“You could say that. Plus I wanted to get rich, and I knew medicine was the best way to do that. Everyone gets sick. It’s the one commodity that people will pay any price for—health.”
“Why is being rich so important to you?” she asked.
“Have you ever been poor?” His voice was flat. “I’m talking empty pantry, no electricity, ice-cold house in winter poor.”
She considered the handful of times she had overheard her parents arguing over a pricey grocery bill here, or a late mortgage payment there. But never had their pantry gone empty, their lights flickered out, or their rooms grown frigid in the dead of winter.
“No, I guess not.”
“Then nothing I say will help you understand why it’s so important to me that I never go through that again,” he said bluntly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking his hand in hers.
It was the first time she’d seen a soft side of him, and for the first time since meeting him, she actually felt something for him. Pity. Sorrow. It was hard to differentiate which.
“I understand why you don’t like me.” His voice was reedy as he turned to her with a glum expression. “I’m sure you have all kinds of predispositions about me. But I’m wagering only half of them are factual.”
“And the other half?”
“Mildly accurate.”
“Such as?” Sam asked as the crowd surged to their feet. She looked around, trying to figure out what all the commotion was about, then noticed the Pirates’ score climb by one point.
“My mother was a genius. And perfect in every way. Though my father made sure to keep her in her place. It’s why she took her life.”
While Sam’s maternal genius speculation was accurate, she would have never guessed Thomas had suffered such a significant loss to suicide.
“How heartbreaking.” She paused, uncertain if it was appropriate to ask the question nagging her. “Do you agree with your father—that her place was to hide her brilliance?”
“If it meant she didn’t make my father look like a fool, yes.”
Sam sat on that for a long moment before asking, “How old were you?”
“I had just graduated high school. Then my father took his life a few months later.”
“That’s terrible.”
She wanted to ask how it happened, but his tone—so dark and low and strange—warned her to go no further.
He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I’ve learned since then that we can never understand someone else’s experience. All we can do is harden our hearts to others and it doesn’t hurt so much.”
“Do you really believe that?”
The truth was that Sam could relate. As tragedy after tragedy struck her family, she had learned not to dare dream for anything good in life, because the price for it was usually too high. In Thomas’s case he learned not to dare love anyone, because the aftermath was usually heartbreak. We all had our hang-ups.
“That’s why I was a womanizer,” he said matter-of-factly. “Past tense.”
“Oh?”
“Not anymore. Because of you,” he added. “Something about you, Samantha—”
“Sam—” she corrected. If he was going to profess his love for her, he might as well use her preferred name.
“Sam,” he said abruptly. “You inspire me. You make me believe in something greater than sex.”
It almost sounded like he thought she was the opposite of sexy, which made her laugh because she genuinely didn’t care what he thought of her. It was liberating.
“Should I be thanking you for that?”
“I mean that in a good way. You challenge my mind, Sam. No woman has ever done that before, only you and my mother. Maybe that’s why I like you so much—you remind me of her.”
“You must not know very many women then. There are a lot of us who are deeper than we appear and more intuitive than you assume.”
For example, upon first glance at Sam’s mother, one might assume she was a simple woman who loved makeup and could cook a killer chicken a la king (no pun intended). But the reality was that Minnie Stanton was an artist who could recontour a face with a handful of simple ingredients and few simple strokes of a brush.
Or take Miss Posey, a woman who rarely left her house and was famous for her gossip. But Sam saw beneath that and discovered she was quite the weather geek, inventing an anemometer from soup cans and a hygrometer from milk bottles.
“I don’t know about that. You’re not like most women,” he said, then added, “and by the way, you should smile more. You’re more attractive when you smile.”
Sam didn’t like when people lumped all women into one mold, and she hated when people told her to smile, as if her teeth were purely for their entertainment.
“Your turn,” he said, his voice wooden in stark contrast to the rising emotions around them. “Tell me about your parents.”
“Must I?” She dreaded telling her own story.
“It’s only fair.”
“Well, my father died a few years ago, and my mother visits too often and sells Avon and makes women beautiful for a living.”
