Doctored

Ellen picks up on the first ring. "Hello."

"Ellen." Sharon. BFF and all that.

"Yeah?"

"You ever take a look at those online dating sites?"

"Sharon, I've been officially divorced for.." Ellen consults her watch. "...all of two hours and twenty-seven minutes. Lemmie let it sink in."

"Bobby has."

"Bobby has what?"

"Looked at the dating sites. All of them."

"Well good for him. He's a free man. He's an idiot, but he's a free man."

"Ellen, you need to know..."

"What Bobby does now is his own business. Let him climb the Empire State Building for all I care."

"Did you know Bobby runs marathons?"

Ellen chokes on her coffee. "Must've taken up jogging in the past couple of hours."

"And that he was the valedictorian of his college class?"

Ellen narrows her eyes. "Bobby didn't go to college."

"Well he most certainly did. He is a heart surgeon, after all." Sharon bursts into gales of laughter. "You should see his picture. Twenty years old, at least."

Ellen laughs. "Well, let the poor sop who chooses him figure it out. I'm done with him."

"Never married. No kids," Sharon reads.

"Wait a blasted minute. What did you say?"

"No kids."

Ellen slams down the phone, sits up in her chair and fires up her computer. She finds her ex-husband online; smiles at his photograph. "You look real good, Bobby. But we can fix that, can't we?"

She guesses his password on the first try. "Forget you married a hacker, you hack?" she asks.

She downloads his photograph and saves it to his desktop. "Let me doctor the surgeon," she says, adding a wrinkle here, a pimple there. She inserts a double...no a triple chin. "That will do nicely," she says. She uploads the photograph, resets her ex-husband's password and shuts down her computer.

Ellen answers the telephone on the first ring. "Hello."

"Ellen," Sharon says. "What did you do?"

Ellen smiles. "How does he look?"

"Horrible." Sharon laughs. "Well done."

~end~

This was written for this week's Trifecta Writing Challenge. The word was doctor.