CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
George Dunker’s office was on the opposite side of the street from Gimbels and on the other side of the bridge, a few blocks east, toward Lake Michigan. It was on the fourteenth floor of a very large office building that covered nearly one square block in the heart of Milwaukee’s downtown commercial area. The massive building housed hundreds of businesses in its offices, such as law firms, manufacturing rep offices, and a lot of doctors’ offices. George Dunker was a medical doctor, specifically, an otorhinolaryngologist, which was a long name for a specialist in disorders of the eye, ear, nose, and throat.
Dr. Dunker stood at one of the windows in his private office within a suite of five rooms. His office was on a south wall that looked out onto Wisconsin Avenue, over a hundred feet below. It was a gray day, late in the afternoon, a wintry day in the middle of an April in which winter just wouldn’t let go. The sky was dull and threatened to snow, which was not an impossibility in April.
The rooftops of the surrounding buildings were dingy and spotted with islands of dirty, icy, rock-hard snow piles that had once been swirls of fresh white powder snow, which over the course of the winter had collected in the shaded nooks and corners of the roof tops. Now, looking like packs of hardened sooty snow, they would probably last through May if they didn’t get any direct sun.
Soot spewed endlessly out of the dozens of factory chimneys that towered above the heavy manufacturing plants that crowded Milwaukee’s industrial valley, a valley carved out by the Milwaukee River sometime after the Ice Age. The soot landed on every surface in the city, not just the tops of buildings. The Milwaukee River meandered through the landscape of hundreds of docks and in and out of boat slips, like a river of mercury, adding yet another tone of gray to the view out the window. Shoreline ice on Lake Michigan hadn’t begun to break up. It, too, was looking a dull gray, barely in contrast to the water and worn smooth, its jagged edges long gone from too many months of winter. It ran down the coast like an irregular gray ribbon as far as the eye could see, separating the gray, cold waters of the lake from the gray, cold real estate that hugged its boundary.
Dr. Dunker’s whole mood was gray, like everything as far as he could see, as he contemplated his life in between the day’s meetings with one patient after another. He didn’t have much time to contemplate his situation. There were people in both patient rooms and two more impatiently waiting to see him in the reception area, and more expected. His receptionist, Delia, was busy orchestrating the flow of people in need of medical attention and all the forms that come with these visits. And LuAnne Tompkins, his nurse for the past ten years, had her hands full making sure that every patient had the proper care coming in and follow-up instructions going out, while assisting each patient’s treatment every step of the way. Everyone was busy, too busy.
Dr. Dunker was too busy three days a week in his office and two days a week in St. Joseph’s hospital, a workload that was burdened with some late night and weekend emergencies, but he rationalized that busy was good. Busy kept his mind off his personal life. Busy kept his mind off the tragedy of losing his wife, who had died two months ago. Busy kept his mind off the challenges of being a father to two small children who were now motherless. Thankfully, he had a nanny to take care of them, but the responsibilities of it all were quite overwhelming.
He loved his two children, Peggy and Steve, who were nine and seven years old. He knew they would need a mother sooner or later, and he would need a wife sooner or later, hopefully sooner. Was it too soon to think about that possibility, the possibility of another wife and mother in his home? Probably, he thought. He knew he still had a lot of grieving ahead of him, but the pragmatic side of him was equally sure that he couldn’t go it alone for too long.
As a result of a couple of no-shows, the patient load finally eased up a bit in the final hour of an afternoon that was supposed to conclude at four o’clock, as it did every day. It was looking like the threesome had survived another frenetic day, although more than two hours of paperwork would keep Delia at her desk until at least six.
At three-thirty, a tall, rather striking woman walked into the office. Delia didn’t recognize her, so she guessed she was the person who matched the new patient file on her desk. The very slight limp that this woman had didn’t look to Delia like anything other than sore feet. The woman approached the desk’s open reception window and said she had been referred to Dr. Dunker by a colleague of his in Fond du Lac, an ophthalmologist named Dr. Keitel. She told Delia that her name was Connie Koehler. Delia handed her a form and asked her to make herself comfortable in one of the chairs in the reception area while she was filling it out. Then, she assured her that Dr. Dunker would see her shortly. Having glanced at the file in advance, Delia’s curiosity made her take a quick but careful look at Connie’s left eye, the one the file had indicated was a prosthetic, and couldn’t help thinking it looked pretty good. Keitel had done some good work, she thought to herself, before getting back to some pressing paperwork.
Twenty minutes later, Nurse Tompkins opened a door adjacent to Delia’s reception office and invited Connie into a patient suite to prep her for Dr. Dunker’s appearance. There wasn’t any specific treatment required before the doctor showed up, but Nurse Tompkins wanted to get a quick preliminary understanding of any needs that might have to be met in that first visit and make sure that Connie wasn’t in any discomfort. The sudden decline in workload gave Nurse Tompkins a chance to chat a bit with Connie, which was her practice with every new patient.
The two women took to each other right away and quickly discovered that they both came from the same part of the state—Connie from Chilton, of course, and LuAnne from Sheboygan. Their hometowns were only thirty-eight miles apart, which made the two small town girls think of each other as neighbors.
Connie told LuAnne that she had been working at Gimbels but was looking for an office position of sorts, something like filing—something that didn’t require her to stand up all day long because of her bad leg. LuAnne was quick to see the possible match and told Connie that Dr. Dunker badly needed administrative help. She said she’d look into it and talk to the doctor. She promised she would call Connie sometime in the next couple of days to follow up. Just then, Dr. Dunker walked into the patient room and met Connie Koehler for the first time.
There are a lot of people out there who have been married for whatever length of time and claim that they experienced love at first sight or that they instantly felt they would marry the person they had just met. It must be purely chemistry because the attraction is often felt within the first minute or two of meeting, and maybe less time than that! Of course, an attraction doesn’t mean anything will come of it; it just sends a shared signal that there is something in the meeting that should be explored.
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A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak Page 40