Phyllis Halldorson - A Wife For Dr. Sam

Kirsten regretted that she’d made her friend feel guilty. All Coralie had done was introduce a man and a woman who were good friends of hers, and whom she was sure would be compatible.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kirsten said gently. “You had no way of knowing Sam and I would be so antagonistic toward each other.”

Coralie shook her head. “That’s just it. I should have known. As I said before, it’s not you personally that he dislikes, it’s the fact that you’re a woman.”

Kirsten gasped. “You mean he doesn’t like women! But why would you—?”

Coralie looked as startled as Kirsten felt. “No, no, I didn’t mean that,” she hastened to say. “He likes women, but the one he fell in love with betrayed him and broke his heart.”

Kirsten sank back against the sofa. “Oh,” she exclaimed on a sigh. “You mean he’s divorced?”

“No, they’d been engaged for several years, but were waiting until he finished his internship before getting married.”

Kirsten found that hard to fathom. “But why—”

Coralie made a face. “Don’t ask me. Still, it’s not as if they were celibate all that time. They lived together while he was in medical school.”

Kirsten made a gesture of frustration. “I’ve never understood cohabitation. When a couple lives together, they make a strong commitment to each other whether they realize it at the time or not. They have most of the obligations of marriage but none of the legal protection, so why not take the vows?”

Coralie chuckled. “Hey, Ms. Old-Fashioned Gal, come on down off your soapbox. I’ve heard your fiery rhetoric before. In fact, as I remember, it was aimed at me once.”

“Yes, and you took my advice. If you’ll remember, you thanked me for it later. Said I’d saved you from making a big mistake.” Kirsten looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to preach. I just hate to see any woman allow herself to be put in a vulnerable position.”

“Well, don’t worry about Belinda,” Coralie said emphatically. “She was the one who broke it off and took Sam for everything she could. I don’t have all the details. He never talks about it, so all I know is what Jim’s told me and what I’ve learned from gossip the local citizens were eager to impart. In a small town like Copper Canyon everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

Kirsten’s curiosity was nagging at her. “Well, for heaven’s sake,” she said impatiently, “what happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Coralie began. “Her name was Belinda Evans, and her and Sam’s parents were close friends, so they’d known each other all their lives. They’d been best friends in elementary and middle school, sweethearts in high school and lovers in college. I gather that it wasn’t until his last year in medical school that the trouble between them erupted.”

“But if they were so much in love, why didn’t they get married?” Kirsten repeated.

Coralie rolled her eyes. “I told you, I don’t know. You know how college kids are. They like to be independent. Maybe Sam and Belinda were rebelling against authority, or maybe they wanted to make a statement. Who knows. I asked Jim one time and he said he didn’t know and hadn’t asked, implying that it was none of anybody else’s business.”

Kirsten smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. Well, I have to admit he’s right…So go ahead. What happened to break them up?”

“When Sam started medical school in Chicago, Belinda went along with him and they set up housekeeping together. The idea was for her to work and help support them, but her college degree was in humanities, which didn’t qualify her for much of anything unless she did graduate work. She had trouble finding a job, and when she did find one it was as an entry-level salesperson in a department store at only slightly above minimum wage.”

Kirsten was puzzled. “I understood Sam’s father was a physician. Couldn’t he pay for his son’s schooling?”

“Well, yes, he could and did,” Coralie explained, “but physicians in small communities aren’t as well paid as those in the cities, and the tuition to medical school is terribly expensive. Sam didn’t want to burden him with Belinda’s living expenses, too. After all, there were other children in the family who had to be educated.”

“Yes, I see,” Kirsten said. “Was it their financial problems that caused Sam and Belinda to break up?”

Coralie frowned. “No, actually it was the long hours of work and study his training required that finally did them in. She was lonely, irritable and desperately unhappy, when so many of his nights as well as his days were spent at the hospital.

“He tried to explain to her that this was the type of thing all medical students went through and there was nothing he could do about it, but by then she was beyond reason and started accusing him of seeing another woman.”

“She didn’t!” Kirsten protested. “Students always work gruelingly long hours in medical school and during their internship, to say nothing of residency if they decide to specialize.”

Coralie shrugged. “Not everyone knows that,” she pointed out. “You and I do because we also studied in the medical field, but Belinda had no such frame of reference. Her dad’s a blue-collar worker who got excellent technical training in an apprenticeship program but never went to college. She got a degree, but chose easy courses and only studied hard enough to get by. According to Jim, she didn’t really want to work. She wanted to marry a wealthy man who would support her.”

“Lazy, wasn’t she,” Kirsten muttered through tight lips. She’d heard enough to thoroughly dislike this woman.

“Afraid so,” Coralie agreed, “but according to Jim nobody dared say that to Sam. Jim tried it once and nearly got his head taken off. Sam was blindly in love and couldn’t or wouldn’t see her faults.”

“So what finally happened?” Kirsten prodded again.

Coralie’s tone and expression deepened to sadness. “Sam came home to their apartment one night to find Belinda gone. She’d taken all her things with her and left a note saying she couldn’t live the way they were any longer.”

Coralie’s voice broke. “He had some critically important exams coming up in the next few days and couldn’t take time off to track her down and beg her to come back. By the time he found her a couple of weeks later she’d married a man who, he learned belatedly, had been keeping her company during the long hours when Sam was at the hospital.”

A surge of compassion for Sam temporarily displaced the anger Kirsten had been feeling. “What a rotten thing for a woman to do to a man!” she said indignantly. “He must have been devastated.”

“He was,” Coralie confirmed, “and he never got over it. Oh, he doesn’t dwell on it, but neither has he had anything but superficial relationships with any woman since. That’s why I was so eager to get you and him together. You’re so right for each other, but obviously he wants no part of it.”

Kirsten’s tender heart hurt for Sam, who had been so badly treated by this spoiled and selfish woman. She wished she could hold him, comfort him, take away the lingering pain, but that was her nurturing instinct reacting, not her good sense.

In fact, it was all the more reason for her to steer clear of him. She was too vulnerable to him, too empathetic to his anguish, and she sure didn’t want to get mixed up in that quagmire!

“You can’t blame him, can you?” Kirsten said. “He might never completely trust a woman again. I wish I could help him, but I can’t. Nobody can, until he admits he needs it and asks for it.”

She paused for a moment and softened her tone. “And, Coralie, you’re not doing the women you set him up with any favor by trying to interest him in another relationship. He’ll just drive them away like he did me.”