At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks [41]
Lexie shook her head. “We can’t go with Anna. I want her to have her own name.”
“How about Olivia?”
Lexie shook her head again. “No. We can’t do that to her.”
“What’s wrong with Olivia?”
“There was a girl I went to school with who was named Olivia. She had a terrible case of acne.”
“So?”
“Brings back bad memories.”
Jeremy nodded, thinking it made sense. He wouldn’t name his daughter Maria, for instance. “What are some of your other ideas?”
“I was thinking about Bonnie, too. What do you think of that?”
“No, I dated a woman named Bonnie. She had nasty breath.”
“Sharon?”
He shrugged. “Same thing, except the Sharon I dated was a kleptomaniac.”
“Linda?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. That one threw a shoe at me.”
Lexie studied him carefully. “How many women have you dated in the last ten years?”
“I have no idea. Why?”
“Because I’m getting the sense that you’ve dated just about every name out there.”
“No, that’s not true.”
“Name one, then.”
Jeremy thought about it. “Gertrude. I can honestly say I’ve never dated a woman named Gertrude.”
After rolling her eyes, Lexie held up the outfit again, examined it once more, then set it aside before reaching for another. Only ten zillion more outfits to go, Jeremy thought. At this rate, we should be leaving the store right about the same time the baby is born.
She held up a new outfit before glancing at him. “Hmm . . .”
“Hmm what?”
“Gertrude, huh? I had an aunt named Gertrude, and she was just about the sweetest lady you’ve ever met.” She seemed to be conjuring up the memory. “Now that I think about it, there might be something there. I’ll have to consider that.”
“Wait,” Jeremy said, trying and failing to imagine calling any infant Gertrude, “you’re not serious.”
“We could call her Gertie for short. Or Trudy.”
Jeremy stood up. “No,” he said. “I can put up with a lot of things, but we are not going to name our baby Gertrude. I’m putting my foot down here. As the father, I think I have some say in this, and we’re not naming our daughter Gertrude. You asked for a name that I hadn’t dated.”
“Fine,” she said, putting down the outfit, “I was just teasing, anyway. I never liked that name.” She walked toward him and slipped her arms around his neck. “Tell you what—why don’t you let me make it up to you for dragging you around today. Maybe a nice romantic dinner at my place? With candles and wine . . . well, for you, anyway. And maybe after dinner, we’ll figure out something else to do.”
Only Lexie could make a day like today suddenly seem worth it, he realized. “I think I can come up with something.”
“I can’t wait to hear all about it.”
“I may have to show you.”
“Even better,” she teased, but when she leaned in to kiss him, her cell phone suddenly chimed to life. The mood broken, she pulled back and fumbled through her purse for the phone and answered on the third ring.
“Hello?” she said, and though she didn’t say anything else right away, Jeremy suddenly knew that something was wrong.
An hour later, after checking out and quickly loading the car, they were sitting at a table at Herbs across from Doris. Though they’d already gone over it, Doris had been talking so fast that Jeremy had trouble keeping up.
“Let’s start from the beginning,” he said, raising his hands.
Doris took a long breath. “I just can’t explain it,” she said. “I mean, I know Rachel can be flighty, but never like this. She was supposed to work today. And no one knows where she’s gone.”
“What about Rodney?” Jeremy asked.
“He’s as upset as I am. He’s been looking for her all day. So have her parents. It just isn’t like her to vanish without telling anyone where she’s going. What if something happened to her?”
Doris looked as if she were about to cry. Rachel had worked at the restaurant for a dozen years and had been friends with Lexie before that; Jeremy knew that Doris regarded her as family.
“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe she just needed a break and headed out of town.”
“Without telling anyone? Without bothering to call and tell me that she wasn’t going