The Queen of Hearts(27)

I was surprised. Nick had a Twitter account.

I opened his page. Even on the small screen of my phone, the photo was recognizably of him. He was skiing, or possibly snowboarding—some outdoor winter sport, in any case. Goggles were pushed up against his forehead, partly obscuring his hair, and behind him, the powdery white of some snowcapped mountain was just visible. He must have been laughing at whoever had taken the photo; his head was thrown back, exposing the bright, even row of his teeth, and his eyes were crinkled up, an unfamiliar but attractive row of laugh wrinkles at their outer corners. I stared at his face.

Finally I wrenched my eyes from his photo to read his tweets. He wasn’t exactly prolific. In the last two years, he’d posted ten tweets, all of them related to a game between the Denver Broncos and Baltimore Ravens. Even the self-description underneath his picture gave nothing away, since all it said was Billionaire Philanthropist.

Right.

I closed Twitter and opened the browser on my phone. Even though the only other occupant of the car was illiterate and strapped into a restraining car seat, I hunched over furtively as I typed Nick’s name into the Google search bar. Immediately, I was rewarded with a flood of entries, most of them stupid health-care-rating sites offering every troll on the planet free rein to bash his doctor. All my colleagues loathed these sites, since privacy laws prevent physicians from responding, no matter how slanderous and untrue the comments. I scrolled past a page or two of these things, finally arriving at Nick’s legitimate Internet entries. The first couple were research-related: papers he’d authored, conferences at which he’d presented. Then I came to the website for his last practice.

From Emma’s comments at the pool the other day, as well as his Bronco-obsessed tweets, I was reasonably sure he’d been living in Denver. His medical practice there, a big surgery group, had not yet removed him from their website. I clicked on his name, near the bottom of the alphabetized list.

Quickly—any second now the carpool line would begin moving—I scanned the academic stuff. Medical school, Johns Hopkins; general surgery residency; fellowship in hepatobiliary surgery; Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society; Fellow, American College of Surgeons, on and on. There was no mention of a wife or a family. Where was the good stuff?

Finally, there it was: a paragraph at the bottom of Nick’s CV.

In addition to his surgical practice, Dr. Xenokostas is an ardent skier, golfer, and macramé artist. (Wait. What? Macramé artist? Although—that last one did sound like Nick, not because he actually was a macramé artist, but because it was the kind of bullshit he’d slip into his CV to check for signs of consciousness in the HR department.) Ignoring a contrary little zing in my chest, I read on.


He also enjoys hiking with Zadie, his beloved black Lab.

Whaaat?

With a jolt, I realized that the massive SUV in front of me had already pulled ahead and was picking up cute ponytailed kindergartners. The mother in the massive SUV behind me politely refrained from honking, but she was drumming her long fingernails on the steering wheel. I thrust the car into drive and lurched forward.

Now I could see Eli and Finn. They were standing with their friends along the wall of the building adjacent to the curb, all twitching violently as if they’d been Tasered. One of the teachers had probably told them to stop running around, which forced them to emit pent-up energy by flailing in place. How these teachers managed to instill order in a group of six-year-old boys was a mystery on par with the creation of the universe. I hit the unlock button on the driver’s-side-door control panel, and a teacher beckoned Eli, Finn, and the two other boys in their afternoon carpool forward. They charged like bulls.

“Hey, der’s my brothers,” Delaney hollered. “Hello! Hello, big kids!”

The boys were tangled in a logjam at the SUV’s door. “Hustle up, buttercups!” I called.

“Hurry up, pigs!” added Delaney, who had not quite mastered the art of the idiom.

Finn’s teacher, Mrs. Rhodes, trotted over to assist. The carpool line was a finely tuned machine, which managed to deposit scores of meandering kindergartners into their vehicles in less than eight minutes, in order to allow room for the next grade’s mothers to begin rolling in. We were holding up progress.

“There you go,” said Mrs. Rhodes, patting Finn on the shoulder as he climbed in. She gave me an odd look, the kind you’d reserve for an enthusiastic nose picker. “Hmm. Have a nice afternoon,” she said dryly.

Well, really. It had been only about thirty seconds since the car door had opened. That wasn’t that ba—

“Hey, Mom!” Eli said brightly. “Turn it more up!”

My arm reached out automatically to adjust the volume and then recoiled as I realized what was blaring on the car’s speakers:

“—gotta roll, gotta bounce,

but first she say let’s burn an ounce—”

Now Eli was singing along enthusiastically.

Herbal Life’s “Bitch Ain’t Sharing.” That explained the acerbic look from Mrs. Rhodes. My car and my iPhone had some mysterious relationship where the Bluetooth was always activating random inappropriate stoner music without my consent. I hastily punched the button to forward to the next song.

“—Yeah, 4 big blunts 4 my J-town playaz—”

Mother of God. This was even worse. Where was all my normal music? Actually . . . this was a hilarious bluegrass version of Down with the Man’s “Sippin’ Sizzurp”—aside from the profane, misogynistic lyrics, of course—but still. I turned off the stereo.