Free The Seduction - Art Bourgeau by Art Bourgeau

not
forgiven her. She took off the lab coat, folded it carefully and put
it back on the stack with the others. Before she could take a fresh
nurse's uniform from the stack the door to the linen closet opened
and one of the secretaries stuck her head in.
    "There you are. Dr. Pollack would like to see
you before you change."
    "I'll be right there," Missy said.
    Nathan Pollack, her father's partner, was not alone
in his office. Waiting with him was his wife Beverly, whose stare was
frigid. In Missy's view God had never created a more repellent couple
than the Pollacks. Why her father had chosen him as a partner was
beyond her. As a couple the Pollacks reminded her of Laurel and
Hardy, minus the humor. Nathan Pollack was the straight. She had
never heard anyone, including her father, call him "Nate."
He was a small man who wore glasses with the kind of mock aviator
frames favored by men who carried pockets full of pencils, a man who
wore T-shirts under his Izod on the golf course. For Nathan Pollack a
spontaneous act was to drive his black BMW into town without an
umbrella on the back seat. But Nathan was a regular peach compared to
Beverly, who offended Missy's sensibilities with her abundance of
facial hair, two hundred and counting pounds and smothering breasts.
Nathan rose from behind his desk and indicated a chair for Missy as
though he was trying to sell it to her.
    "Sit, sit, please."
    His voice sounded shaky. She wondered why.
    He sat back down. "Let me say again—and I'm
sure I speak for everyone in the practice, especially Beverly and
myself—how sad we are about Cyrus."
    She instantly resented his using her father's first
name, reserved for a few close friends. Nathan might have been a
partner but never a friend or confidant.
    "I hope the time off helped some."
    "Yes," she said, holding back to keep from
saying it didn't help to see his wife bulling her way through the
buffet with a crab claw in one hand and enough food to feed Philly's
homeless in the other.
    "Good . . . well, to bring you up to date, while
you were gone we have made a few changes—"
    "What sort of changes?"
    "As you know, your father was a brilliant
physician—"
    "Yes, I know. Can we cut to the chase, Nathan?"
    "I beg your pardon."
    "Sorry, just some jargon I picked up."
    "Yes . . . well, as I was about to say, without
your father the practice will undoubtedly suffer. And to avoid future
financial problems, we dismissed four of the girls in the office."
    This was what he was so tentative about. When her
father was alive he generated enough work for at least four girls;
with out him there was no need to keep them. It made sense but the
way they did it bothered her. She had little doubt firing them while
she was away was Beverly's idea.
    "If I remember correctly, you only own
twenty-five percent of the practice," she said.
    "Not anymore. When your father died I bought out
his share of the practice."
    "What? That doesn't make sense—"
    "I would have thought you knew we had a buy-out
agreement. Whichever one died first, the other bought his share."
    His tone was the same pseudo-compassionate one he
used in telling testicular cancer patients that their balls had to
come off. His bad-news voice. It made her sick.
    "Tell me all about it," she said, trying to
sound calm.
    "It's simple. We had an agreement and insurance
policies. When Cyrus died the insurance company paid your mother two
and a half million dollars, and she signed over to me your father's
stock in the practice."
    "What about the other assets, the property?"
    "Your townhouse and car went to your mother. All
according to the agreement. The rest—the cabin, the house at the
shore, the condo in St. Martin—stays with the practice."
    "And you own it all—"
    "Which brings me to my next point." Oh, he
was loving this. The segundo now numero uno. "In the interest of
cash flow, our accountant has recommended that Beverly take over
running the office and you be in charge of the lab."
    "The