“Thanks. I’m still trying to make sense of what happened.” He sat down across from me at the faux-wood table and dropped his hands into his lap. He looked young, incredibly attractive, and very tired. We got some of the fundamental questions out of the way, like where and when he was born, the basics of the family tree, and a general skeleton of his father’s life before he married Thad and David’s mother. I knew a lot of this already from the file, but it never hurt to get information firsthand. After we covered those topics, I wanted to get some deeper information about the relationship between father and son.
“Did your father’s profession influence your decision to go into medicine?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said quickly. “I grew up going to work with him, listening to him talk with his patients on the phone late at night. I was with him when people would stop us in the grocery store to thank him for taking care of someone they loved. I saw how what he did made a difference in people’s lives. I knew I wanted to do something just as meaningful with my life.”
It wasn’t every day that you saw unabashed hero-worship from a twenty-seven-year-old guy about his dad. “Will you go in to cardiology as well?”
“Not sure. I’m finishing up my first year of my internal medicine residency, and I have two more before I have to decide. I’m leaning toward it, but I just got off a Peds rotation and really liked that too. So I don’t know, maybe pediatric cardiology?”
“Cool,” I said and made like I was jotting something down. But really I was trying to think of another question. I wasn’t expecting David Davenport to be so interesting given what I knew of his brother. Thad had always been nice to me when he came by the library to visit Tabitha, but he was chronically vanilla. Literally and figuratively. He had skin the color of a button mushroom, with ample dark hair covering his arms and occasionally sprouting out of the top of his collar. He wasn’t necessarily unattractive, but I’d always assumed Tabitha’s interest in him had as much to do with his family money as anything else. His brother on the other hand was dynamic and energetic and refreshingly un-hairy.
“Um, okay, so can you tell me about the kind of father Arthur was to you?”
He picked up his phone, which had been sitting face-down on the table, and checked the time.
“Oh, I’m sorry—do you have to go?” I asked.
“Nah, I have another few minutes. Do you mind if I grab a shake or something while we talk? Not sure when I’ll get another break.”
“Of course.” I followed him over to the cafeteria line.
“You’re from Tuttle, right?” he asked as we stood in line behind a man holding a large refillable coffee mug. “What year were you in school?”
“I graduated a year behind Tabitha.”
“I was a few years ahead of you then.”
“You didn’t go to Tuttle, though.” This wasn’t a question. With a graduating class of eighty-seven people, I would have known anyone—or at least been able to recognize anyone—who was within a few years of my class.
David ordered a Green Monster shake from the woman working behind the counter. She blushed and he pretended not to notice, but something told me he knew exactly the effect he had on the opposite sex. “I went to Woodberry, over in Charlottesville.”
That made sense. Woodberry was a fancy prep school about an hour from Tuttle Corner. It was known for strong academics, but an even stronger sports program. David, while clearly bright, was athletically built, with the thick neck of a football or rugby player. “Did Thad go there too?”
He paid for the shake, took his change, smiled at the pretty checkout girl again, and we walked back to the table. “No, he went through Tuttle schools. I don’t think Wood-berry was even on my parents’ radar when Thad went through school.” David’s face changed at the mention of his older brother, who now stood accused of their father’s murder. “You know, I just realized something,” he said, a wistful look on his face.
“What?”
“I guess I’m an orphan now.”
Technically that was true. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing for a few moments, allowing David the space to sit with his realization. “Um, how long has your mom been gone?”
“She died when I was sixteen. Cancer,” he said in the matter-of-fact way physicians have of talking about illness and death.
“Your father never remarried?”
“Nah,” he said. “Got close a time or two but I don’t think he was really interested in starting over after Mom passed. He used to joke, ‘Marriage is a lot of work, and I already have a full-time job.’” David laughed. “But really, I think Dad was just a bit of a player, you know?”
The word player was not often applied to a sixty-year-old man and it struck me as odd. “Was he seeing anyone—I mean, just before he died?” I wasn’t sure if I was asking as a part of my role as obituarist or crime reporter, or if it even mattered. Either way, David didn’t look offended.
“Dad always had something going on,” he said. “But he didn’t usually talk to me too much about it, thank goodness.” He smiled and gave me a wink.
With about five minutes left before he had to go back to work, I asked the one question that all good obit writers are supposed to try to get an answer to. “So, if you had to say, what was the one thing you learned from your father’s life?”
David leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, his slate-blue eyes looking directly into mine, while he thought about how to answer this rather philosophical, cosmic question.
