Free Stranger, Father, Beloved by Taylor Larsen

just about every subject, and once she began speaking, it was almost impossible to get her to stop. He could not believe that such a person had been created—it seemed like God’s cruel joke that she should have come into his life. Michael believed sincerely that if she hadn’t, he and Alex would have remained close and they would both be esteemed professors at the university.
    Michael would watch Alex and Meg together and always muse to himself, why are they together? Is it a sex thing? Perhaps great sex was clouding his judgment.
    Her southern accent, general opinions about everything, and occasional subtly racist comments seemed to zap the spark out of everything. The fact that Nancy also disliked Meg was a great comfort to Michael. When the four of them were out at a restaurant, he would watch Meg’s tiny little mouth motor away and then see silent, obliging Nancy sitting next to her. At such moments he felt proud to have chosen someone as stoic and dignified as Nancy. He was almost positive that his being subjected to Meg’s company must have influenced his decision to want to marry Nancy.
    Going home after those evenings out with Meg and Alex, Nancy and Michael had experienced genuine companionship. They would drive silently or exchange a few knowing looks or brief comments about the evening. Nancy would hold his hand, and it was such a relief knowing he had her to sleep next to when they got back to thedorm. They were united against Meg. When Michael spoke, Meg would look politely in his direction, but when he looked into her eyes, nothing seemed to be there. Once she had even rolled her eyes during one of his discussions about Foucault, rolled them when she thought he was looking away. But he had seen her, and his eyes had burned into her like two lasers, causing her to look down at her half-eaten spaghetti and blush at her mistake.
    As Alex had gotten closer to Meg, Michael had spent more and more time with Nancy. During senior year, Michael and Nancy had gone to Alex and Meg’s wedding, and they had all been polite and warm toward one another, but right after college, Alex had moved up to Massachusetts, near where Meg’s family lived, and he and Michael had found it hard to stay in touch, until they lost touch completely.
    The coffee had raced through Michael’s system, and the effects of the caffeine were now dwindling. He decided to read over his novel and perhaps add a few lines that might unearth what the story was really about, get at its essence. He put on his sunglasses to protect his eyes from the sun and opened the window so the pleasant breeze would blow into and out of the car. He had started writing the novel a year ago and kept working and reworking the same thirty pages. The plot revolved around a young American man traveling around Europe. He was using many of the settings from his own travels to Europe during the summer between his sophomore and junior years. He kept a copy of the novel in a box in his car, and now he pulled out the set of wrinkled pages and reread them.
    He had overheard Nancy bragging to people at their party that he was working on a “wonderful” novel. When asked what it was about, she had struggled to answer and resorted to the beautiful writing—“like poetry” she had said. That seemed to satisfy them, though they still had no idea what it was about. Michael had slunk off to getanother drink when he heard the conversation taking place twenty feet from him. Nancy didn’t know a thing about good literary writing, and perhaps neither did he. He could take it as a challenge to try to learn, though, to become a writer.
    He wrote a few lines: “The man had traveled quite a distance with his carpenter bag. He didn’t trust leaving it in his seedy Parisian hotel, so he kept it by his side at the café.” That was an intriguing couple of sentences indeed and could lead to something. But he would have to figure out