I wonder if we’d left a half hour later, arriving fifteen minutes late for the appointment, how long we’d have to wait. I try to tell him, but he sits quiet, silent, nods without looking up. I finger the book I brought to read, not knowing what the doctor will be doing, how long it may take. It remains closed in my lap. I feel funny reading unless he takes a magazine and reads as well. I think he would think I didn’t care.
Across from us, another couple, older, marriage worn and silent, much like us. Now and then the man makes some remark about the time, the parking, the crowded waiting room. He is uncomfortable. Most of these men that sprawl or sit up rocket straight in hard waiting room chairs look very uncomfortable. Vulnerable.
The nurse calls out a name. Not his. We look around and a man sitting against the wall pushes himself out of his chair. The woman by his side makes a strange face, one of exasperation I think, but it is there and gone and he does not see it.
I look at my watch again and immediately feel badly. I don’t mean to make him think I am impatient. I look over at him, relieved–I think, relieved–that I don’t think he noticed. Two more people come in, take the clipboards and sit to write their lives on lines and spaces, checkmarked into all the boxes that apply. I’ve read everything my bifocular vision can discern on walls, in racks of pamphlets I was too embarrassed to read the first time we were here. Across from us, the woman uncrosses her legs, and something catches my attention. She has camel colored leather mules on her feet. Her toes poke through. It takes me a while to figure them out, but I decide she is missing the large toe on her right foot, and on her left, the large toe twists around in an odd right angle to her foot.
"I hope I don’t have to undress," she say to her husband. Here, in this waiting room, that doesn’t sound strange.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology