

Then Terri said, “ He beat me up one night.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years in his life.

He said he’d spent five years of his life in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. There were Mel and me and his second wife, Teresa-Terri, we called her-and my wife, Laura. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big windows behind the sink. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
