Free A Perfect Fit by Lynne Gentry

1
    M AGDALENA KADER PRESSED HER way through the medical staff clustered around the emergency room’s fuzzy television. “What? Did Tunisia declare a national holiday or something?”
    “Shhh. Princess Diana is about to get out of the carriage,” gushed Kaifah, a cow-eyed nurse’s aide engaged to a rug salesman and leaving her position in less than a month to set up a proper household. “Don’t you want to see her dress?”
    “I have work to do, and so do all of you.”
    Magdalena had been too busy working toward becoming a doctor to daydream about wedding dresses. She did, however, occasionally allow herself the luxury of imagining a happily married life raising a family. But the man would have to be someone special, someone who would not expect her to give up medicine and be a traditional housewife. Her work mattered, and she would apologize to no one for loving the opportunity to make a difference.
    She shuffled through a stack of charts, her blood pressure rising at the sour pout Kaifah hurled in her direction. It had taken centuries for women in her male-dominated culture to obtain the right to pursue careers outside of the home. Yet, nearly every one of them she came across would have thrown it all away to marry a prince.
    Magdalena quickly separated the charts into three stacks, based on triage. The first was a teenager with a sprained ankle. The ice pack would keep the swelling down until X-ray could work him in. She set the boy’s file in the third stack, which was for cases of lower priority, along with the files of a souk vendor covered in a fiery allergic rash and a tourist with what appeared to be a bad sinus infection. The second pile consisted of an elderly gentleman with stomach pain and a toddler with a bad cough. The first stack was reserved for the woman who had sliced an eggplant in two, along with her thumb. The bleeding had slowed when the nurse wrapped the injured digit with tight gauze, but the wound would require stitches.
    A hand clasped her shoulder. “Dr. Kader.”
    Magdalena’s heart jumped. “Father, you startled me.”
    He smelled of surgical Betadine, a testament to the long hours and the deep level of commitment that made him such an excellent doctor. The kind of doctor she hoped to become.
    “Sorry, Doctor.” He glanced over his shoulder, cleared his throat, and all those gathered around the television scattered. No one wanted to be caught loitering by the chief of cardiothoracic surgery. “You’d think the blasted Brits owned the world.” He peered over her shoulder. “What have we got today?”
    Magdalena gave him a rundown on the cases. “No cardiac. At least not yet,” she reported.
    “Just as well; I already have an aortic aneurysm repair on the board.”
    While everyone in the hospital feared Omar Kader, Magdalena’s earliest memories of her father were of him coming to gently wake her for school. He would set a tray before her. A hard-boiled egg and weak tea heavily creamed and sweetened with honey from the valley. While she ate, he would choose her socks, taking extra care to match the blue in her school uniform. He worked the hairbrush as deftly as he worked a suture needle, and her tangles would soon fall into a neat, thick braid that snaked down her back. She’d watch him slip into his white coat before they got into the backseat of the limo together, her hand in his, as he quizzed her on medical vocabulary.
    And then there was the year she turned twelve, the age when Tunisian mothers begin to seriously groom their daughters for marriage. Magdalena had suffered a broken heart at the hand of Jabir Abduallah.
    The gangly soccer player had knocked on her door, soccer ball twirling upon his long, slender fingers. “You’re still in your uniform?” He gave the ball another spin. “Change and come watch the game.”
    With clammy hands, she pressed the pleats of her woolen skirt, her heart beating wildly at the thought of the most handsome boy in the neighborhood