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yet.”
    â€œI hope Gabriel won’t come in here to show me his worn-out tongue.”
    â€œVery funny.” Lauren smiled. “David, I admire your dedication, I really do. It’s just that when I see you with all these patients, and you hardly get paid, and in Boston you’d be—”
    â€œI know what I’d be.” He stood up to tilt up the blinds tight against the sun. To obscure things, Lauren couldn’t help thinking. To hide—how could she put it diplomatically?—the aesthetically challenged landscape outside the window. “Nobody in America can even afford to get sick,” he added.
    â€œI also believe in socialized medicine,” Lauren said earnestly. “I guess I believe in it more as a patient and less as a doctor’s wife . . . Anyway, what was wrong with that Ethiopian boy?”
    â€œIt was his mother who was sick. I sent her to the E.R. for tests. She doesn’t even know how old she is.”
    â€œBeth Israel was bad, but this seems worse.”
    â€œBecause they’re our people.”
    Lauren paused. She was a fourth-generation American. One of her great-grandfathers, Abraham Harding, had founded a temple in Boston that held services on Sunday instead of Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Lauren knew she was a Jew, she never pretended otherwise, but who were her people? Her funny, smart, easygoing Jewish friends at college who ate cheeseburgers, fasted until two o’clock on Yom Kippur, and made jokes throughout abridged Passover seders. Not the ragtag group of patients out in the waiting room.
    â€œYou’re still not giving it a chance,” David said. “Your mother spent her last visit here pointing out each man picking his nose at stoplights.”
    â€œThere were so many of them.”
    Now it was David’s turn to hold the silence.
    Lauren said, “My mother told me the other day that when a fund-raiser called her and asked for a donation to the UJA, she said she wasn’t going to donate any more money to Israel because she’d already donated a daughter .”
    That didn’t bring the laugh she’d hoped for. “I’d love it if we could do something fun, just the two of us, for even an hour or two,” she tried.
    â€œYou know what we’ll do? As soon as I close the clinic, I’ll take you for a motorcycle ride. We haven’t done that for a long time.”
    â€œThat would be so nice,” Lauren said. When was the last time they’d taken off and done something impromptu like that? That was one reason why she’d fallen in love with David. When he was in Boston, he made everything seem new and exciting. “Let’s goto the North End and eat Italian. Let’s go to Secret Squantum Park. Let’s go . . .” Now they were so caught up in their daughters and their jobs that they rarely had time together—alone—anymore.
    â€œWhy don’t you go home and wait for me and I’ll be back as soon as I can.” David rose and walked around the desk. “Come here.” He pulled her off the chair and kissed her.
    â€œIs this what you do with your other patients?”
    â€œLauren,” he whispered, his arms around her, “I just want you to be happy with me.”
    â€œI am happy with you.”
    â€œHere.”
    â€œ Here? ” She glanced around the office and he gave her such a look of exasperation that she apologized.
    â€œI didn’t mean right here in this room,” he said.
    A FEW MINUTES after leaving David’s office, Lauren was back on her bicycle, riding on the old army patrol road that ran along the shore. She looked down and saw sea foam throw itself over a ledge of flat rocks, glittering sunlight on turquoise-blue water, and farther out, the line of the horizon dissolving between the sea and cloudless sky. The heat was solid against her skin. When she reached the hill at the edge of Peleg, she stopped