Chapter Five
Over the next few days, our conversation was never far from my thoughts. I mulled it over and replayed it in my mind, wondering what the hell the solution could be.
But I could not fault Adam for the raw honesty he’d showed me. For trusting me enough to bare his soul and his fears to me. But short of some miracle dropping from the sky, I couldn’t see a way around this impasse.
I was willing to wait, for now. But could I wait forever?
That was a question that kept me up at night.
It only took a few weeks of being a resident physician to realize that I had to snatch a personal life whenever I could. As Adam was still working—though foisting off some of his workload onto Jordan—I took one of my days off to meet with Jordan’s significant other.
“Oh em gee, thank you for getting here early and nailing down the table. I am flat out starving.” April arrived, plopping down a designer bag the size of carryon luggage onto the bench beside her.
My eyes widened taking it in. “What’s that for? Fending off muggers?”
“Haha. I have a lot of shit I need to carry around for the new job. Way too much shit.”
I added sugar to the tea I’d been served before she got there. She flagged down the waiter and he headed her way with a menu in hand. “How’s that going, by the way? Any better?”
“My boss is an asshole and doesn’t think young people fresh out of school deserve to have a life outside their job. One night he had me at the office ‘til ten p.m. I thought Jordan was going to go through the roof or get arrested for assault. Ironic, since he himself can be a boss from hell.”
I blew out a breath. “And he’s also an enabler—to my workaholic husband. The two of them egg each other on. If I wasn’t a hundred percent certain of their sexual orientation, I’d swear those two were having an affair.”
April’s eyes widened and she stared off to the side for a minute, smiling lasciviously. “Oh. My. God. You just gave me the most amazing mental visual just now...drool.”
I laughed. “You pictured it?”
“Two extremely hot guys getting it on? Of course I did. And if you didn’t, you need to read more of my kind of books and fewer medical journals.”
Our laughter was cut short by the arrival of the server. April glanced at the menu and quickly ordered. I took a little longer to decide but finally settled on a taco salad. As soon as the server left, I turned back to the conversation.
“So, Jordan’s free to cheat on you as long as it’s with Adam?” I laughed again.
“Well as long as I’m a spectator, then yeah.”
“Just a spectator?”
“Well...” she tilted her head to the side, staring at that same spot as if the image were still projected there in her mind. Her cheeks grew pink. “I wouldn’t protest if they decided to involve me.”
Her grin widened further, and I couldn’t stop laughing. “I should probably be pissed off about you imagining a threesome with my husband, but you’re just cracking me up.”
She joined in, a cute dimple forming beside her mouth. “It’s just a fantasy. A perfectly safe one, I might add. The funny part is if there was ever even just the slightest hint of that scenario becoming reality, I’d be so terrified or self-conscious, I’d run away. But I talk a good talk when it’s just fantasy.”
I wiped a tear with my napkin once I stopped laughing. “Damn girl, you are just the medicine I needed, making me laugh like that within five minutes of sitting down.”
“Oh, if you want a laugh, I could spend a minute or five hundred going off about my asshole boss. I am counting down the days ‘til I can find a better job. I need to keep this one just long enough that it doesn’t look like a red flag on my resume.”
I stirred my tea for a moment and then looked up. “What if...you didn’t have to look for another job after this one? Or worry about the blip on your resume?”
April blinked, then reached out to straighten her silverware. “What do you mean?”
“Well. You know that nonprofit organization project we keep talking about? I just feel like maybe it would be a good time to start doing something more than talking.”
She straightened, blue eyes widening. “The nonprofit clinic? I absolutely love that idea, too. But I can’t imagine that you’re ready to take that on right now, are you?”
I shrugged. “Well...ready is a relative word. It seems a little crazy to do it now, yes. But you know me, I’m an overachiever, and for the next year at least it would mostly be planning and paperwork before we can even get anything going. Why not start working on it now?” After all, there were many other ways to feel fulfilled than dwelling on the thought and plan of starting a family.
April blinked. “Well...money, for one thing. NPOs may not be for profit but they do need money to get going.”
I nodded. “I have that money from my inheritance just sitting there. I haven’t wanted to touch it, considering the source.”
“So, you’re figuring using it for the NPO will clear out all the ick from your gross biological sperm donor? Not a bad plan.”
I laced my fingers together over my place setting. “Exactly. I wanted to do something good with it but didn’t know what. And I didn’t even realize until our group ski trip to Canada, when you and I were throwing around ideas for it. Of course, it would be a big undertaking. Even with you at the helm, we’d need more help.”
She bobbed her head, taking a sip of ice water. “We sure would. A lawyer, for one. Maybe Adam’s uncle?”
I suppressed a grin. At least she didn’t refer to Peter as my stepdad. Which he was. But none of us liked to acknowledge that bit of weirdness. It had been nearly four years, and all of it was perfectly normal and natural now. And yet, I never called Peter my stepdad unless I was trying to deliberately give Adam the ick. And for that purpose, it was highly successful.
“I think Lindsay Walker would give us a big discount on this. I ran the idea by her at a party last year and she said she’d love to work on something like that.”
“Oh, okay,” April said coolly, looking away. Clearly, she wasn’t hip on the idea of Lindsay.
I frowned, wondering where that came from. It’s not like Jordan had ever hooked up with Lindsay. I couldn’t say the same for my husband, unfortunately.
April seemed to pick up on my unspoken question. “I don’t know her very well, but she was close to Jordan at one time. It makes me a little...” she grimaced.
I held out a hand to placate her. “Oh yeah, don’t be jealous. Nothing ever happened between those two.”
April laughed. “I’m not jealous, though sometimes I get this weird feeling that she wished it had. Honestly, the fact that she and Adam were a thing for several years weirds me out more.”
“Oh yeah,” I took a sip of my tea. “It’s weird but it’s become more of a distant weird now.”
April reached into her bag, pulled out a microscopic notebook smaller than my wallet, and unclipped a pen. “I take all my notes in analog now. Technology and I don’t get along and I’ve lost too many files on my phone to get me into trouble. Like that asshole needs an excuse to yell, really. Anyway, let’s see. We’ve got a lawyer. Do we have a timeline for this? Paperwork for articles of incorporation needs to be filed, but we also need to look at business requirements to do some projections.”
She scribbled some more, and I sat back feeling overwhelmed. I supposed if someone asked her to write a prescription for amoxicillin, she might feel the same way.
Even after our food arrived, she was still scribbling notes into her little notebook. She’d barely glanced at her food—an Asian salad festooned with delicious looking mandarin orange slices and wonton strips.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I will. I will. It’s not like a salad is going to get cold, am I right? But if I don’t write down all these ideas now, I’m going to lose the inspiration. This is so damn exciting, Mia. You don’t even know. It’s been my dream to start a nonprofit from soup to nuts.”
“Well, people will definitely be calling us nuts, won’t they? Especially me. I’ve got three years of medical residency to finish before moving on to my fellowship.”
“You’ll be our doctor of record eventually, but we can hire a physician to get things started. Maybe you could even do part of your residency under him or her?”
I blinked. Why hadn’t I thought of that? “You’re brilliant.”
She gave me a preening smile. “Why, thank you. You’re not so bad yourself, Dr. Mia. Put a bunch of smart women together in a room and we’ll make magic—and possibly take over the world. For now, that’s you, me, and Lindsay.”
I almost snorted thinking of the look on Adam’s face when I told him I was bringing Lindsay in to help me get my dream NPO started.
“You want to set it up in an underserved community, right? Do you have any ideas as to where?”
“Somewhere around here, obviously.” I bit my lip, thinking.
April began eating her salad. “Immigrant communities would have the biggest need. Places like Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley. Isn’t it wild how these cities in Orange County have such peaceful, glamorous names? Yet they don’t much resemble those names. There’s neither a lake nor a forest in Lake Forest, know what I mean?”
I laughed again. April was good for that.
She sighed about halfway through her salad without having come up for air. “Damn this is good. But I’m packing it away so fast, I might as well have shoved it in one of those horse feeding bags and attached it to my face. I’m sorry. Don’t think I’m blowing you off in favor of my salad. I was just super hungry.”
“It’s not like I’m not doing the same thing.”
After a few more forkfuls of salad and a long, thoughtful chew, April spoke again like she’d never stopped, “So the problem with putting your clinic in one of those communities is that you’re going to need bilingual staff. In Santa Ana, that would be Spanish, in Garden Grove, Vietnamese, et cetera. And then there’s the competition with other low-cost clinics. Since we talked about this last year and I started some initial canvassing, I couldn’t help but notice that they are on practically every block in some of those communities. Which is wonderful for the community, really, but not so great for us trying to find an underserved niche.”
“How bout we create our own niche? Make it a women’s clinic?”
She brightened. “Oooh, that gives me so many ideas.”
The girl was talking so fast, she hardly paused to take a breath. She was in her element, and I was here for it, asking her questions and her replying as we clarified my vision of the place and whom it would serve.
By the time we left, she had already started a bullet list with at least ten items we needed to tackle to get started. I promised her I’d send her my schedule for the next few weeks so we could meet again and possibly talk to Lindsay at that time, too.
I’d obviously made a good choice in future business partner, and I couldn’t wait to get started.