We were out of the garage and getting on the highway when I couldn’t take the quiet any longer. She didn’t have on the radio or anything and you could’ve heard a squirrel run under the SUV.
“So, Doctor Solitaire Baker-Reynolds, that sure is a long name. I take it that you’re married.”
I’d seen the wedding ring on her finger so I already knew the answer; between that and the hyphenated surname. At least, I thought I did.
“Actually, I’m a widow. My husband was killed in an auto accident during my pregnancy.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
She gave me a sideways glance. “You have nothing to be sorry for. It wasn’t your fault.”
I let out a laugh and instantly regretted the implications of it. “I’m sorry; about the laugh, that is. It’s just that I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve spoken those same words so many times over the last couple of years.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I took a deep breath, debating about whether I even felt like discussing Rayne. It was still so painful for me. “My fiancée, Rayne, was murdered shortly before our wedding date.”
“Oh, my God! That’s horrible!”
“Yes, it was horrible.”
There was a pause while we both gathered our thoughts. Certainly, her loss was as devastating as mine, so we were two souls left behind.
“You said you were pregnant when your husband was killed?” I asked her.
“Yes. I have a little boy, named Jeremy after his father.”
“How old?”
“He’s nine, going on ninety. He thinks he’s going to be the next Bill Gates.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with aspiring toward a goal like that. There could be much worse things.”
“True, but try having a nine-year-old asking you for all of your receipts and duplicate checks so he can keep track of them on his accounting software.”
I chuckled. “That is pretty funny.”
“He’s a mess but he gives me reason to live.”
“Well, it’s always great to have a reason to live.”
We chatted for the rest of the way to Doctor Thompson’s Sports and Medicine Clinic in downtown Charlotte. He’d flown me into town in hopes of convincing me to take a position there. While I’d lived in the D.C. area the majority of my life, things had never been the same for me since Rayne’s death. Felix, Dwayne, and Mike tried to hook me up with women right and left. They couldn’t understand that replacing Rayne wasn’t as easy as one, two, three. For me, there was no replacement.
Doctor Thompson, whom I’d met several years earlier, did still look exactly the same. The lucky ones never seem to age. He was in his midfifties and had more than twenty thousand patients on the record for his clinic. There were three other doctors working there, including Solitaire, and he felt it time to add a fourth.
He greeted me with a bear hug and led me into his office, after thanking Solitaire for giving me a ride. After we took seats, he gave me his best speech.
“Yardley, we could really use you down in these parts. Business is booming and Charlotte is becoming a progressive city; it’s growing by leaps and bounds.”
“Yes, I know. The news has spread up North and I’ve heard of a lot of people moving this way, down to Charlotte and on down to Atlanta.”
“Charlotte’s great, but I’ll always be a Giants fan,” he said with a grin.
“That’s right,” I said. “You’re originally from New York.”
He laughed. “How could you forget? My accent still hasn’t left me after all these years. I get many jokes about it from Southerners whose accents are just as humorous to me.”
“Well, I hope that I don’t develop a drawl. I managed to get through college without one.”