Today Will Be Different Read Online Free PDF Page B

Joe. Joe could cut through my confusion. Joe the sword.
    There’s a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you’re traveling with someone who’s confident, organized, and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: “Are we there yet?” “My bags are too heavy.” “My feet are getting blisters.” “This isn’t what I ordered.” We’ve all been that person. But if the person you’re traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I’ve been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing. It’s a question for Joe.
    His office was a few blocks away. Even just seeing him through the glass would be enough to center me.
    “Wait,” Timby said. “We’re going to Dad’s? Can I play with the iPad?”
    Joe and I were waging the altogether futile war against electronics by not letting Timby play video games. The one loophole was the iPads in Joe’s office.
    “Is that something you’d like to do?” I asked Timby in an unexpected singsong, like a stranger offering candy. “I could drop you off while I popped over to lunch.”
    “Whoa,” he said, processing his unbelievably good fortune. “Yeah!”
    I called Sydney yet again.
    “Guess who? Disregard my messages. I’ll see you at noon!”
    “Hey, look!” Timby had spotted the sign for Jazz Alley. “It’s that place with the oily hummus and they make ginger ale by combining Coke and Sprite, and you have to sit at tiny tables smooshed together with people you don’t know.”
    Perhaps I’d complained more than once about being dragged there by jazz-loving Joe. If you were ever driven to the brink of madness listening to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” try sitting through an aggro jazz trio doing a baffling forty-five-minute version.
    “I’m not a fan of jazz,” I said to Timby. “No woman is.”
    “You should tell Dad to go by himself,” he said.
    “Don’t think I haven’t tried,” I said. “But there’s something about me the guy can’t quit.”
    We shared a shrug and headed to Joe’s office.
    The first thing that should have tripped my alarm was the empty waiting room. But this wasn’t completely unprecedented. Joe had celebrity clients (athletes and musicians) who, for a variety of reasons (ego and ego), couldn’t be in the same waiting room as civilians. Therefore, down the hall from the double-doored entrance to the Wallace Surgery Center was a row of single, unmarked private waiting rooms. Conceivably, Joe’s patients could have been in there.
    The second thing I noticed, which did trip my alarm, was the top of the aquarium lying across the couch.
    In defense of celebrities (!), they all love Joe. No matter how coddled the quarterback or preening the guitarist, as soon as something goes wrong with their hand, they fly to Seattle because they’ve heard about The Guy. When The Guy turns out to be unpretentious Joe, they become smitten. Joe waters the plants himself. His desk is a mess. The office is in constant chaos because he spends too long with each patient. He treats everyone the same, his curiosity a gentle rain. You’d have to draw him a picture to explain why it’s cooler to save the pinkie of a Cy Young Award–winning pitcher than the wrist of a checkout lady with carpal tunnel. Stars like the people who fawn over them; they trust the few who don’t.
    Nobody was behind the reception window. I moved closer. On the desk was an open container of tortellini salad, its bottled Italian dressing a Proustian blast back to a past I wanted no part of: broke, in New York, eating Korean-deli salad bar.
    Deep in the office, Luz the receptionist caught sight of me. I