Once at the end of the line, he stopped, jammed the handle down on his suitcase, and sat on it. Finally at rest, he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat sluicing down over his caramel-colored cheekbones, collecting in his five o’clock shadow that appeared to be much grayer than his jet-black hair. The past two days had been a blur of surgeries, patient complaints over rescheduled procedures and appointments, Cathleen’s cries and worries over her ailing brother, babies crying in the night, airports, mad dashes across terminals all to get here. Here. Los Angeles. Again. It hadn’t really hit him till he exited the sliding doors of the airport. Till he inhaled the air, though it was not so different from the noisome air he’d left back at LaGuardia. He hadn’t fully embraced what it meant to be back in the city that brought with it so many memories, not to mention the life he now had. The life he could hardly have imagined for himself just five years earlier. Ever since he’d met Cathleen, her sick boy Colm, and her brother Sean, life as he knew it had been a similar blur—a mad dash from one destination to another.
