Free Reunion by Therese Fowler

Mindy
or
Remington Steele.
Blue, anxious, distractible, had better luck with books.
    Without the interruption of commercials or the finite images of someone else’s interpretation of a story, she could more easily fit herself into the romance or drama unfolding inside a book’s cover. She filled empty hours, when her homework was done and the paper plates from dinner were cleared from the coffee table, with stories of clever women who won over reluctant bachelors. Women who defied parents or society in order to follow their hearts—inevitably to romance, and often to fame and wealth. Or women who traveled to exotic places in astonishing jets and were greeted by mayors who were glad to do their bidding. What a glamorous life, and so far removed from reality that she never thought to jump the chasm between her vicarious thrills and the methodical plotting that living such a life would require.
    No, what she’d planned for was far more predictable and achievable: When she and Melody were both out of school, she would use what sheearned working for Lynn Forrester to put herself through college and become a high school English teacher. She’d assign her students the books she was growing to love under Mr. Forrester’s guidance: books about Mark Twain’s river life, Willa Cather’s prairies, and of course the battlefields and savannahs and islands that featured in Hemingway’s troubled imagination. At eighteen, she hardly understood the causes of Hemingway’s torments, but she had an instinctive feel for the tragedies in his stories. What is tragedy, though, at eighteen? It’s romance, and it was romance that had been fixed in her mind that fall after she met Mitch. Romance, and a steadfast determination that, whatever she did, she would not allow her life to turn out like her mother’s.
    That, at least, had gone as planned.

5
    itch sat on a bar stool in his parents’ kitchen, looking at the shopping list his mother, Lynn, had just handed him.
    5# potatoes
    5# shrimp
    8 lobster tails
    Lemons
    Romaine
    Tomatoes, onion
    Cornmeal
    Butter (unsalted)
    2 Key Lime pies—Blond Giraffe
    “A person could gain ten pounds just reading this list,” he said. “There are only four of us, you know.”
    His mother, who’d begun rearranging things in her crowded freezer, leaned around the door to squint at him critically. “I think you’d better stop at two or three pounds. You’re officially over fifty now, and you know, the older you are, the stickier those pounds get.”
    “Tough to stop when I’m around enablers like you,” he said. “You want me to buy
two
pies and also show restraint?”
    “We need two,” she said, going back to her task. “While you all were in the pool, I invited the girls from next door.”
    “The girls” would be the new neighbors, Kira and Lori, who he’dmet soon after arriving this morning and who had wasted no time in telling how they’d met each other (at Fantasy Fest) and, thanks to some very savvy stock trading on Lori’s part, could now afford to call the place home. They’d also wanted to know everything about
him.
The things his mother hadn’t already told them, that is. Things she said she didn’t know. For example, how serious were he and his traveling companion, Brenda? She looked like such a nice woman, they said, from the glimpse they’d gotten through the flowering hedgerow. Was she really a professor of Victorian literature? “Indeed she is,” he’d answered. “And she just published a wonderful book on Lewis Carroll—Duke University Press, you should pick it up.” They’d looked at one another with suppressed laughter in their eyes. “No, seriously,” he’d said, “it’s really good.”
    “I was wondering,” he asked his mother, “why did you tell them about Brenda?”
    “Oh, you know how it goes. We hang out in the kitchen, we make a pot of tea, we chat, things come up. They were curious. We’re all curious.”
    “Hmm.” In fact Mitch, too, was