Free Reunion by Therese Fowler Page A

curious. He’d known Brenda for sixteen years, but there was no telling what would happen now that they’d gone ahead and dipped their toes into more intimate waters. Well, a little more than their toes, which was going to take some getting used to. The only reason he’d told his parents was as forewarning that Brenda, who they’d known was joining him for this visit, would now also be sharing his room.
    Not once, while she was his best friend’s wife, had he coveted Craig’s nights with her. Not once had he mentally undressed her, let alone imagined more—though he had certainly noticed her curves and the appealing play of freckles on her skin, the times he’d seen her in a swimsuit. Taken more notice after he and Angie split, true. He’d noticed every attractive woman at that time, the start of a six-year stretch of single life dotted with oases of relationships with women who were more reluctant to get involved than to get
busy
, as the saying went. Call him old-fashioned, but he liked to truly know a woman before he and she took their clothes off together.
    He was proud of having made only one embarrassing, clichéd, mid-life mistake: last year, with a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who was also his teaching assistant. An aspiring writer (they were all aspiring writers), her quiet demeanor belied the specific and vivid tell-alls she posted on her Web log, or rather
blog—
he was still playing catch-up on the evolving vocabulary. Her good judgment was lacking, true, but at least her writing was skillful: she’d written a post that said he was “sufficiently endowed, and capable with all the tools in his toolkit,” which, revealing as it was, was still nice to know, and he was also “tender, really; a credit to his gender.” His colleagues had enough ammunition with which to ridicule him, they didn’t need purple prose, too.
    Brenda had not, however, been any kind of prospect until she was suddenly widowed. Their new closeness might owe more to shared grief than shared passion … except, after last night it was clear the passion wasn’t lacking, not in the least. Was she just using him as a stand-in? Was she going to wake up tomorrow morning, or maybe Sunday, or next week, and realize he was only superficially like Craig?
    Fine time to worry about that now.
    He scooted his stool back and stood up. “So then,” he said, folding the list and putting it into his pants pocket, “the girls are joining us for dinner. Anyone else?”
    “No—oh, except they’re bringing the baby, so you better pick up some Cheerios, and some apple juice, too.”
    He smiled. “Mom, I think they’ll have the baby’s needs covered.”
    “Probably, but you never know.”
    Mitch’s father came into the kitchen, having changed his swim trunks for plaid shorts in red tones, which he’d paired with a blue tropical-print shirt. His crew-cut white hair was spiked and shining with hair gel. “What don’t you know?”
    “More like what
you
don’t know,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “About matching.”
    “And what
you
don’t know, about style and attitude. Let’s hit the road.”
    Mitch looked down at his white golf shirt. It
was
boring. “Soon as Brenda’s changed,” he said.
    His father sat down at the table. “Right, right, Brenda. How about you two?”
    Mitch shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”
    “I understand that,” his father said. “I hear it from the damn doctor all the time.” About the progress he was making, and was expected to make, recovering from his stroke. He was doing well, tackling the challenges of speech and motor control with determination born of stubbornness. The remaining challenge was in how they were all supposed to deal with what the neurologist could only describe as “crossed wires”—the highly technical term used to explain how it was that his father now and then slipped into another man’s persona. And not just any man: astronaut Ken Mattingly, who his father had