Free The Color of Family by Patricia Jones Page B

the other woman appeared, the one who’d been sittingnext to him with or without a baby in her womb, and said to the woman already standing there, “I had to have the same thing. My hormone levels were all over the place with my last two, and you know I lost a baby between those two, so Dr. Barrett is watching me like a hawk.”
    â€œShe’s good that way, isn’t she?” the red-haired woman said.
    â€œOh, the best,” the other woman said dramatically.
    The red-haired woman turned to Aaron. “You must be so proud.”
    â€œYes, proud. I am proud,” Aaron answered instinctively. And even if there had been time to ponder such an inquiry, he thought, pride would be as good a word as any to describe a feeling to which he’d never truly given much thought.
    â€œWell, I know what I’ll be talking about at dinner tonight,” the not-so-pregnant looking woman said. “I’m going to tell everybody how I was sitting in my doctor’s office and Aaron Jackson from Channel Eleven walks in and sits down, and he’s my doctor’s brother.”
    â€œI know exactly what you mean,” said the other woman. “Of all the places to see him.”
    Aaron smiled thinly and glanced over at Sharon, who regarded him with a certain empathetic smirk. And he thought that it must be more uncomfortable for those like Sharon, observing the fawning, than it was for him at this point in his life as a newsman because, to him, Sharon looked as if she wanted to crawl beneath her desk in shame on behalf of her entire gender. It was an embarrassment with which he could certainly find common ground, as it was no different than his reaction to the men he might see on any given summertime newscast in Orioles caps, or Orioles shirts, or simply dressed from head to toe in orange and black with an Orioles tattoo on their bicep babbling on like star-drunk fools about their devotion to Cal Ripken. But women like these, who will go home and turn a sighting of him into a large chunk of their dinner-hour talk, are a part of his life, and it didn’t much matter that, to him, there was very little about their fascination that made sense. All he could do was accept it graciously and be everything they expected him to be—and that, he knew, was something that varied from person to person, perception to perception, fantasy to fantasy.
    â€œAaron, Ellen said you can meet her in her office.” Nancy appeared, snapping him out of his revery.
    As he got up and went past Sharon’s desk, where Nancy stood with the remaining patient, he smiled and said, “Good luck with your baby.”
    â€œOh, thank you,” she gushed. “And it was certainly nice meeting you.”
    â€œLikewise,” was all Aaron said. And as he turned the corner to go into Ellen’s office, he heard the woman whisper to Nancy or Sharon, or both—he couldn’t tell—that he was much more handsome in person than he was on the television. He couldn’t help but feel the relief of having already passed by before she said this, otherwise he’d have to acknowledge the roundabout compliment.
    He stood in the aperture of Ellen’s office, waiting for her to look up from what she was writing. There was no doubt whatsoever that she knew he was standing there, but she would simply not respond in any way to his presence. It was as old as his memory of her as his sister, except that when she did it when they were kids, she’d do it with the sole purpose and hope that he would eventually go away, shoo, like the bothersome gnat he was to her. Why she did it now, though, he could only assign to her absolute obstinacy.
    But then, without looking up from what she wrote, Ellen finally griped, “Are you going to come in and sit down, or are you going to stand there watching me?”
    Aaron walked slowly into her office and over to the chair, and as he sat, said, “Why do you do