Therese Fowler - Reunion

Not once, while she was his best friend’s wife, had he coveted Craig’s nights with her. Not once had he mentally undressed her, let alone imagined more—though he had certainly noticed her curves and the appealing play of freckles on her skin, the times he’d seen her in a swimsuit. Taken more notice after he and Angie split, true. He’d noticed every attractive woman at that time, the start of a six-year stretch of single life dotted with oases of relationships with women who were more reluctant to get involved than to get busy , as the saying went. Younger women, mostly, but not all. Call him old fashioned, but he liked to truly know a woman before they took their clothes off together.

He was proud of having made only one embarrassing, clichéd midlife mistake: last year, with a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who was also his teaching assistant; an aspiring writer (they were all aspiring writers) whose quiet demeanor belied the specific and vivid tell-alls she posted on her web log, or rather blog —he was still playing catch-up on the evolving vocabulary. Her good judgment was lacking, true, but at least her writing was skillful: she’d written a post that said he was “sufficiently endowed, and capable with all the tools in his toolkit,” which, revealing as it was, was still nice to know, and he was also “tender, really; a credit to his gender.” His colleagues had enough ammunition with which to ridicule him, they didn’t need purple prose too.

Brenda had not, however, been any kind of prospect until she was suddenly widowed. Their new closeness might owe more to shared grief than shared passion … except, after last night it was clear the passion wasn’t lacking, not in the least. Was she just using him as a stand-in? Was she going to wake up tomorrow morning, or maybe Sunday, or next week, and realize he was only superficially like Craig?

Fine time to worry about that now.

He scooted his stool back and stood up. “So then,” he said, folding the list and putting it into his pants pocket, “the girls are joining us for dinner. Anyone else?”

“No—oh, except they’re bringing the baby, so you better pick up some Cheerios, and some apple juice, too.”

He smiled. “Mom, I think they’ll have the baby’s needs covered.”

“Probably, but you never know.”

Mitch’s father came into the kitchen, having changed his swim trunks for plaid shorts in red tones, which he’d paired with a blue tropical-print shirt. His crew-cut white hair was spiked and shining with hair gel. “What don’t you know?”

“More like what you don’t know,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “About matching.”

“And what you don’t know, about style and attitude. Let’s hit the road.”

Mitch looked down at his white golf shirt. It was boring. “Soon as Brenda’s changed,” he said.

His father sat down at the table. “Right, right, Brenda. How about you two?”

Mitch shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”

“I understand that,” his father said. “I hear it from the damn doctor all the time.” About the progress he was making, and was expected to make, recovering from his stroke. He was doing well, tackling the challenges of speech and motor control with determination born of stubbornness.

So yes, his father was doing well; the remaining challenge was in how they were all supposed to deal with what the neurologist could only describe as “crossed wires”—the highly technical term used to explain how it was that his father now and then slipped into another man’s persona. And not just any man: astronaut Ken Mattingly, whom his father had known as a teenager while living in Miami in the 1950s and whose career he’d followed ever since. The delusions were disconcerting, to say the least. One minute his father was Daniel Forrester and then, with no outward sign, he was the astronaut, only with Daniel’s memories conflated with what Daniel must imagine Mattingly’s life had been. Mitch found it maddening—he never knew who he’d get when he called—but his mother was actually entertained. “Gives me a little variety,” she’d said.

“Listen,” she said now, closing the freezer. “Get the lobster and shrimp from Rusty’s, over on Stock Island—Daniel, you can direct him—and you know what? Forget buying cornmeal, just bring home some of their conch fritters.”

She stood with her hands on her generous hips, surveying the kitchen as though looking for something that had just snuck away under her nose—the most iconic image he had of her, dating as far back as he could remember. Then she said, “Oh! Dad told you about The Blue Reynolds Show being in town this coming week, yes?”

Did his pulse jump a little with those words? If Blue Reynolds remembered him at all, it would be for things he wished he could take back. He said, “No; he must have forgotten.”

“I did forget, damn it!” His father slapped the tabletop. “But how about that, eh Mitch? The one you let get away.”

Brenda’s footsteps were audible as she came down the hall from the guest room they were sharing. The same one he’d shared with Angie. It didn’t matter that he was now fifty-one and twice divorced, he still felt awkward about rooming with a new girlfriend in his parents’ home. That they had known Brenda for a decade and a half was no help; they knew her as Craig’s wife, now widow. She was his colleague who taught works by the Brontës and Dickens and Carroll, not a woman he slept with. Did any of them feel as weird about this as he did?

Brenda stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Her short auburn hair was dry, and she was wearing a summery black knit dress with a neckline that plunged a little farther than was usual for her. “Who did you let get away?”

“Blue Reynolds,” he said, attempting to sound casual, as though he also had Kate Capshaw and Kim Basinger in his past. “Only she wasn’t Blue Reynolds back then.”

“ You dated Blue Reynolds? When?” She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d told her he had moonlighted as a porn star. So much for sounding casual.

He repositioned a mango atop a bowl filled with fruit. “It’s not a big deal—and it was a long time ago.”

“Twenty-two years,” his father said.

Mitch was stunned. “You can remember that ?”

His father shrugged.

“Blue Reynolds, really?” Brenda said as Mitch took his parents’ car keys off the hook near the counter. “You never told us—or me, at any rate, that you knew her.”

“It never came up.” Even Craig hadn’t known. “Shall we?” he asked, holding up the keys.

He hoped Brenda didn’t think he’d hidden the information deliberately. In truth, he’d never thought his short relationship with Harmony Blue, as she was called back then, was worth divulging to anyone, especially since she’d become Blue . What point was there? Sure, it would make great cocktail party fodder, but he’d be barraged with questions he either didn’t enjoy answering or had no answers for.

They had been young—or she had; too young for the complexities of his life at the time. He should’ve known better than to keep dropping by his mother’s office over that first winter, ostensibly to lend a hand with some rearranging and remodeling of the office space. There was something innately compelling about Blue, though, even back then. She was somehow both tough and vulnerable, somehow experienced and innocent, and lord, she was pretty. Their nine-year age difference was not so huge. He was not Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, for God’s sake.

If he’d been teaching during the summer session, that year after she finished high school, or if Renee, his first wife, hadn’t hauled Julian off to Maine for two months, he’d have been too busy to notice her. As it was, he’d gone from the intensity—or more like the insanity—of juggling a teaching load of three classes, his research, Renee’s demands and fits of jealousy, and erratic fatherhood, to the yawning expanse of days as wide open as the rolling farmland outside the suburbs where he sometimes rode his bike. Harmony Blue Kucharski, with her love of reading and Scrabble, had been a welcome distraction that summer. She was the subject of pleasant daydreams during the little down time he had in fall. By winter, he’d convinced himself that she was old enough to become something more.