Jennifer swallowed and opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t very polite, but he wouldn’t have heard her anyway.
“So, what’s been up with you? You in IT?”
She began to shake her head, but Bill didn’t wait for her to explain.
“You know, me and Bryce, we’ve been having a very good year.” He leaned in and she could smell brandy on his breath already, even though the cocktails weren’t set to begin for another twenty-some minutes. “We got a bead on a project that—” He leaned in even closer. “I probably shouldn’t be tellin’ you this, but we think Microsoft is gonna be hot for it.” He eyed her up and down as if his clearly embellished “project” gave him the right to inspect everything and everyone that crossed his path.
“Really?” she managed. “How interesting.” She took a step toward David, but Bill followed her.
“Yeah, I can’t reveal any of the details yet, but, me and Bryce, we’re pretty sure we’re gonna get a big offer by—”
David strode over and clapped Bill on that back. “You’d better not spill more than that,” he told him. “I could hear you over there by the tables.” David pointed for good measure. “Just think what would happen if those top-secret details of yours got into the wrong hands?”
Bill’s jaw dropped. “Uh…”
David threw his arms around Jennifer and gave her a side hug. “Nice to see you,” he said to her. Then, to Bill, “You know, if we could find a quiet corner, I’d really like to hear more about what you and Bryce are doing after dinner. I mean, if we could be sure it’d be private. But, for now, I need Jenn’s help, okay?” And with that he steered her away toward the drinks table.
She chuckled low enough so only he could hear. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Don’t mention it,” he said, his arm still around her. Then, louder, “Could you help me put some ice and a few of these beer bottles in the cooler?”
“No problem,” she said, game for anything, even inane tasks, especially when he smiled at her that way, so much like the boy she’d known. Or, rather, thought she’d known.
She dipped her head, remembering, and started pouring ice into the jumbo C-IL-U cooler. It was clear Mitch and David spear-headed the event with a College Life theme in mind. Though everyone in attendance chipped in to cover the cost of the room, the booze and the food, the slogan of the night may well have been “The Way We Were.” She brushed a rogue ice chip off her casual but tastefully tailored outfit. Looking around her at some of the guys in the room, she thought she was the only one who missed the announcement of the jeans and sweatshirts dress code.
Until she spotted Allie.
Allie was wearing jeans—of a type. They were black and formfitting, tapered to the ankles with black low-cut boots on her feet and some very sheer ivory material for a top. She wouldn’t have looked grossly out of place, however, if it weren’t for her expression of rapt fascination when she was chatting it up with a number of the guys—first Keith, then Charlie, then Bill’s twin, Bryce. All of them edging up to talk with her. All of them equally riveting conversationalists, at least from the spellbound look on Allie’s face.
“I think it’s time for the drinks,” David announced, seeing the direction of Jennifer’s gaze. “What can I get you?”
“A wine. Something red,” she said absently, observing the interplay between Allie and the men. People’s personalities remained pretty constant, didn’t they?
David handed her a plastic cup of Pinot Noir. “She got divorced five years ago.”
“She tell you that?”
“Yeah,” David said quickly. “Mitch and I needed to contact everyone, so…” He grabbed a bottle of Amstel Light for himself, popped it open and raised it in a private toast with her. “Here’s to happy old days.”
She clinked with him but couldn’t bring herself to drink more than a sip. She was deluged by memories, more with every second that ticked passed. Not all of them were happy. Not even all the ones before David left. She tried another taste of wine. Its acidity seared the back of her throat as she tried to swallow it away.
David, by this time, had finished half of his beer. A light beer? Huh. He’d vowed never to drink that “watered-down piss,” as she recalled. Maybe times had changed more than she’d thought.
She indicated the snack tray the abominable Bill made Pete bring to the table. “Want a cracker or something?”
David shook his head. “Nope. Cheese and salami—” He shuddered. “Not good for the abs.”
She blinked at him. The abs? This was a far cry from the guy who’d loaded up on junk food at Kirby’s for an all-night snack-a-thon when they were nineteen.
He shrugged at her expression of disbelief. “I know, I know. But it’s easy to get a gut after a while. I wanna stay fit.”
And, indeed, she hadn’t really thought about it because, for her, keeping weight off was easier than for most (she didn’t eat when she was stressed out), but he didn’t look much heavier around the waist than he had during college. His face was fuller and older, yes, but not his stomach. Even Michael had put on some weight there, and most of the guys in the room were on the heftier side now. David must have worked hard to maintain his shape. Interesting.
“Hey, David,” Allie said, sauntering up to them and winking at David. “Good to see you…again.” She turned to Jennifer. “Wow. If it isn’t the happy couple reunited at last, huh? You look”—Allie inspected her—“unchanged. Mostly.”
Jennifer cleared her throat. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.” She feigned a sweetish smile. “So, what have you been doing lately?” Besides being an outrageous flirt, she added silently.
“Oh, you know.” She made a rolling motion with her hands. “One day’s a lot like the other. Work and get-togethers with friends and weekend softball tournaments and stuff.” She winked again at David. “We won our league’s championship this year. Got to go on a fun overnighter in Springfield.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said. What the hell was it with all the winking? “Are you working in programming?”
Allie’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Of course. But I get manicures every week so my fingers don’t look like it.” Never one to be underestimated, she sloughed off the fluffy-headed act for a second so Jennifer could receive the full impact of her familiar intelligence behind those nasty blue eyes. Then she held up ten perfectly polished fingernails. French-tipped. “David tells me you do…Web pages.” She laughed brightly, as if something so mundane couldn’t really be possible. “He said you—”
“Oh, Allie, look.” David nodded at the entrance. “Didn’t you say you were wondering when Nico was gonna show? The dude’s finally here.”
“Excellent,” Allie murmured, her attention momentarily diverted.
Jennifer wondered why the sudden interest in Nico, especially from somebody like Allie, who’d pointedly ignored the thin, quiet guy during all four years of college, preferring to focus on boys who could score her some good weed or, barring that, a high-tech microprocessor. “What’s he been doing lately?” she asked them.
Allie looked at her like she was an uninformed and rather unsightly beetle. “You didn’t hear? He owns N-tech Toys. They just went public last spring. Good ole Nico could buy and sell all of us three times over.” She shook her head and smirked. “Sometimes you just can’t call ’em.”
Jennifer could see it was true. Even Bill and Bryce were kowtowing to him like he was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the CEO of a Japanese electronics firm all rolled into one. Poor guy. And then there was David—for a second his expression registered something like resentment. Huh.
Mitch, who’d been busy setting up an ancient Macintosh Classic II for part of their evening’s entertainment, saluted David, then Allie and then her as he plugged in the beast they had all considered state-of-the-art once, despite their preference for PCs. (Well, except for Mitch.) He quickly welcomed Nico to the party and announced, “Who’s ready for an original game of Monkey Pong
?”
A cheer went up.
Monkey Pong, a game conceived and programmed by Mitch long before he became a designer at Apple, had monkeys swinging from trees and lobbing bananas—boomerang-style—at a range of unsuspecting jungle creatures. Players got points if their monkeys hit an ocelot or an anaconda, even more if they nailed a flying toucan or a scurrying iguana. Some of those suckers could be hard to see. In college, they had set up two consoles side by side and had tournaments in the lounge. That night, there was just one old computer, but the gang surrounded it like it was the newest Mac-Book Air.
The guys started taking turns playing. Mitch, in his element, grinned and guzzled some kind of vodka slushie thing while annihilating a jaguar and a couple of macaws. Charlie was the closest to giving Mitch a run for his money, but Jennifer also saw Dale, Jake and Ruben jumping in to play a round or two.
Ruben, one of the most tenderhearted guys Jennifer ever knew (David told her he now worked as a branch manager for Sprint), waved them over. Allie ignored him and sidled up to Nico, but David and Jennifer walked over. “Wanna play a round?” Ruben asked them. “For old times’ sake?”
David said, “Sure,” and when Jake finished his turn, David slid in. Despite the game’s sentimental charm, though, Jennifer begged off.
Ruben grinned shyly at her. “Too much excitement for one night already?”
She nodded. “It’s a little overwhelming.” She watched over David’s shoulder as he whacked his first ocelot. The guys whooped for him, but he barely seemed to notice. Ah, the beauty of computer games. Players could focus so hard on the screen and, like hypnosis, lose themselves. All the awkwardness, self-consciousness and the social unease would just disappear. It was one of the things she had loved so much about playing. Something she knew Shelby, if not Veronica, understood.
Jennifer sucked in some air. What was going on in Glendale Grove with her daughters? With Michael? She stole a peek at her cell phone. No messages from home. She didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad one.
The guys played for about an hour more as Jennifer observed the group and answered, with quiet one- or two-line comments, the questions asked by the guys from the old gang. Allie kept Nico hostage by the snack table but, otherwise, it was a gathering much like one of her family’s holiday dinners. People who hadn’t been together in months or years picked up threads of conversation as if no time had elapsed. It was surprisingly simple to slip into the old patterns of talking and being, and she couldn’t help but notice how David reveled in his return to CPU sovereignty.
After that, they milled around, eating appetizers, drinking alcohol and chatting in revolving clusters. Jennifer was glad to see that Nico finally escaped Allie’s clutches thanks to some deft maneuverings by Mitch and Pete. David stayed by Jennifer’s side or very near it for the next hour, but she watched him shape and lead a number of discussions, crafting them with the skill of his old presidential experience. She, likewise, watched the other guys respond, happy to be in his orbit again.
Just before the pizzas and buffalo wings arrived at ten past seven (Fiorello’s Pizzeria didn’t follow David’s orders for a precise 7:02 delivery—so much for an adherence to multiples of thirteen), Lexi appeared. She stood in the shadow of the doorway for a long moment, seemingly unsure whether she should walk through it. When Jennifer caught her eye, she made her decision.
“Hey, Jennifer,” Lexi said. “Am I ever glad to see you.” She hugged her, said a quick “Hi, there” to the guys, then glanced anxiously around the room.
Jennifer knew the person Lexi was looking for, so she said, “She’s supposed to come, but she’s late.”
“I know,” Lexi whispered. “I almost didn’t show when Mitch told me Tash was gonna be here, but”—she shrugged—“can’t let fear and bad memories ruin our lives, now can we?”
Jennifer shot a look at David and then back at Lexi. “Guess not.” The two women shared a smile. Each having a huge club relationship crash-n-burn in public, they had more in common than most.
When Natasha—“Tash”—finally arrived, she gave Jennifer and Lexi a long-distance nod, but hung out in a different corner of the room with Dale, Kyle and a plateful of pizza. David, who was occupied with impressing Allie, Ruben and Bryce in a captivating discussion about his employer’s GPS receivers, left Lexi and Jennifer to their “girl talk,” as he called it.
Lexi raised her eyebrows at that, but said nothing back to him. To Jennifer, though, she said, “It’s so weird seeing Tash again. Or even thinking about her. All those hurt feelings, all that betrayal…it’s all still there, you know?”
Jennifer laughed faintly. Yeah, she knew. “But you’re with someone good now, right? Someone caring?”
Lexi nodded. “Becca’s great. We’ve been together for about twelve years. How about you?”
Jennifer told her about Michael and the girls, judiciously omitting all the marital tension of the past few months.
“Nice,” Lexi said. “I’m glad to hear it, ’cuz, man, David was a real jerk to you at the end of college.”
“Any idea why he did it? Or why Tash had been such a bitch to you when you two broke up? Was it a deep and permanent character flaw?” Jennifer asked her, not realizing until that moment how helpful it was to finally talk about David with someone who actually knew him. “Or was it just youthful thoughtlessness?”
Lexi pondered this as Jennifer snagged them each a slice of pepperoni. “This is what I think,” she said, around a bit of pizza. “I had a few relationships blow up between when Tash and I split and before I met Becca. The thing I learned was that I needed a measuring stick to see whether a relationship was even worth fighting for. That knowledge still might not be enough to save it, but I had to know if there was a threshold below which there was no way it could possibly work. You follow?”
She gave a short nod.
“Okay,” Lexi said. “I thought of this for the first time right before I left Tash. I kept asking myself if I believed she had my best interests in mind. Not because I was looking for some kind of martyr, but because I needed a girlfriend who, at least most of the time, seemed aware of me and my needs. Who didn’t always put her own wants and wishes above mine. Tash might be really great for someone else, but for me, she wasn’t so good. She didn’t have my back, wasn’t all that considerate and every time there was a choice to be made about what I wanted versus what she wanted, she assumed we’d go with her choice because she had the more forceful personality.” She shrugged. “In the end, my leaving blindsided her and it pissed her off big time, but that was only because she hadn’t been paying attention to what I’d been asking for all along.”
Jennifer considered this. “So, you’d told her? You’d expressed what you needed and still she didn’t listen?”
“Yep.”
She thought about David at the end of their relationship. She knew she had told him she loved him and she needed him. She knew she had expressed those things as part of the rhythm of their daily interactions. She thought he had expressed them in return. Did she not remember correctly? Could she have been the one who didn’t recognize the signs of his unhappiness? Might he have tried to tell her what he needed and she just didn’t realize it?
A few minutes later David wandered over to them and asked to steal her away for a walk. So, after she and Lexi exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers, Jennifer and David slipped on their jackets and headed out into the crisp mid-November night.
They roamed through the campus, soundlessly at first. Past the Weaver Center. (“Want a strawberry milkshake?” he asked, breaking the silence. “Not this time,” she replied, knowing his cryptic reference was: “Remember our first date?”) They meandered near the Catacombs, where student voices could be heard clearly even out on the walkways, and then alongside TJH. In the dark, if they didn’t look at each other directly, Jennifer suspected they could almost delude themselves into believing they were those kids again. David, unspoken and glancing at her askance
, reached for the sleeve of her coat, near her wrist, squeezing it as if he were holding her hand.
Because it wasn’t her hand, she let him keep his grasp on it, but she had waited long enough to question him.
“So, what’s going on with you and Marcia?” she began.
He shrugged and, even peripherally, looked uncomfortable. “I told you almost everything already. You know it’s not…great between us. We’re still together because of the boys, but that’s all.” He shrugged again and Jennifer remembered he’d used those exact sentences when he’d told her of his marital woes via e-mail and text. “What can I say? I made a mistake, Jenn.”
She took a big breath. “What happened in those last couple of months of college, David—with us? Was it pressure from Sandra that broke us up? Marcia? Your parents or your friends? Or was it me? Did I not listen to you?”
He paused in the middle of the sidewalk and closed his eyes tight. Then he let his hand slide from her cuff to her chilled palm. The heat of his fingers burned hers, but she held on.
When they began walking again, he said, “It wasn’t you, Jenn. There was pressure…from outside of us. Mostly from my sister but, also, I kinda panicked. I caved in to what other people thought was best for me, but I didn’t know then what I know now. I realize it’s a cliché to say that, but it’s true. Time helps a man see things better, and I didn’t know what a good thing we had until it was gone.”
Jennifer wasn’t completely untouched by his speech, but it just seemed so well practiced. Her suspicions flared, possibly without reason. Or, maybe, there was a shred of logic that accompanied the unanticipated niggle of “feeling” that shot through her. In fact, had she not been at the reunion to witness the social dynamics with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have remembered something. That, in their last few weeks of college, Allie had made herself pretty scarce, too. That David wasn’t the only one who was MIA. And on this very night, all those years later, there was so much winking between them.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 31
