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drank
coffee in the morning, but the warmth and caffeine would be
comforting now.
    With her back to me, Maggie said, “I
apologize for my son, Poppy. He can be very…intense. And don’t
worry about your job. I don’t want you to leave, and I’m the
patient, right?” She winked at me over her shoulder.
    I offered a weak smile and asked the
question that I’d been stewing over since meeting Ford. “Why is he
so angry? I understand he’s having a hard time accepting your
illness, but it seems like he really hates me.”
    Maggie set a mug down in front of me
and left the room. When she returned a moment later, she was
holding a large photo album. Sitting down next to me she opened it
to the first page. Taking a sip of my coffee I looked over the
pictures of a much younger Maggie holding a baby boy.
    “Ford wasn’t always this way. He was
such a happy baby, always smiling.” She flipped to the next page to
reveal Ford as a toddler, with lighter hair and the same striking
blue eyes. There was a man, who I assumed to be his father, in the
pictures as well. Maggie continued to flip through the pages of
Ford as a child looking happy, and I realized I had never seen the
grown up Ford smile.
    When we reached the time when Ford
looked to be about seven or eight years old, the man disappeared
from the pictures and only Maggie remained.
    “Ford’s father left when he was seven.
We had been high school sweethearts, and apparently he was bored
with our life,” Maggie explained. I knew what it was like to lose a
father at a young age, though I had never had to experience the
feeling that my father just didn’t want me.
    “After Ford’s father left, I had to
work two jobs to keep up with the bills. This was the only home
Ford had known, and I didn’t want him to lose that too. I thought
signing him up to play football would keep him busy and out of
trouble.”
    One of the reasons I wanted to be in
the health care field was that I felt like I was really able to
empathize with people. And right now it was like I could feel the
pain that Ford would have felt as a child.
    Maggie got up to pour herself a cup of
coffee while I continued looking through the album. Nearly all of
the pictures that followed were of Ford in a football uniform, from
seven years old all the way through high school. I was glad I
didn’t know him then, or I would have had a serious crush on him. I
snorted quietly. Like I didn’t have a crush on him now.
    Maggie sat back down and continued
Ford’s life story. “He was very good,” she said, pointing at an
action shot of Ford on the field getting ready to throw a pass. How
had I never watched football before? He looked seriously hot in his
uniform.
    “He was going all the way. From high
school to college and then to the NFL.”
    Wow, I had no idea he
was that good.
Since he was currently tending bar and not playing in the NFL, I
braced myself for the unhappy ending to this story.
    “It’s coming up on three years now
since he broke his leg - a career ending injury,” Maggie said
quietly. “His football career ended that day, and his hopes and
dreams with it. He hasn’t been the same since.” She looked so sad
that I reached over and covered her hand with mine.
    “I’m sorry, Maggie. That would be very
difficult to get over such a disappointment,” I said.
    She shook her head. “He won’t watch
football anymore or even talk about it. His friends and I have
probably enabled him to hide from it by tiptoeing around the
subject. But looking back I think we may have done more harm than
good. It probably would have been better to force him to deal with
it and move on.”
    Ford seemed to be the epitome of
stubborn, and I doubted he would have faced his issues before he
was ready. But what struck me most was that he had friends, which I
let slip out without thinking.
    “He has friends?”
    Maggie must have laughed for two
minutes at my question. “Yes, Poppy. He does have friends, although
they all