“Clifford? It’s getting there,” she admitted. “I’ve been seeing him longer than I’ve seen anyone else. He came to Quincy about a year and a half ago, and we started dating about six months later. What about you? Any long romances before you left home?”
“One,” I said. “It became impossible, however.”
“Impossible? Why?”
“It was complicated. We were from two different worlds.”
She just looked at me with her soft smile. Some people can’t subdue their personalities, I thought. No matter what they wear, what they hear, where they are, their inner self shows itself. Julia was what Daddy would call “a sweetheart, someone who almost always saw the glass half full and never half empty.” She didn’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses so much as she avoided looking at anything or hearing anything that would diminish her optimism. How she could do that and work in a hospital ER was a puzzle to me.
“Care to explain? I mean, was he very wealthy or something?”
“Something like that. He comes from one of those families who think they are tied to royalty. I didn’t fit the picture for his parents. Of course, he assured me that it wouldn’t matter, but it always matters. In the end, no matter what they say, blood is too strong to ignore.”
I thought that was a good mix of what was true and what was not.
She pursed her lips and nodded, impressed. “Daddy keeps telling me you seem like a woman twice, if not three times, your age. He keeps looking at your application form to see if that one in front of the eight isn’t really a three.”
“Events have a way of aging you prematurely,” I said.
“Yes. Oh, damn.”
“What?”
“I said nothing sad, and here I went and made you talk about a sad love affair.”
Our waiter brought her the Volcano. She seized it and gulped half of it in defiance. “Here, try it,” she said. I laughed and emptied the remainder. She immediately signaled the waiter and ordered another. “Tell you what,” she told him. “Save yourself a trip. Bring me two.”
He looked at her with a smirk, looked at me, and went off to get the drinks.
“I hope you don’t get yourself in trouble or anything. I know this is a small town and—”
“Don’t worry about it. If you don’t flaunt it, no one makes a big deal, and don’t worry about my drinking too much. This place provides a taxi if needed,” she told me. “Something tells me we’re going to need it.”
The waiter brought us the two drinks. This time, she sipped hers and started moving with the rhythm of the music.
I drank from my glass and looked out at the crowd on the dance floor, who acted as if we were at the last ten seconds of a New Year’s Eve celebration. We could hear their cheers and cries as they delighted in abandon and bathed in the passion and lust that seemed to settle over the whole dancing mix of young men and women like an invisible cloud of pure sex. They danced as if each was on his or her own private stage, but every chance they got, they rubbed bodies, caressed, and even kissed.
Suddenly, I thought that a young woman who had her back to us resembled Ava. My heart stopped and started. I sat up straighter and shifted so I could get a better view. The young woman moved behind two other couples, one quite plump.
“Something wrong?” Julia said.
“I thought I saw someone I knew,” I said, and continued to shift in my seat to get a better view. The young woman seemed to have literally disappeared. I looked everywhere I could.
“You want to go out there?” Julia asked, mistaking my interest in the dancers as envy.
“To dance?”
“It’s what people do here.”
“Yes,” I said, realizing that I might be able to see the young woman more easily from the dance floor.
We stepped away from the booth, me more slowly than her, and then she laughed, took my hand, and tugged me onto a clear spot on the dance floor. The music seemed to come up from the floor, through my legs and torso, driving me to move faster whether I wanted to or not. She was a good dancer. In moments, we seemed to be challenging each other with dramatic steps and moves. I was so into it that I forgot to look for the young woman, but soon I did.
There were a few who could have been the woman who had caught my attention. They were about Ava’s size, with similar hair. That had to be it, I thought. Relieved, I let myself go even more. We were attracting the attention of young men nearby, who tried to insert themselves between us. For a few minutes, we let two of them do so, but then Julia looked at me, laughed, and nodded toward the bar, where our food was waiting on us.
To the disappointment of the young men, we hurried off. They kept beckoning for our return, but we went back
to our booth. Julia finished her drink, and I finished mine. She ordered two more and began to eat. I was really only nibbling on my shrimp cocktail.