‘I expected to hear more.’ Reuben Holmes’ family, friends grieve his death in SouthPark fire.

Jacquelyn Johnson had not seen her brother Reuben for almost 20 years when the two met three weeks ago for lunch in Charlotte.

There, the reunion over flatbread, meat and vegetables at the Tryon House restaurant on Woodlawn Road had gone so well that the two planned to meet again this past Saturday afternoon.

Reuben Holmes had been so pleased with the occasion that he texted a photograph he had taken of himself and his sister to his boss, Keith Suggs.

Both siblings felt the need, as Johnson put it, for future conversations.

Now there’s no catching up.

On Thursday, Holmes, 58, was killed in an inferno that consumed a SouthPark construction site.

Holmes and Demonte Sherrill, both employees of an Atlanta-based door and window company, were trapped on the sixth floor of an apartment building being built along Fairview Road.

Johnson, 66, a retired nurse who lives in Columbia, said she received word of her brother’s death from her son on Saturday morning, just as she was preparing to drive to Charlotte to meet with Holmes later in the day.

On Monday, she was grieving his loss while still celebrating the few hours the two had shared.

“The first meeting can be so touch and go,” Johnson told The Charlotte Observer in a phone interview. “But the gentleness, the humbleness of his conversation, it was just serene. I wanted to hear more. I was expecting to hear more. I was not expecting to hear what I heard Saturday.”

Holmes, of Huntsville, Ala., was one of nine children born in Moultrie, Ga., and raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York.

Family members say his death came as his life leaned into a long upswing from personal struggles that had derailed some of his earlier years.

Holmes had a good job. He was financially supporting himself and his mother in New York. After starting work in Charlotte a month ago, he had reached out to Johnson, who says she had been raised by her grandparents and had never really been a part of her siblings’ lives.

A favored uncle

Holmes was single and had no children of his own. Yet Ticha Holmes of New York, one of his nieces, said he was the favored uncle of the older kids, “the uncle we could go to and talk about anything, no judgment, always loving and very giving.”

She recalls a time in her childhood when Holmes surprised Ticha and three other nieces with the 10-gallon water jug he had used for years to stash spare bills and change. Each girl received about $500, she said.

Ticha Holmes credited Suggs with saving her uncle’s life — both by giving him a good job 2 1/2 years ago and, more importantly, by being his guide and friend. She called him Reuben’s “guardian angel.”

It was Suggs who Holmes had called from the top of the burning building on Thursday, who, according to Ticha, counseled her uncle to lie down on the ground to get below the smoke.

Except the smoke had been everywhere. The two friends stayed on the line together until Reuben Holmes stopped talking, Ticha says. (Suggs later assured her that her uncle and Sherrill had been overcome by the fumes before the flames reached their bodies.)

On Friday, Suggs used the reunion photo Holmes had sent him in an online attempt to reach his friend’s family before they read about his death in the media. As he awaited callbacks, Suggs grieved the loss of both of his workers.

“I’m having a rough time dealing with this,” he said. “But, you know, it was God’s will, not mine.”

He described Holmes as both a trusted employee and a close friend, “who would give anybody anything,” who spent hours of free time watching movies on his tablet, and who “didn’t mind going to work.”

Johnson says that during their lunch, Holmes seemed happy, secure and confident in where his life was headed.

“He was on a different level now, so humble, gentle and sweet,” Johnson said, adding that she was looking forward to their next talk.

On Monday, she was making do with what had recently passed between them — setting aside her brother’s texts to make sure she did not delete them.

“They’re like a trophy to me now,” she said.