“So you went to Columbia thanks to Roger,” Ellie said, smiling; then she exchanged looks with Leslie.
“Yes,” Madison answered. “But when I got there, I was much too shy to introduce myself to Roger’s friend’s brother.” Smiling, Madison looked down for a moment. “I’m not sure either of you saw it in our one brief meeting so long ago, but I used to believe that I wasn’t . . . Well, I guess you’d say that I didn’t believe that I was of the class of people who went to medical school.”
“I never noticed that, did you, Leslie?” Ellie said, with her eyes wide in feigned innocence.
“I certainly never thought you were less than brilliant,” Leslie said, smiling.
“You two are great for my ego,” Madison said. “But, anyway, I think it was Roger’s letters telling me about something that had happened to him that made me choose my specialty, and because of that, I met my wonderful teacher, Dr. Dorothy Oliver. And, by some one-in-a-million chance, it turned out that her nephew was the friend’s brother who Roger had written me about.”
Madison waited for a moment as though she expected this extraordinary coincidence to garner exclamations from Leslie and Ellie, but, instead, they sat there silently, waiting for her to continue.
“So I finally met Thomas in my second year in med school,” Madison continued, “and we hit it off immediately. He helped me every step of the way through school and we were married the day after I graduated.”
Ellie and Leslie leaned back in their chairs, smiling in satisfaction.
“And you have children,” Leslie said, not as a question but a statement. Happiness sounded in her words.
“Yes, four of them,” Madison said, still smiling. “Both Thomas and I would have a dozen if we could. We love kids. They make life worth living. If I didn’t have them . . .” She looked up. “Well, anyway, I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t have Thomas and the children. Sometimes I think that we were all made for each other, that if we didn’t have one another, that there wouldn’t be anyone else for us. Does that make sense?”
“More sense than you can possibly imagine,” Leslie said.
“So now all of you live in New York?” Ellie asked.
“No,” Madison said. “Didn’t I tell you—Oh, right. You don’t remember anything. The lot of us live in Montana, in Erskine. We have a clinic there.”
Ellie had once researched clinics in small towns, and she knew that they made little money. Without thinking, she said under her breath, “That’s right. Thomas was wealthy.”
“Oh, no,” Madison said quickly. “It was my money that we used for the clinic. What money Thomas has is tied up in trust for the children.”
“From modeling,” Leslie said pointedly to Ellie. “She earned the money from modeling.”
“No,” Madison said; then she looked down at her cup of coffee for a moment. The waitress had taken their plates and refilled their coffee cups. “You two are going to think this is strange, but I made the money in the stock market. It was weird, but I could look at a list of companies that were on the stock exchange and I seemed to know which stocks were going to go up.”
For a moment she looked at the other two women, as though waiting for them to express surprise at this, but when neither of them said anything, Madison continued. “It started out innocently enough. One day one of my fellow medical students was reading aloud about the stock market and I told him which stocks were going to go up. It was as though I knew which products were going to catch the imagination of the American people.”
When neither Leslie nor Ellie replied to this, Madison went on. “I began investing what I could spare from the catalog modeling work that I did while I went to school.” Madison paused to take a sip of her coffee. “And when the Internet started, I invested heavily. I was sure that thing was going to do well!”
Again, she paused; then, looking up, she gave them a brilliant smile. “To make a long story short, I made millions.”
Still, she saw no shock on the faces of Ellie and Leslie.
“I felt that I owed my hometown a lot because, if it hadn’t been for their sending me to New York, who knows what would have happened to me? I might have ended up never leaving the place and marrying some guy I hated and . . .” She trailed off, as though the idea were too ridiculous to pursue.
“Anyway, I talked to Thomas about what I wanted to do, and he agreed wholeheartedly, so we invested most of the money in equipment to start a clinic in Erskine. We practiced general medicine for
a year or so, but we always knew that we wanted to go into rehabilitation medicine, which is my love. So now, Thomas and I have a small hospital with six physical therapists working for us.”
Smiling, she leaned back in her chair. “And you know something? The clinic is not only paying its way, but we make a profit, so we can give our employees fat Christmas bonuses. We get a lot of the ski injuries from the resorts near us, and it’s their injuries that pay for the clinic. And our profits also allow us to give free medical care to any resident of Erskine.”
She looked at Ellie and Leslie as though waiting for questions from them, but both of them were silent, which encouraged Madison to continue.
“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Madison said. “When I was first told that I was being sent to New York to become a model, I resented what I thought of as interference from some meddling old-timers. Truthfully, I thought they wanted me to put Erskine on the map so they could profit. It’s funny to think of now, but I was even angry at my father—who, by the way, is a nice man and often sees his grandkids—but I was angry that he sent the money for me to go to New York. I don’t know what changed my mind, but suddenly, the resentment was gone.”
For a moment, Madison looked at them. “You know something? I changed the day we met. After I left the DMV, it was as though the resentment had vanished and I knew what I was to do and where I was going.”
“Almost as though someone had waved a magic wand,” Ellie said softly.
“Yes! Exactly! I changed after we met. And because I changed my attitude, everything good happened to me. I met Thomas, and we have a beautiful family, and—”