“It was different, but everything was actually pretty good. Well…except for that sort of bluish stuff. No offense, but that was pretty nasty.”
Catherine laughed again, her eyes crinkling ruefully at the corners. “I’ve got to agree with you on that one. What was that?”
“I was afraid to ask. But I noticed that no one ate much of it. Chris scraped his onto Bonnie’s plate when no one else was looking.”
“You’re kidding. I didn’t see that.”
“Neither did Bonnie. She gave him a dirty look when she finally noticed. She hid it under a lettuce leaf.”
“Karen knows not everything turns out as well as she hopes. She has a good sense of humor about it.”
“She seemed nice. Her husband, too. Actually, everyone was decent—except maybe for Julia—even though I didn’t have much in common with a group of professors and orthodontists and pharmacists.”
“You’re selling yourself short again. You just said they’re nice people. Why would it matter what they do for a living?”
He hesitated, then sighed. ?
??I guess I’m still smarting over my reunion. There was this girl—er, woman—from my class…”
“Did she say something derogatory to you?” Catherine asked quietly.
He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to tell this story, but maybe it would help Catherine understand a little better why he’d been so sensitive about his career. Why he had been braced for condescension from her professional friends. “She and I had been flirting all day. Drinking a little too much. I had a thing for her in high school, but we’d never hooked up then. The reunion was an all-day thing, and we hung out for a couple of hours. Had a couple of dances that evening and things were looking promising—and then everyone started talking about their jobs. I really thought Marcia knew by then what I did, but I guess it had never come up.
“Someone said something about being a doctor, and Marcia said she was in pharmaceutical sales. That’s when she turned to me and asked what I did. She said she knew I had gone to college to play baseball and she wondered if I’d turned pro.”
“She thought you were still a ballplayer? Wouldn’t that have been mentioned by that point?”
“Like I said, we hadn’t been talking about careers. Up until then, it had all been remember-when stories and gossip about the ones who hadn’t made it to the reunion. I guess she thought I looked the part of a ballplayer. It was a real casual affair and I’d worn a St. Louis Cardinals jersey-type shirt with jeans and athletic shoes. She figured I’d finished college, at the least, and had gone on to some white-collar career. When she found out I dropped out after one semester and had been working construction and maintenance jobs ever since—well, let’s just say the flirting ended fast. She treated me like I had some sort of communicable disease for the rest of the evening.”
“That was very shallow of her.”
“She was always a little shallow. I just thought she’d outgrown it. I was wrong. I even saw her giggling with her old cheerleader friends later, and I figured she was telling them what a loser I’d turned out to be.”
“Mike, you are not—”
He held up a hand to silence her automatic protest. “It wasn’t so much the way Marcia acted that made me think about how I was wasting the best years of my life. It was looking at all the other guys who were doing the same thing. The ones who spend their time drinking and partying, drifting from one dead-end job to another just biding time till the weekend, not caring about the future. I mean, Bob and Brandon are great guys, you know? The best. But when I asked Bob if he’d started thinking about stuff like retirement or health plans or other things that might be headed our way, he just laughed and quoted that old saying about living fast, dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse.”
“What did you say to that?”
Shrugging, Mike tried to smile. “I asked him where he was going to find a good-looking corpse to leave. It wouldn’t do any good to try to have a serious conversation about stuff like that with him. He just turns everything into a joke.”
“But you have fun with him.”
“Oh, always. Bob’s really a great guy. Wouldn’t hurt a flea. Doesn’t judge anyone, treats everybody the same. He just happens to be happy living in the present and letting the future take care of itself.”
“We both have nice friends. They’re just different, in some ways.”
In a lot of ways, he thought. But their friends were no more different than he and Catherine, themselves.
He reached out to touch her hair, letting the silky brown strands ripple through his fingers. “It’s so much easier when it’s just the two of us, isn’t it?”
She nodded slowly. “I suppose it is. We’ve never had any trouble talking when it’s just us.”
“That should mean something, shouldn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t it matter more that you and I get along than anything our friends have to say?”
“Not just friends,” she reminded him, sounding wistful. “You can’t just ignore your family.”
“My sisters,” he said dismissively. “They would come around. My parents would probably love you.”