Last Dance, Last Chance

personality. She told herself that most people found Anthony completely charming.
    Sometimes, Debbie wondered if Anthony’s mother would ever accept her. Surprisingly, Lena came to be very fond of Debbie and often took her side when she and Anthony had a disagreement. As time passed, Debbie and Lena Pignataro became good friends, and Debbie understood why Lena was sometimes snappish with people. Her own background had been hardscrabble and miserable.
    “Lena was a change-of-life baby,” Debbie explained. “She was born into a very, very poor family in Port Colborne, Ontario. Her parents died when she was young, and she was never close to her brothers and sisters.”
    But Lena Wakunic, christened Sabena, was beautiful. She was Ukrainian and had pale blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a lovely figure. As a young man Ralph Pignataro met Lena at Crystal Beach, a resort a few miles east of Port Colborne. She was alone in the world, and he fell in love with her and vowed to make up for all the things she had never had. He even put her through high school. When she was angry or “uppity” with people who had less than she did, Ralph knew it was because of the dark times she had lived through. He always tried to smooth the way for her and to make excuses for her.
    By the time Debbie met her, Lena Pignataro was a very attractive middle-aged woman with the body of a girl in her twenties, as fair as Dr. Ralph was dark. Her blond hair had turned white and looked platinum rather than gray. She wore expensive but modest clothing with high necks and long sleeves, although she usually wore high heels and a delicate gold ankle bracelet.
    Dr. Ralph himself looked like Vic Damone, a popular singer of the era. All of Ralph and Lena’s children were good looking, with Antoinette and Ralph resembling Dr. Ralph and Steven and Anthony looking more like their mother.
    In time, Lena came to accept Debbie as Anthony’s girlfriend. Still, Debbie realized that Lena might not make the most nurturing mother-in-law if she and Anthony should ever marry. Lena adored Anthony and was partial to all of her children. She had great difficulty refusing any of them anything, but Steven was clearly her favorite.
    Debbie knew she wasn’t a debutante or anything close to it and that Anthony could have had any girl he wanted. Sometimes she still marveled that he had chosen her. She was glad that she had had the courage to tell him how she felt about him.
    She never minded that their relationship was all about him. Anthony had such great dreams for the future that she was happy to be part of them. When he told her he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and one day become a surgeon, Debbie knew that medical school and internship would take many years, but she was willing to wait. She promised Anthony that she would work and help him through med school if that’s what it took. They would be together forever and have the children she longed for—the children she believed he wanted, too.
     
    Remarkably, Debbie Rago and Anthony Pignataro ended up dating for seven years before their marriage—mostly a long-distance courtship. It would have been nice if they could have become engaged sooner than they did, but he explained to her that they would have to wait until he finished medical school. He needed to concentrate totally on his studies, he said, but he assured Debbie that being apart was as difficult for him as it was for her because he loved her completely.
    It turned out to be a very long-distance romance. To his shock, Anthony wasn’t accepted by any medical school on the mainland of the United States. The top universities accepted only about five percent of those who applied, looking for applicants who had the best grades and the most well-rounded personalities. Given the option of choosing a straight-A student with no other interests or extracurricular activities, and one with less than perfect grades but a broad base of friends and community service, the second possibility usually got the nod.
    Anthony Pignataro didn’t make the cut, probably because he had done little to prepare for the test, counting on his intelligence alone. He didn’t even come close. The MCAT scores for those chosen by Harvard’s med school averaged over 11, and Anthony’s were far below that.
    The only med school willing to take him was the nonaccredited San Juan Bautista School of Medicine in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico. One drawback to attending a Puerto Rican med