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I was gawking at the man, amazed. I had thought he looked young but put it down to a good skin-care regime and his dark complexion being naturally blemish free. He couldn’t have been older than thirty-one or thirty-two, and he was already the head of Orthopedic Surgery?
“Wow.”
Jonah rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully, and I turned my head away. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed. I wasn’t quite the boy genius he had clearly been, but I knew what it was like to be spotlighted because of your accomplishments. I didn’t know what to say to break the steadily building ice but apparently Howard did.
“You know, you look a lot like your father.”
Previously, it had been a sore subject, but now, it was welcome.
“You’re not wrong there,” I laughed. “When I was little I wanted to look like my mother, though.”
“Oh?”
I saw my father’s face turn toward me, listening for what I might say. He thought I was about to out him as an absentee parent.
“My mother is gorgeous. She has this beautiful, straight black hair, and really pale, clear skin.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I was picked on for my freckles, you know.”
Howard and Angela chuckled. On seeing this, my father let out a steady laugh. It made my skin crawl, seeing him pretend like that, but I was used to it.
“Well, I think you look perfectly lovely,” the other woman—Dr. Louise Etcitty, head of Antenatal Surgery—said. “God knows the number of women in the hospital that have fallen for your father’s good looks!”
They all chuckled together, like it was some kind of inside joke, but I couldn’t find it particularly funny. My father’s eyes met mine, and in them was a warning not to mention my mother.
“Oh, stop harassing the poor girl!” a graying man I was introduced to as Dr. Ben Goose cried. “She doesn’t want to think of her father like that! Why don’t you tell us all a little about yourself? What area do you want to go into?”
I tried not to sound too confident, since I’d been told plenty of times that my mind would probably be changed once I was on the floor.
“Cardiothoracics,” I said.
Howard looked at me thoughtfully. “You should definitely speak to our Head of Cardiothoracic Surgery; he’ll be here soon. He’s a decent guy and will talk about his specialty to anyone who listens.”
“The man’s an ass,” Angela said blatantly.
“Angela!” Louise exclaimed. “He’s a brilliant surgeon!”
“That doesn’t stop him being an ass,” she declared, and Jonah nodded.
“Even I have to admit that he can be an arrogant S.O.B when he wants to,” Jonah interjected. “And I’m his best friend. You just like him because he’s so pretty.”
“His prettiness has nothing to do with it!” Louise argued, but her cheeks flushed red.
“I’m surprised a man like him has the highest level of good outcomes—every time he walks in a room the women just about have a heart attack,” Angela offered.
Louise scoffed, but I just wondered what the man was really like. Could I stand to work under someone that Jonah described as an “arrogant S.O.B”? I’d have to make do and grit my teeth. A good working relationship always made a long day just that much better, so I hoped I could find common ground with the mysterious Head of Cardiothoracics.
I sipped at the coffee in front of me and blinked at my father. All of his colleagues seemed like genuinely nice people, the kind of people I could get along with once they weren’t my bosses anymore, and they seemed to think the same of him. Was my father still the gruff, impatient man I had known for my whole life, or was that just his reaction to being presented with a daughter? I couldn’t believe that after twenty-four years of life, I was somehow still trying to make him proud.
Now wasn’t the time I could stop trying either. With him as the Chief of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, I couldn’t get lax about my efforts. He was officially the man who could decide what path my future would take. Well, him and the mystery man that was neglecting this brunch in order to be somewhere else.
I stayed quiet for the next ten minutes, drinking coffee and nibbling on some kind of salmon-tasting finger sandwich. I couldn’t deny that a free meal definitely made things better. I let the people around me chatter without input, and I was pleased that although they discussed the goings-on of what would be my new workplace, they weren’t gossiping.
“Her baby is the sweetest, I swear,” Jonah would say, and the others would nod in agreement.
“I really think these reforms need to be put in place for patient wellness,” Angela stated, and someone else calmly provided a countering point-of-view.
It was rather awesome to watch them all discuss things like rational adults. No matter how grown up everyone in school had pretended to be, they had all been competing, subtly trying to strangle each other under the weight of education. Everyone wanted to be first. Here, they were all at the top of their game and didn’t feel the need to fight. I hoped that would last. For all I knew, they were trying to make a good impression on the boss’s daughter, only being civil for the sake of their own reputations.
“Oh! Speak of the devil!” Jonah cried, standing and pulling me from my reverie.
