Then He Kissed Me (7 page)

He frowned. “Did you think I wasn’t? Frankly, I’m surprised Dr. Morrison hasn’t already suggested it.” He looked at her behind those designer glasses of his. Lauren had a sudden urge to snatch them off his nose and grind them to the ground. But that was childish. Nate Miller’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired, but he was just looking out for Daddy’s best interests.

She folded her hands in her lap and tried for a pleasant expression. “Thank you for taking good care of my father today. My mother and I appreciate it. But I think we’ll wait and let Doc Morrison handle this.”

“That’s your prerogative, of course, but I’d like to go on record as saying that I’m deeply concerned. If that cut had been just a tad lower, a towel wouldn’t have been able to stop the bleeding.”

Lauren felt the color drain from her face. “You’re not suggesting my father…tried to slit his wrist?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m merely looking at the facts.”

There was something so cold blooded about the way he said that. Dan Handy might be just a “fact” to him, but he was a live warm-blooded human being. He was funny and smart and caring. And deep down, he was…scared. They all were. Couldn’t Nate Miller
see
that?

“You can quote the facts all you want, Mr. Spock, but the truth is you don’t know my daddy at all. He’s the last person on earth who would ever hurt himself. Or anyone else for that matter.”

“There’s no need to raise your voice. I understand you’re upset—”

“What? You think I need an anti-depressant, too?”

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a pamphlet and handed it to her. “That might not be necessary. Here’s some information on support groups. Unfortunately, there isn’t a group that meets in this area, but there’s a hotline number you can call as well as a website where you can get more information. Being a caregiver is stressful. Your mother and you are both at risk for developing depression and other stress related diseases.”

She tossed the pamphlet back on his desk. “I have about a dozen of these, thanks.” She stood up to leave. “Are we done here?”

He closed his laptop and rose. “Absolutely.”

“Great. Then, have a good life,” she said and stomped off down the hallway. The
nerve
of him to suggest Daddy might have tried to hurt himself! If Doc Morrison knew… She should report him. How could Doc think Nate Miller was capable of taking over his practice? She actually hoped now that Jessica succeeded in her little plot to get him down to Miami. The sooner he hightailed it down south, the better for everyone.

Her parents were waiting for her in the reception area. Daddy was talking to Ralph Humphries, one of his old golf partners. “Sweet Tea! Look who’s here today.”

“She’s still prettier than a June bug, Dan,” Ralph said, giving Lauren a hug. He was only a couple of inches taller than Lauren and had a full belly and a short white beard. When she was little, Lauren used to think he was Santa Claus.

 “I hope you’re not too sick,” she said. Her heart was still pounding from that awful encounter in the office. She tried to shake it off before Daddy could see that she was upset.

“Nah, just getting my diabetes checked,” Ralph said. She almost told him he might want to wait and come back tomorrow, when a
real
doctor would be here to see him, but she kept her mouth shut.

 “We got the prescription for the antibiotic,” Momma said. She looped her arm through Lauren’s and took her off to the side where Daddy and Ralph couldn’t hear her. “What did Dr. Miller want to talk to you about?” she asked in an excited voice. “Did he ask you out?”

“
Please
! As if…” Momma looked taken aback. Lauren swallowed hard. She needed to act normal or Momma would want to know what Nate Miller had said to get her all riled up. “He just wanted to make sure that Daddy was being properly supervised.” She paused. “Were you there when the accident happened?”

“Well, of course I was. Felicia was, too.” Momma frowned. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing.” Seeing Momma’s face and hearing her version back up Felicia’s, allowed Lauren to breathe easier.

“Back to Dr. Miller,” Momma said. “I can’t believe our good luck. You know, Paula from over at the country club knows his sister, Melanie. I’ve been a busy bee while you were in there flirting! I made a couple of phone calls and I think I could get her to help fix you up.”

“Fix me up what?”

“With Nate Miller, silly! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. It just makes so much sense.”

“Oh,
no
, Momma. Absolutely
not
.”

“But you said you’d let me fix you up again, and I realize now that Ted was completely wrong for you. Much too old and stuffy.” Her mother paused. “Is there a reason you don’t like him? Did he say something in there to put you…off?”

If Lauren told her mother what Nate said back in the office, she’d lay an egg. Plus, it would hurt Momma’s feelings terribly. Momma wasn’t good at hiding her emotions. If she was upset, then Daddy would know it. And the last thing Lauren wanted was to upset Daddy.

“No, no reason. But…there’s no chemistry. I just don’t find him attractive at all.”

Her mother started laughing. “Oh,
that!
Well, I happen to find him very attractive. Not the same way Tom is,” her mother said, referring to Lauren’s ex, “but in a different way. A quieter way. Just give it one date. And if there’s still no chemistry, then you can’t say we didn’t try!”

Lauren grit her teeth. If this connection of Momma’s was even legit, and
if
she could manage to set it up, there was every chance that Nate would nip the whole thing in the bud. He had no more reason to want to go out with her than she did with him. Especially not after that little scene in his office. Plus, he might still get back with Jessica.

“Okay, whatever you say. Sure, set me up with Nate Miller.” Like that was ever going to happen! But it would give Momma something to do.

She thought briefly back to what Nate said about the family counseling. If he’d suggested it with a little more tact (and hadn’t said all those other awful things as well) she probably wouldn’t have reacted so vehemently. But there was no use bringing it up. Momma always said that people who couldn’t handle their own problems were weak. Counseling wasn’t a bad idea, but Momma would never go for it.

T
he residents of Whispering
Bay had an unofficial, but well known way to refer to the two areas of town where most of the population lived. There was NBTB, which stood for Not By The Beach, and BTB, its opposite. Nate grew up in a modest three bedroom brick home in the NBTB section of town. His dad had been a foreman at a nearby lumber mill and his mom stayed home to take care of him and his younger sister, Melanie.

As far as childhoods went, Nate’s had been perfectly normal. He played video games and excelled at math and science and dreamed of being an astronaut when he grew up. Sports weren’t his thing, but he did like to toss an occasional basketball. He was taller than most boys his age, and although not very coordinated, his height gave him somewhat of an advantage. But he was never good enough to make a team (at least, he assumed he wasn’t, because he never tried out for any). Melanie was the athletic one in the family. She played volleyball and girls’ basketball and just about every sport she could try out for.

They’d gone on family vacations to Disney World, had camped in the national parks nearby, and had gone on a more elaborate family road trip to the Grand Canyon (shades of Chevy Chase and Family Vacation and Walley World). Nate had been a boy scout and he’d even helped his dad build the wooden deck they added on to the house.

He’d been happy as a kid. Or as happy as any kid could be. It had never been easy for him to make friends, but his skill at video games had ensured that there was always be someone who wanted to hang out with him. Teachers liked him because he was quiet and smart. Girls petrified him, so he steered clear of them, and he never messed with the bullies at school, so they steered clear of him.

Then one day, everything changed. His dad died of a heart attack when Nate was thirteen. The life insurance hadn’t been enough to do more than pay off the rest of the mortgage on their modest home. His mother, Connie, had only a year of college and couldn’t find anything in the area that paid much more than minimum wage. So at age thirty-eight, she went back to nursing school full time. Nights, she worked part-time as a medical assistant at a retirement home in Panama City. It had been up to Nate and Lanie to help around the house, cooking and cleaning and getting themselves ready for school. They were a team, Mom had said, and teams fought together till the end.

After Mom graduated nursing school, she got a job at the hospital in Panama City and things got better. They weren’t rich, but she was able to keep food on the table and pay all the bills and there was even money to replace their old car. Her hard work had paid off and Nate was proud of her, but when it came time to go away to college, he was hesitant to move too far away.  So, he picked the closest one to home that would give him a free ride—Florida State University, just two hours down the road. And when it came time to apply to medical schools, he decided to stay put and continue on at FSU. Doc Morrison offered to pay for all the expenses not covered under his scholarship and in exchange, Nate promised to come back home to practice.

It hadn’t been hard to keep that promise. Despite the allure of more glamorous medical subspecialties, he’d been pleasantly surprised to find that family practice genuinely appealed to him. He liked solving puzzles. Taking a vague set of symptoms and figuring out what was wrong with someone. His colleagues had teased him. He’d graduated top of his med school class and could have gotten just about any residency he’d wanted. Dermatology and plastic surgery at big teaching hospitals like Emory or John Hopkins were considered cream of the crop. Instead, he’d chosen the family practice residency program at Tallahassee Memorial.

Doc Morrison hadn’t made him sign a contract. They’d given each other a good old-fashioned handshake to seal the deal, but in Nate’s eyes, that was just as binding as any legal document. If Jessica knew, she’d have his balls in a vise. No matter. He wasn’t breaking his word to Doc Morrison. Jessica or no Jessica.

Nate could smell his mother’s beef stroganoff before he even opened the front door. Charlie, the family cocker spaniel greeted him enthusiastically, barking and wagging his tail like an idiot. “Hey, boy,” Nate said, bending down to give the old dog a scratch behind the ears.

“We’re in the kitchen!” Lanie yelled. Nate followed the smell of his mother’s cooking to the back of the house.

Lanie immediately handed him a cold beer from the fridge. “You’re gonna need this.”

“Oh, goodie, my not-engaged son is here.” His mom swatted him on the arm with a wooden spoon. “How come I had to go to work to find out you proposed to Jessica?”

Nate flinched. Lanie smiled like she was enjoying herself. “I was going to surprise you,” he said, which sounded dumb, but the truth was he knew the two women in his life weren’t big fans of Jessica. It was a classic case of planning to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

“We’re surprised, all right,” Lanie said. “
Pleasantly
surprised, I might add. Next time you decide to throw yourself off a cliff, please come to me for advice first.”

“I really had no idea you disliked her this much.”

“That’s because I didn’t think you were serious about her. I thought you were just using her for sex.”

“Melanie!” Mom slapped Lanie on the arm with the wooden spoon.
Good
. Now they were even.

“If you’re that desperate for company, bro, you should have come to me. There’s a new litter of puppies at the shelter. Chihuahua-Dachshund mix.” She shuddered. “Extremely needy and hard to house break. Just your type.”

Lanie was the manager at the local animal shelter and she was always trying to foist some stray dog on him. “I mean, I can certainly see what you saw in Jessica. I’d go for that myself if I knew I’d never have to see her again.”

“Please don’t tell me we have the same taste in women,” Nate said.

“That would imply you
have
taste.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Mom said.

“He knows I love him,” Lanie said defensively. She shook her head sadly. “Bro, your mess is all over the Internet.” She pulled out her cell phone and began finger swiping the screen until she got to YouTube.

Mom suddenly looked worried. “Maybe we shouldn’t show him.”

“Show me,” he said.

“Okay, here goes.” Lanie pulled up the video and the three of them stood hunched over her phone. Like his sister said, the video was all about botched proposals. Poor sad sacks whose girlfriends had no clue they were about to get down on one knee. One proposal had gone down during halftime of an NBA basketball game. The girl ran off in front of a stunned crowd and the team mascot (a teddy bear, no less) had to drag the guy off the court. Then came the guy who talked about how he loved the way his girlfriend ate a cupcake. “Don’t worry, you’re next,” Lanie said.

Fuck
. There it was, the scene at The Harbor House playing out in front of him. He was down on one knee and he looked pale and the whole time Jessica kept the same expression on her face. At one point, the videographer had done a slow pan of the restaurant. The entire place looked mesmerized. He’d known that the tables nearby were looking on, but he had no idea everyone in the place had been watching, too. And then there was the moment when Jessica told him to get up and he still looked confused and had even offered her the ring again. Against the quiet background you could hear a man’s voice say, “
What a loser
!” The video then segued into the next spot that involved some poor schmuck proposing on T.V.

“Want to see it again?” Lanie asked.

“That’s enough, Melanie, leave your poor brother alone,” Mom said.

“All I’m saying is that the whole thing could have been a whole lot worse,” Lanie said.

“How?” Nate asked.

“Jessica could have said yes.”

*~*~*

T
hree nights later, Lauren,
along with the rest of the Bunco Babes, sat in Kitty Pappas’ living room watching the exact same video. It was Thursday night in Whispering Bay, which meant it was time  to get down to the business of rolling dice, drinking frozen margaritas, and gossiping. Not mean spirited gossiping. It was more like the exchange of mutually needed information.

This week’s Bunco game was being held at Kitty’s house. Kitty, along with Shea Masterson and Pilar Diaz-Rothman were the group’s founders. Kitty was recently married to Steve Pappas, part owner of Pappas-Hernandez construction, the company who’d torn down Whispering Bay’s old senior center and was now in the process of building a new state-of-the-art rec center for the whole town to enjoy. Tom worked as a construction supervisor for the company and was in charge of the big rec center project. He worked hard and had a good reputation for being fair as well as smart, and Lauren was proud of him.

There were twelve Bunco Babes total, including Lauren’s good friend Mimi Grant, as well as Frida, from The Bistro. Lauren wasn’t a permanent member of the group, but lately, they’d been calling on her a lot to sub. Thursday night was rapidly becoming Lauren’s favorite night of the week. She loved being a mom and running her shop, but it was good to get away with the girls and enjoy some “me” time. Plus, attending Bunco was the best way to keep in tune with what was happening in Whispering Bay.

They were at the part of the video when a man was heard exclaiming, “
What a loser
!” Lauren cringed when she recognized Ted’s voice. She now knew exactly what Janie the receptionist had meant when she’d told Lauren not to mention YouTube to Nate. As unfriendly as she felt at the moment toward Dr. Nathanial Miller, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. It was awful enough to have your proposal of marriage turned down. But then to have it be
entertainment
for the rest of the world?

Kitty cut off the T.V. “And that, ladies, is what the whole town is talking about right now.”

The living room exploded with a dozen different voices.

Mimi took a sip of her margarita and shook her head. “Poor Nate Miller. He’s having a tough enough time as it is, but now this?”

“I’m friends with his sister, Lanie, and she says that this Jessica is like the creature from the black lagoon,” Frida said.

Shea nodded. “She’s evil looking, all right.”

“It’s called resting bitch face,” Pilar said. “You can look it up in the urban dictionary.”

“Just because you turn a guy down doesn’t make you a bad person,” Kitty said. “But it does seem kind of cold to just keep on eating like nothing ever happened.”

Lauren tried to keep her voice neutral. “What do you mean, he’s having a tough enough time as it is?”

“Everyone knows Doc’s patients aren’t too happy with him,” Mimi said. “Personally, I think Nate’s pretty terrific. When Zeke’s shoulder started acting up again, he immediately sent him to physical therapy instead of just prescribing drugs, and now Zeke feels as good as new. But, he does have a bit of a brusque manner about him.”

Brusque was putting it nicely
.

“I was actually there for the proposal,” Lauren admitted. “That voice you hear in the background? It belongs to none other than Ted Ferguson.”

This news was met by a resounding chorus of boos. Ted Ferguson was to Whispering Bay what Sherman was to Atlanta. Well, maybe not
that
bad. He hadn’t actually destroyed the city, but it wasn’t for his lack of trying.

“I thought Ted Ferguson had crawled away into some hole to die,” Shea said. “Or was that just wishful thinking on my part?”

“The latter,” said Pilar, who was also the city’s attorney. “He’s definitely maintained a presence in the area.” She looked at Lauren. “What on earth where you doing with him at The Harbor House? Please don’t tell me you were on a date.”

“Blind date. Courtesy of my mother.” Lauren went on to tell them how they’d been at the table next to Nate and Jessica, and of her bathroom encounter with Jessica, as well as how the evening had ended.

“
My other toy has tits
?” Kitty nearly doubled over in laughter. “Oh, my God! That’s…horrible! You must have been—”

“Mortified? Humiliated? Pissed? How about all three,” she said.

“You know,” Kitty said, “Once upon a time, Ted Ferguson and I sort of went out.”

 “You’re kidding,” Lauren said. Kitty’s husband Steve was the equivalent of the single woman’s dating trifecta: tall, dark, and handsome. Add in the fact that he was also rich and a genuinely nice guy, and you could say Kitty had hit the husband mega jackpot. “You did
not
go out with Ted.”

Pilar and Shea nodded their heads vigorously. “Oh, yes she did,” Pilar said. “Tell her about it, Kitty.” The rest of the room urged her on, as well. Lauren knew the locals credited Kitty with “saving” Whispering Bay from Ted Ferguson’s evil clutches, but the whole thing had happened when she was still living in Atlanta, so she wasn’t privy to any of the juicy details.

“It was supposed to be a business function,” Kitty emphasized. “I was single at the time, of course, and when Ted first came to town, he hired me as his realtor. So, in the middle of this party, he makes a pass at me—”

“Don’t forget the part when he told you to get your fat ass in gear,” Shea said.