"You left the profession by choice. We've established that."
"Okay, so I walked out the door with my eyes open. What did I choose instead? What am I good at? Name one thing."
He balked. I knew he would. Doc Homer wasn't fluent in the language of compliments.
"I have no career, no kids, not even a place I consider home. Basically I'm a bag lady with an education."
"That's a preposterous assessment."
"How would you know? You don't really see me, you just see what you want. You take pictures of people and turn them into rock walls."
"That is not what I do. I begin with a picture in my head, from the past. I try to duplicate it from the images I have at hand."
This was a new one. "I don't believe I give a damn about the images you have at hand." I lowered my voice. The quickest way to lose points with Doc Homer was to lose control. I said, "You always just wanted Hallie and me to be above everybody in Grace."
"You were above your peers."
I snorted at that. "I was as trashy as Connie Munoz and Rita Cardenal, without half their guts or one-tenth of their sex appeal. I was ugly and embarrassed to be alive."
Doc Homer had a strange way of actually getting quieter when he raised his voice. "My daughters were not trash," he said.
I looked him square in the eye. "I got pregnant when I was fifteen."
"I know. I watched you bury the baby in the riverbed."
I felt an odd flush in my neck and face. For about a minute we both listened to the dripping of the coffeepot. Then I said, "Why do you lie about everything?"
"I've never told you anything but the truth."
"You've never told me anything, period. You said you and mother came from Illinois. But you came from here. You've got a whole family lying up there in the damn graveyard."
"We did come here from Illinois. I was stationed there, and went to medical school there. We moved back here after the war."
"What kind of war had people stationed in Illinois?" I asked absurdly, close to tears. "I'm sorry, but in history class they never told us about the Midwestern Front."
"Alice's family despised me."
I stopped, remembering how Viola had averted her eyes and said, "that family went downhill," the day. I discovered Homero Nolina up in the cemetery. The red-haired Gracela sister with the temper, who married Conrado Nolina and produced a legacy of trash-that was my father's family. What he believed he came from, and what we still were. Auburn-haired and angry, living in exile in our own town. There wasn't enough air in the kitchen for me to breathe, and get all this in.
"So you, what, ran off to the army. Got yourself educated on the G.I. Bill, and then came back here as the mighty prodigal doctor with his beautiful new wife, and acted like nobody could touch you."
I watched him closely, but could read nothing. I couldn't even see him, really; I had no idea how he'd look to a stranger. Old? Sick? Mean-spirited? He poured coffee into two mugs and gave the larger one to me.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome."
"Why did you come back here? If it was so important to you to start over, you could have gone anywhere. You could have stayed back there in Illinois."
Doc Homer sat down opposite me. He clenched and unclenched his left hand, then spread it flat on the table and examined it abstractly, as if it were a patient. I looked at the framed photograph on the wall over his head: his portrait of a hand that wasn't a hand, but five cacti with invisible spines.
"Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?" he asked me suddenly. "When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?"
I shook my head. "No, but I've watched. I know what you mean." The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
"The seat of human emotion should be the liver," Doc Homer said. "That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers."
I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left.