The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(19)

It had been my decision. Eva remained somewhere high above the United States, headed to Boston, I believe. As an airplane pilot, Eva was usually high above someplace. When we first started dating, I kept a closer tab on her schedule, but as time passed I’d paid less attention. The cockpit was her office; it just happened to be an office that could be in one location in the morning and three thousand miles across the United States in the afternoon. In our first few months together, I would fly to meet her for a weekend in Boston or New York, or she would surprise me at my home late at night, sliding beneath the covers and pressing up against me, but the frequency of those getaways and late-night surprises had, with time, diminished. The demands of my own practice had also increased. When Eva arrived home late, she usually stayed in the guest bedroom so she wouldn’t disturb me.

As I drove north on the El Camino Real, I wondered if Eva would be as understanding as Dr. Snip It. She expected to come home to a man no longer able to fertilize her eggs, at least not after shooting off the cannon another twenty-five times—the number of ejaculations Dr. Fukomara said would be necessary to expunge the billion or so sperm still actively on the hunt.

“Still locked and loaded. That’s the good part,” he’d said during the consult. “Lots of sex.”

When Eva and I first started dating, we could have knocked out that number in a month. I had joked before I dropped her at the airport the other morning that it might take us six months to clear the chamber. She didn’t laugh. She kissed me lightly and got out of the car.

“I’ll call you if I don’t get in too late,” she’d said.

I parked in one of three reserved parking spaces at the back of my building on Broadway Avenue and took the rear staircase to my offices on the second floor. When my father had his stroke, my mother refused to sell his pharmacy practice or the building he had purchased with it. Money was never a factor in my mother’s decisions, and it had not been her reason to keep both the practice and the building.

“Your father put his blood, sweat, and tears into that pharmacy,” she’d said.

So, years later, when my business partner and best friend, Mickie, and I were looking to open an ophthalmology practice together, I purchased the building and kept Broadway Pharmacy as the ground-floor tenant. My mother had wanted to give me the building as an early inheritance, but I had refused her generosity.

“You’re going to get it when I die anyway,” she’d said when we broached the subject one Sunday night over dinner, something I tried to do every week, usually on a night when Eva was traveling.

“Yes, but that won’t be for decades, and you might need the money to pay for your own retirement care,” I’d said. “Otherwise I’ll have to put you out on the street with a ‘For Sale’ sign around your neck.”

“Decades? I hope not. I’ll throw myself in front of a bus before I allow myself to see ninety.”

“I might push you in front of that bus if you remain this cantankerous.”

“Don’t be insolent, Samuel.” She cleared my plate, signaling that I had finished eating. “Fine. Make me a fair offer.”

“I’ll call Jerry Conman in the morning,” I’d said, referring to my high school classmate who had, despite his unfortunate last name, carved a pretty good career in commercial real estate. Conman and I met for beers the following week at Behrman’s Irish Pub on Broadway, and he told me over a Guinness what I had already suspected. “Your father’s pharmacy has very little goodwill as an ongoing business. It’s losing customers to the chain drugstores. You’d be better off selling it.”

My father had run a successful practice for nearly two decades on the strength of his personality. He had an uncanny ability—a gift, really—to remember everyone’s first name and something about their lives. Going to Broadway Pharmacy was not so much an errand as an occasion. Frank, the pharmacist I had hired after my father’s stroke, lacked the same charisma. Allegiance had its price, and the more the chain drugstores discounted their prices, the higher the number of regulars who defected.

“At best,” Conman told me, “Frank could sell the store’s files and stock to one of the chain drugstores, and you could rent the space to a more lucrative concern, like a hair salon. Otherwise it will be a slow, expensive death.”

Honoring my mother’s wishes, I came up with an alternative plan, which was to open my ophthalmology practice in the five rooms above the store that had served as an apartment. Taking out a small business loan to remodel and open my own business was a risky financial venture, and I could have existed just fine paying my dues in an established practice, but Mickie, who would become my business partner, did not have the temperament to be anyone’s minion, and I could not bear the thought of my mother having to sell something so dear to her. We paid a hefty price, all financed through a bank loan at an outrageous interest rate. I was my own boss and poorer for it. Go figure.

After I opened Burlingame Ophthalmology and Vision Center, Broadway Pharmacy’s prescriptions doubled in a month, and it sold more reading glasses and eye-care products than any drugstore in the area, once again proving that old real estate adage—location, location, location.

“Dr. Hill? I wasn’t expecting you back until Monday,” my receptionist, Kathy, said as I entered the clinic. I had told my staff I was spending the weekend at Lake Tahoe, where I owned a small cabin.