Free Reunion by Therese Fowler Page B

known as a teenager while living in Miami in the fifties and whose career he’d followed ever since. The delusions were disconcerting, to say the least. One minute his father was Daniel Forrester and then, with no outward sign, he was the astronaut, only with Daniel’s memories conflated with what Daniel must imagine Mattingly’s life had been. Mitch found it maddening—he never knew who he’d get when he called—but his mother was actually entertained. “Gives me a little variety,” she’d said.
    “Listen,” she said now, closing the freezer. “Get the lobster and shrimp from Rusty’s, over on Stock Island—Daniel, you can direct him—and you know what? Forget buying cornmeal, just bring home some of their conch fritters.”
    She stood with her hands on her generous hips, surveying the kitchen as though looking for something that had just snuck away under her nose—the most iconic image he had of her, dating as far back as he could remember. Then she said, “Oh! Dad told you about
The Blue Reynolds Show
being in town this coming week, yes?”
    Did his pulse jump a little with those words? If Blue Reynolds remembered him at all, it would be for things he wished he could take back. He said, “No, he must have forgotten.”
    “I did forget, damn it!” His father slapped the tabletop. “But how about that, eh Mitch? The one you let get away.”
    Brenda’s footsteps were audible as she came down the hall from the guest room they were sharing. The same one he’d shared with Angie. It didn’t matter that he was now fifty-one and twice divorced, he still felt awkward about rooming with a new girlfriend in his parents’ home. That they had known Brenda for a decade and a half was no help; they knew her as Craig’s wife, now widow. She was his colleague who taught works by the Brontës and Dickens and Carroll, not a woman he slept with. Did any of them feel as weird about this as he did?
    Brenda stopped in the doorway to the kitchen. Her short auburn hair was dry, and she was wearing a summery black knit dress with a neckline that plunged a little farther than was usual for her. “Who did you let get away?”
    “Blue Reynolds,” he said, attempting to sound casual, as though he also had Kate Capshaw and Kim Basinger in his past. “Only she wasn’t Blue Reynolds back then.”
    “You
dated Blue Reynolds? When?” She couldn’t have looked more surprised if he’d told her he had moonlighted as a porn star. So much for sounding casual.
    He repositioned a mango atop a bowl filled with fruit. “It’s not a big deal—and it was a long time ago.”
    “Twenty-three years,” his father said.
    Mitch was stunned. “You can remember
that?”
    His father shrugged.
    “Blue Reynolds, really?” Brenda said as Mitch took his parents’ car keys off the hook near the counter. “You never told us—or me, at any rate, that you knew her.”
    “It never came up.” Even Craig hadn’t known. “Shall we?” he asked, holding up the keys.
    He hoped Brenda didn’t think he’d hidden the information deliberately. In truth, he’d never thought his short relationship with Harmony Blue, as she was called back then, was worth divulging to anyone, especially since she’d become
Blue.
What point was there? Sure, it wouldmake great cocktail party fodder, but he’d be barraged with questions he either didn’t enjoy answering or had no answers for.
    They had been young—or she had; too young for the complexities of his life at the time. He should’ve known better than to keep dropping by his mother’s office over that first winter, ostensibly to lend a hand with some rearranging and remodeling of the office space. There was something innately compelling about Blue, though, even back then. She was somehow both tough and vulnerable, somehow experienced and innocent, and lord, she was pretty. Their nine-year age difference was not
so
huge. He was not
Lolita’s
Humbert Humbert, for God’s sake.
    If he’d been teaching