The Tear Stopping Lab Page 10   pleasure, really. Keep in touch. Shoot me an email or something.” And he follows the receptionist down a narrow hall towards the Doctors office.   “What a strange character,” Veronica thinks. “He seems so automatic in his behavior and even he can cry. Why can’t I?”   She thought of her last night with Stephano. She came home at six in the morning after spinning at Shine all night. It had been a long night, and all she felt like doing was crawling into bed with Stephano and falling asleep with her head on his chest. She wanted to shower before she got into bed, so not to join him smelling like nightclub smoke. She found him awake, reading a book on the living room’s sofa. She came to greet him with a kiss and he backed away, saying they need to talk, saying this isn’t working, they aren’t working as a couple. He thinks he doesn’t love her, this isn’t working anymore. He needs to think as a single unit for a while. Maybe they should talk in a few months and see where they were. Who knows, maybe things will look different in a few months. He said all this as if it were on the tip of his tongue for hours, and he was waiting for her to come back, to dump his thoughts on her, and leave himself clean. “OK,” she said through her exhausted eyes, barely holding up her lashes with a night’s old coat of cheap mascara. He then stood up, and said that he should leave their apartment for a few days, give them both time to think. He stood up, and only then did she realize that he was fully dressed. He picked up a suitcase, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and exited the apartment. She remembers her reaction even more vividly than his speech. She looked at their empty apartment. She took off her nylon pants, and g-string underwear, then her sweaty halter-top. She got into the shower. As the water sprinkled on her face, then dribbled down her body she thought of the two years they had spent together. How he courted her at first, switching shifts with other bartenders so he could work whenever she performed. Then the night he folded her a rose from three