W Is for Wasted

stretched out his hand on the table and she laced her fingers into his. “Speaking of which, I’ve got a surprise. I wasn’t going to tell you, but it occurred to me I better give you fair warning.”
    He removed the brochure from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table, elaborating as he went. He showed her the route along the Danube, pointing out some of the stops on the itinerary; Budapest, Vienna, Passau. He was honest about not having the entire sum set aside, but he was getting there, he said. She didn’t seem as excited as he’d hoped, but the idea might take some getting used to. They’d never traveled abroad. Europe was just a rumor as far as they were concerned. They had passports, which they were careful to keep renewed, but they’d never had occasion to use them. Her spirits seemed to pick up as he told her about the accommodations. He had ways of making it seem real; not an extravagance but something they deserved after forty years of being happily married and careful about the money they spent. They finished lunch. He cleared the table and made quick work of the dishes. By the time he left for his run to Colgate, she was her usual sunny self again and he felt better. No point in being depressed when there was so much to look forward to.
    • • •
    The meeting with Linton Reed started off on a bad note. Pete reached the university in ample time, but he was forced to drive around the campus in search of the Health Sciences Building, which he hadn’t spotted on the map he’d picked up at the campus information center. He pulled a ticket from the dispenser and circled the lot until he found a parking space. On reaching the clinic’s administrative offices, he made a point of asking to have his parking ticket validated. In the event the conversation didn’t go well, he didn’t want to get stuck paying the campus parking fees. The department secretary didn’t approve of his being there, but she didn’t have the nerve to refuse to validate his ticket. She pasted three stickers to the back. He took a sly satisfaction from her dislike of him, which she could barely conceal.
    To retaliate, Pete was made to wait thirty-five minutes before he was escorted down the hall and allowed into His Holy Presence. The good doctor was handsome; smooth cheeks, clear blue eyes, fleshy lips, and a nose with a slight upward tilt to it. His was the kind of face most would trust. Dr. Reed’s first glimpse of Pete had generated a nearly imperceptible flicker of surprise in the good doctor’s eyes. Pete caught it. He always caught that look.
    Linton Reed observed him with clinical detachment and Pete could see his mental processes at work. Dr. Reed had doubtless read about Pete’s disorder in medical texts, but this might have been the first real live instance he’d come across. Naturally, that would make Pete a curiosity. Dr. Reed said, “Which of your parents suffered from Marfan syndrome?”
    “My father,” Pete said. He felt an instant dislike for the young man, who apparently thought his being a doctor entitled him to probe Pete’s genetic history when the two had only just been introduced. Marfan was an autosomal dominant condition, which meant that a defective gene from only one parent was needed to pass the disease on. It also meant that each child of an affected parent has a 50-50 chance of inheriting the defective gene. It annoyed Pete that in his “doctor” role, Linton Reed had adopted a deeper tone of voice. This was meant to underscore his authority, conveying the rights vested in him as a medical wizard entitled to pry into everybody else’s private business.
    The good doctor probably hoped to open up a whole discussion of Pete’s condition, but Pete had something else on his mind. Linton Reed was a charmer and fully accustomed to exercising his personal magnetism. He was a sheepdog at heart. He looked harmless, but he couldn’t resist herding his fellow man. He’d been born with an unerring instinct for bending others to his will. Pete had had a dog like that once, a border collie named Shep who just couldn’t help himself. Take a walk in the woods with friends and Shep would dash ahead and behind, keeping everyone together whether they wanted that or not. The urge was inbred and the implication was always that the dog knew better than you did.
    Pete loathed the man sitting across the desk from him. He remembered prigs like him in grade school, smart, but soft from sitting on their