I didn’t look away. I had spent the last eighteen years building a spine of steel. At 63 years old, I had learned that looking fear in the eye is the only way to beat it. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me weak ever again.
“Well, well, well,” he said, walking toward me with that arrogant strut that time hadn’t managed to erase. It just made him look pathetic now, a bitter old man holding onto vanished youth. “If it isn’t Bernice. What a surprise finding you here. What’s the matter? Working as a janitor in the hospital now, huh? I always knew you’d end up like this, scraping by.”
I took a deep breath, feeling the anger rise but forcing it down under a layer of calm indifference. I wasn’t going to let him get to me.
“I’m just waiting for someone,” I answered calmly, my voice steady as I looked back down at my magazine, dismissing him.
“Waiting for who?” he sneered, leaning in closer, invading my personal space. “That son of yours? The one with the problems?”
He let out a bitter, mocking laugh that echoed in the quiet waiting room, drawing shocked looks from other patients.
“By the way, tell me one thing I’ve always been curious about,” he continued, his voice dropping to a malicious whisper. “Is that defective boy you insisted on raising still alive? Or did nature finally do the job you should have done and put him somewhere he wouldn’t be a burden to anyone?”
I closed the magazine slowly and deliberately, placed it on my lap, and stood up to face him. I looked him straight in the eyes. I didn’t feel rage anymore. I didn’t feel resentment. I just had a calm, chilling certainty that this man was about to receive the most brutal lesson of his existence.
He had no idea that the chief of medicine, the brilliant specialist who was currently being paged to save his daughter’s life in the ER, was exactly the same “defective” boy he had kicked out of the house eighteen years ago.
