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.
“Change of plans,” I said. “The cabin is rented for the weekend.”
“That’s too bad.”
I noticed a tall, heavyset woman and a young girl sitting in the lobby and smiled at them before continuing down the hall, barely avoiding Mickie, who motored from her office in the direction of one of the treatment rooms.
“Whoa! What are you doing here?” She did not sound happy to see me. Mickie had been in a funk, which was unlike her.
“Couldn’t get the cabin. The rental agency rented it out this weekend.”
She grunted in disgust. “Couldn’t the Con Man have told you that before you made the plans?”
Jerry Conman also managed my cabin in Tahoe. I’d made the mistake of setting him up with Mickie. When he squeezed her thigh under the table at a five-star restaurant in San Francisco, she’d nearly broken his finger. I told him to consider himself fortunate she hadn’t stabbed him in the eye with her fork.
“My fault,” I said. “I told Jerry to rent the cabin as much as possible.”
She crossed her arms. “How is that asshole?”
“He still loves you and wants you to bear his children.”
“I’d rather pull my uterus out through my nostrils with a coat hanger.”
“Nice, Mick.”
I had not intended on being in the office, so I had not scheduled consults for the afternoon, but since Eva would be in Boston for the evening, I offered my services. “How many patients do you have left?”
“Two, but one is an emergency consult. The mother, Trina Crouch, asked for you, actually, but since we thought you were gone, I scheduled her.”
“What’s the emergency?”
Mickie handed me one of the two files. “Seven-year-old girl is going blind in one eye.” I flipped the pages. “She began having trouble reading the blackboard in school three weeks ago after a bike accident,” Mickie said. “The mother had her eyes checked. She’s lost a significant portion of vision in her left eye. No neurological deficit noted. The visual acuity was light perception with poor light projection on both eyes. No other neurological deficits resulting from a head trauma.”