient good-bye and he prided himself on the belief that none of them thought of his office as an assembly line.
    When Bob Oliver had approached him about doing a feature on dentists, David had snatched the opportunity. He made himself available, he devoted a great deal of time to providing the reporter with information, he figured in all the photographs eventually used. Not all had been used, but he bought them all from the Tribune, had them framed and hung them about the office. A handsome reprint of the original article was available in his waiting room.
    â€œHow many patients do you handle at the same time?” Oliver had asked.
    â€œI can only work on one patient at a time,” he answered carefully.
    That had been the only dangerous moment, but then Oliver was not the kind of writer who sought to balance praise with blame. The feature had been a tremendous boon. Not least because Oliver sent his sister Phyllis for a consultation.
    Phyllis was the kind of woman his parents would not have liked. David was surprised that he himself found her attractive. It is not easy for a woman in a dental chair to retain desirability. Sometimes David thought all those open mouths had kept him single. Phyllis was somehow different, fearful of pain, childlike, yet completely trusting.
    â€œWhere are the pictures of your family?” Phyllis asked when their sessions got under way. From the outset, he had scheduled her alone for an hour, not wishing to entrust her to any latex-gloved hands but his own. She was a small woman, but for all that every bit a woman, as she had made little effort to conceal. Bridget, the nurse, had ventured to say something disparaging about the way Mrs. Collins dressed, but she had never made that mistake again.
    â€œMy parents are dead.”
    â€œI meant your own family.”
    â€œI have none.”
    â€œYou’re not married?”
    â€œWho would have me?” he asked, surprising himself.
    â€œOh, you.”
    He turned down the Muzak when she was in the chair, not wanting to miss a word she managed to say while he was working on her smile. She enjoyed returning to the fact that he was unmarried, and he found he liked discussing it with her.
    â€œIt is such a serious step.”
    â€œAre you Catholic?” she asked.
    â€œYes, I am.”
    â€œI was raised Catholic.”
    â€œWhat happened?” Is this why she had been brought to him, that he might give her wise counsel, perhaps lead her back to the faith? She told him of her marriage, and soon that became