*8*

When Bob awoke, his chest hurt. Not terribly: just a minor, dull pain. He arose slowly from the bed and sat on the edge, pausing briefly. Maybe from too many pushups? He breathed in deeply. Hmm, no worse when inhaling. Somewhat like indigestion ... as if he had swallowed a golfball and gotten it stuck a few inches behind his heart. Well, I'll go to work and see how it goes. During his shower, he massaged his chest, turned the knob towards hot and deeply inhaled the steam. Hmm, no change. He got out of the shower and dried off. Maybe it has to do with my back. Lately he had been wrangling with a pinched nerve or a compressed disk: something in his back concerned him.

He reviewed the tasks at hand for today. Reconciling the weekly disbursements run. Verifying that formal testing progressed. Oh yeah, I have to help Denise move her stuff to a new office. Man, this isn't getting any better. His chest still hurt - it seemed worse when he was active, or bent over in awkward positions. Oh Lord, help me. Give me the guidance to do the right thing. Geesh, I better go see a doctor. He had a vacation starting next week - maybe that would allow him time to recover.

Denise passed him in the hallway, "Good morning." Bob grunted and nodded back. Denise went into the bathroom; Bob headed into the bedroom and got dressed. With Denise in the shower, it would be a good time to call the doctor's office for an appointment. He described his complaint, the nurse asked him to come in at 4:30. He looked around for his wristwatch. Hmmm, where the heck did I put it? Probably in the gym bag, he thought. Denise left the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her; Bob went into the kitchen to make breakfast for himself.

We're drifting apart. It doesn't seem like a big deal, really. Relationships change, people go through stages of getting close or moving farther apart. It's just that we've grown accustomed to one another. Which is a good thing, quite natural, really. So we don't spend as much time as we used to catering to each other's fancies.

"Hey Deni," Bob said, "I've got some errands to run after work today, so I'm going to drive my own car in, okay?"

"Okay, no problem," came Denise's voice from the bedroom. "I wanted to do some shopping at the mall after work, anyway," she added.

Work was the same old same-old. As it took his mind off his chest pain, at least it served as a reasonable distraction. He extracted the report from the weekly disbursement run, imported it into a spreadsheet and then into his reconciliation database. He loaded the worksheet from Accounting with the manual checks, added the totals, and compared it to the summary claim run.

Hmm, off by several thousand dollars. Typical. He sorted the checks by account and ran a comparison to narrow down the field. Probably a voided check that Carol forgot to enter.

A twang of Denise remembrance circled past his memory. What to do. Probably ask her out for a nice romantic brunch or something. Maybe buy her some nice jewelry, a ring perhaps.

Denise stopped by his desk. "So, are you going to give me a hand here?" Denise inquired. She had a cardboard box in her hands, filled with listings, a stapler and some highlighter pens.

"Sure," Bob said, saving his worksheet. As he got up, he noticed the pain in his chest again. At some point he would have to tell Denise. Anyway, it would become apparent after a while that he wasn't fully up to speed.

Bob helped Denise move boxes from her old cubicle to her new cubicle. He mused to himself: Junk is the stuff that you throw away. Stuff is the junk that you keep. For Denise, that's certainly true. She kept reams and reams of tick-marked reports, in case she ever needed to go back to them. The stuff's all on-line, anyway: it would take more time to page through the paper to find something than to look it up on the screen. Anyway, the stuff gives her a sense of security, makes her feel like she has a place. It was the professional clothing she wore at work. So he helped her move it.

After work, Bob said "Hey, I've got to leave early for a few errands, see you back at home later?" It was half a question, half a statement.

Denise nodded.

On the drive to the doctor, Bob ruminated over his chest pains. Maybe it wasn't too serious, and the doctor could just prescribe some kind of medicine, nitroglycerin or something, or a narcotic to ease the pain. At any rate, what was the worst that could happen? Maybe some angioplasty or something? Shit. It must have been his crappy diet. Too much fat. That plus Denise's cooking. She didn't realize it, (she did it out of love) but the high-fat butter-rich baking, the tortillas, the cheese, it was all coming back to haunt him now. Plus, he had to admit, being out of shape didn't help. Time to get my butt to a gym or something.