Widow’s Walk by Robert B. Parker

silence didn’t make you uncomfortable. It was somehow natural to him. Susan was silent, too. That didn’t make me uncomfortable either, but it wasn’t natural to her. She had already drunk the first little martini, which was sort of a pale green, and had begun on the pink one. This, too, wasn’t natural to her. Normally she would nurse those three little martinis for the night. It looked like the conversation was up to me and Estelle.
    “You’re a doctor?” I said.
    “Yes. I run a fertility clinic in Brookline.”
    “Been running one of those most of my life,” Hawk said.
    “I know,” Estelle said. “And it’s fine work that you do.”
    The waitress came and took our order. Susan seemed not very interested in the menu. She said she’d have what I had. The black river glistened in the light sprawl from the city. I could see the Citgo sign, which had become famous solely by being visible behind the left-field wall at Fenway. To the right the gray towers of Boston University stuck up too high.
    “You okay,” I said to her softly.
    She shook her head.
    “Want to talk about it?”
    She shook her head again.
    “Want to go home?”
    Shake.
    I patted her thigh. She picked up the pink martini and finished it. There were tears in her eyes.
    I said, “Hey.” And put my arm around her shoulders. Probably the wrong move. She’d been holding it together before that. Now she began to cry. There was no noise. Just tears on her face and her shoulders shaking. I tried to pull her a little closer so she could cry against my chest. She didn’t want to. We sat for a moment with my arm around her, patting her far shoulder.
    “You like to be alone?” Hawk said.
    Susan shook her head.
    We were quiet. Susan took her napkin from her lap and wiped her eyes.
    “Is my makeup fucked?” she said.
    Estelle looked at Hawk. Hawk smiled.
    “She coming out of it,” he said.
    “You look fine,” I said.
    “I’m sorry to be such a jackass,” Susan said.
    “Is there anything I can do?” Estelle said.
    “No. Thank you.”
    “You want to talk?” I said. “You want to leave it be?”
    “I don’t want to talk,” Susan said, “but I fear that I must. You can’t suddenly burst into tears in the middle of dinner and offer no explanation.”
    “You can if you want to,” I said.
    Susan shook her head. “I lost a patient today,” she said.
    No one said anything. Estelle looked like she might, but Hawk put his hand on her thigh and she didn’t.
    “A boy, nineteen years old. He killed himself.”
    “Did you know he was suicidal?” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “Are you feeling that you should have done more and better?”
    “Of course.”
    “Do you know why he killed himself?”
    “He was gay, and he didn’t want to be,” she said. “That’s why he was seeing me. He desperately wanted to be straight.”
    “Isn’t that a little outside the scope of your service?” I said.
    As she talked she began to focus on the subject, as she always did, and in doing so she came back into control.
    “It is hideously incorrect to say that one can help people change their sexual orientation. But in fact I have had some success, in doing just that.”
    “Helping gay people to be straight?” Estelle was startled.
    “Or straight people to be gay. I’ve had some success doing both. The trick is over time to find out where they want to go, and where they can go, and try to achieve one without violating the other.”
    “I’ve never heard that,” Estelle said.
    She was genuinely interested, but there was that sound in her voice that doctors get which says, in effect, “If I haven’t heard of it, it’s probably wrong.”
    “No one is willing to incur the vast outrage that would ensue,” Susan said.
    “It’s your experience,” Hawk said.
    “One ought not to have such an experience,” Susan said. “And if one were stupid enough to have it, one should surely not talk about it.”
    “Shrinks, too,” I said.
    “Hard to believe,”