Max Collins - Girl Most Likely

Was she almost on the verge of tears? He really couldn’t tell. And it hit him that now he was the one sitting next to her in the den watching TV.

“I had no idea,” he said quietly, “that you’d been in that relationship so long. That it was so serious.”

“Pop...”

He held up a hand. “I would never move in and cause a breakup. Listen, I’m fine. Everybody has a bad day now and then, and since your mom passed, that’s bound to happen. Particularly with us Nordic types. You have no responsibility, no need to babysit me, to keep me from blowing my stupid head off. I mean it!”

“I know you do,” she said, looking right at him, her smile faint but loving. “I’m just being straight with you. You deserve that.”

“I want that.”

She was sitting sideways too, now. “You have to believe me, then, when I say this was coming. That Jerry was a bad idea. That the worst thing that could have happened was not coming to my senses about him. Okay? Okay?”

“It just wasn’t my intention...”

“Stop it. Just stop it.”

“If I thought I was a burden to you—”

“You want to do something for me?”

“Anything, sweetie.”

“Do your own laundry.”

He started to laugh. “Done deal.”

She was laughing, too. “Also, go fix me some hot chocolate. I see you bought some Danish butter cookies. That’ll be a good fit.”

“Okay. Work me to the bone. See if I care.”

Soon they were in the big kitchen with a little plate of the butter cookies and two mugs of hot chocolate.

“I hope,” he said, “you got to spend some time with your high school pals, before you left Jerry in the lurch.”

“Oh I did. Casual night was in the party room at the brewery — you know that little side room? And when I was on my way out, in the outer restaurant area, I ran into some overflow of my classmates, drinking, talking. I did some mingling before I walked home.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Oh, you know them all. Jeff, Emily, Daniel, Jake, Nicole...”

He did remember them. Most still lived in the area.

She nibbled a butter cookie. “You know who everybody wanted to talk to me about?”

“Me?”

“Not hardly. Mom. She was everybody’s favorite teacher.”

Karen had taught third grade at Galena Primary till her illness forced an early retirement.

“She was my favorite, too,” he said. Taught him more than he could say.

“They did ask about you, Pop. I mean, you’re well known around here. After all, you made the papers a few times.”

“Once with you,” he reminded her.

She sipped hot chocolate. “Emily told me she thought I was the luckiest person she knew.”

“Oh?”

“To have two great parents like you and Mom.”

“Emily sounds very wise.”

“She also has two really, really awful parents.”

They both laughed.

He asked her, “Did you get a chance to talk to your friend Astrid, or did Jerry’s bad conduct get in the way?”

Her forehead frowned while her mouth smiled. “She wasn’t exactly my friend, Pop.”

“She was for a long, long time. Going back to grade school.”

Krista nodded, eyebrows up. “And in middle school, and through a lot of high school, too. Till she stole Jerry away from me.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

Again they both laughed. Not hard. But they laughed.

Keith said, “I always felt a little sorry for Astrid.”

Krista almost choked on her hot chocolate. “What? Are you kidding?”

“No. Remember, she was pudgy and kind of homely in grade school. Took her till middle school before she blossomed.”

Krista’s eyes popped. “And, brother, did she blossom!”

“Yes, but a person who starts out one thing and nature or puberty or whatever turns them into another... that can be tough. I always felt the homely little girl was still inside there, making everybody, oh...”

“Pay?”

“Maybe in a way,” he admitted. “But some of the most confident, secure people on the outside are the opposite inside.”

She smirked. “If you say so.”

They talked some more. He was suddenly glad to be here in this house with her. No, not suddenly — he was already glad, but he just hadn’t thought about it that way. He and his daughter were closer now. They’d always loved each other. But something like... friendship? Something like that had opened up between them.

They went upstairs to their respective beds. Krista took a shower first, and Keith got in bed, on his own side (knowing he would drift to Karen’s in the night), and began reading the novel he’d been working on since he got here.

One of the things his daughter had done, preparing for his arrival, was unpack some of the boxes of his books. In the guest room, where he’d started out, she filled a bookcase with his Civil War collection. He was less than a buff, but when he first came to Galena, the General Grant connection had got him started reading.

A local used bookstore, Peace of the Past on Main, had fed his interest. Nonfiction titles by Bruce Catton, Garry Wills, Shelby Foote, and more lined the shelves, with fiction by Foote again, John Jakes, and Gore Vidal, among others. As he settled under the covers, in pajamas Karen had bought him, he began in the nightstand lamp’s glow to read the next chapter of MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville , his second trip through the novel.

A knock at the door interrupted him just at the point he was about sleepy enough to put the book down. His daughter, in her blue bathrobe, had reached in to knock on the open door, her smiling expression somehow tentative.

“Hope I’m not bothering you,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“You always got along with my friends, right?”

He noted his place, closed the book, and set it on the nightstand. “Not as well as your mother did. And of course I loathed Jerry, or really any boy who thought he was good enough for you.”

She smiled and came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “How would you like to say hello to some of the kids?”

“Why, are they going to drop by? Tomorrow, I hope. This day is over for me.”

“Me, too. And I am talking about tomorrow.”

He sat up straighter. “Honey, if you want to have some of your friends over, and want me out of here, that’s no problem—”

“No. It’s just... I don’t have a date for tomorrow night, now. Since the breakup and all. It’s a chance for you to see the kids, and... How about going with me? Filling in for a lousy no good son of a bitch?”

“I guess I could manage that,” he said. “Maybe not the son-of-a-bitch part...”

“Good,” she said with a little laugh. Then she noticed Andersonville on the nightstand. “Is that what you’re reading? About a nasty Confederate prisoner of war camp?”

“Seems to be.”

She slipped off the edge of the bed. “No wonder you almost blew your brains out.”

She kissed his forehead, and went out.

The turn to Lake View Lodge was a left off Highway 20 West just beyond the Galena city limits. Krista and Keith Larson were in her Toyota and she was driving. She’d been out here countless times, but at night the irregular W leading to the lodge, seven slow miles through incredibly scenic landscape, could be a challenge, particularly on an overcast night blotting out the nearly full moon.

The thickness of largely leafless forest to her left, the rolling golf courses to her right, were mere suggestions, until the world brightened with floodlights upon reaching the lodge itself.

Lake View was a complex of intersecting modern buildings with rustic touches by way of olive siding and fieldstone chimneys. Its beautiful woodsy setting was in its skeletal winter phase, clumps of snow nestling half-heartedly here and there. Cars already crowded the parking lot — the cocktail party hour before the banquet had been going for half an hour — but out-of-towners had sought places near the front lobby. Krista found a place in the side lot, close to the adjacent convention center where the reunion was being held in the banquet hall.