Page 59 of The Husband Hour
“I have to mic you up,” Matt said. “Normally I have a sound guy, but you threw me a curveball today.” He knelt in front of her chair, leaning close to feed a wire down the front of her shirt. Her pulse raced from his nearness. “Sorry—almost done,” he said. He reached around her to clip a sound pack to the back of her jeans.
She felt relief when he stepped away and looked at her from behind the camera.
“One more thing. I just need to fix this so it’s not visible.” Matt moved back to her and reached around her waist to adjust the sound pack. Then he checked her mic before returning to the chair opposite her, picking up a laptop, and resting it on his knees.
She exhaled.
“You ready to get started?” Matt said.
“Um, yeah.” She was still unnerved by his nearness, the way it had felt to have him invade her personal space.
“Okay, so just look at me. As if we’re having a conversation. Yeah, like that. I know it’s strange, but try to forget about the cameras.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“When I ask you a question, I need you to respond by repeating part of it. So if I say, ‘What is your name?’ you say, ‘My name is Lauren Kincaid.’ All of my questions will be edited out, so for this to make sense, you need to repeat the question.”
Lauren swallowed hard. Behind the cameras, a tall square light beamed down on her.
“So, just to get the ball rolling: Tell me your name and your relationship to Rory Kincaid.”
“My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid is my husband.”
“Lauren, I’m sorry—can you repeat that but using past tense.”
It took her a few seconds to register what he was saying. When she got it, she took a short breath before saying, “My name is Lauren Kincaid. Rory Kincaid was my husband.”
“How did you two meet?”
“We met in high school. I was writing an article for the school paper about the hockey team, and I interviewed him.”
“What was your first impression of Rory?”
“When I met him, I guess you could say the school had put him a little bit on a pedestal. The hockey team was doing great, he was the captain even though he was only a junior, and he was the lead scorer. He was the lead scorer in the entire division.”
“So he was a big deal.”
She nodded. “I interviewed him for the school paper, but the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about him too.”
“What did the Inquirer article say?”
“It was about Philadelphia-area high-school athletes who had the attention of college scouts all over the country. The only one mentioned from Lower Merion School District was Rory. They even ran a photo of him.”
“Do you have a copy of that?”
“Somewhere. I can look for it.”
“That would be great. Okay, so, when did you first go to one of his hockey games?”
“After I interviewed him for the article, I went to his game that Friday night. They played against Radnor and won in a shutout.”
As much as she’d tried to be a neutral observer of the game, reporter-like in her attitude, she couldn’t take her eyes off Rory during the three twenty-minute periods. Even when he was on the bench, she watched him drink from his Gatorade bottle or wipe his brow with one of the white towels the team assistant handed around. He scored a hat trick. After his third goal, the crowd tossed their LM baseball hats and ski hats onto the ice. The energy in the rink was electrifying, and Lauren was hooked—on hockey, and on Rory. “Rory scored all three goals.”
Matt asked if Rory was thinking at that time about a career in the NHL, and she told him that he liked hockey but he was also interested in astronomy.
“Astronomy,” Matt repeated.
“Yes. In high school, he was always reading astronomy books. And he was really gifted in math, so he knew astronomy was something he could get into someday.”
