Free Fat Lightning by Howard Owen Page A

off to college at Old Dominion, she made everyone start calling her Sandy. Sandy’s husband used to be known as Elbert, but he told everyone, as soon as he got out of high school, that he would be called Skip from then on. To Nancy’s knowledge, no one had ever called him Skip before then. She still forgets sometimes. The three of them and Buddy used to double-date.
    The reunion is the 22nd of June, a time of year when Richmond can feel hotter than Florida, the start of a season that will end sometime in late August and is best endured under a ceiling fan on a screened porch facing northeast. The Dabney High Class of ’61 has rented a large conference room at the John Marshall Hotel downtown and hired a Carolinas beach music band. It is supposed to be the same band that played at their senior prom but turns out to be five other people, although some are related to the original members.
    Skip rents a limousine, as a joke he claims, to pick them up at a quarter ‘til 6 and later take them home. Since the driver’s paid by the hour, and they don’t want to arrive until 6:30 at the earliest, they have him drive them around the city while they share a bottle of champagne. They stop off at a bar near the old tobacco warehouse district for a drink, the humidity down by the river almost knocking them back in the car when they get out.
    The limousine drops them off right at the John Marshall’s front doors, but Nancy breaks into a sweat under her full-length teal gown during the 10 seconds they’re outside, and the sweat chills her instantly when she steps into the hotel’s refrigerated lobby. She realizes that she’s already drunk more in one sitting than at any time since she found out she was pregnant with Wade.
    The room, half of an even larger one that’s been divided by a sliding panel, is large enough for 300 graduates and their spouses, should they all choose to attend. Kim Stallings has already told Nancy that no more than half have paid their $20.
    Nancy doesn’t see Buddy when she comes in, trailing Sandy and Skip, who provide a shield from the hugs and kisses and you-haven’t-changed-a-bits while she gets her bearings.
    She’s adjusted to the air conditioning now and briefly considers getting a Coke at the cash bar. Then she realizes how long it might be before she has another chance to get knee-walking drunk with so little guilt. Sam’s keeping Wade; she’s staying at Sandy and Skip’s. She orders a bourbon-and-water.
    Looking around her, she sees a group of people split down the middle by the ’60s, which really didn’t reach Richmond and the rest of the South until the decade was almost over. The men, in particular, are a study in contrast. She sees the Dabney High quarterback, wearing a three-piece suit, his hair in a crewcut identical to the one he wore to the senior prom, talking with the all-region halfback, who is wearing a pink and purple tank top and has a handlebar moustache and hair halfway down his back. Before the night is over, they’ll fight in the parking lot.
    The Class of ’61, Nancy thinks to herself: too young to see what Viet Nam really was, too early for integration. Those who left the old values left them after high school and didn’t seem to have much in common with their old friends anymore. She’s not sure where she fits in.
    There’s a buffet line, and Nancy is halfway through it, sandwiched between two men who have put on enough weight and lost enough hair in a decade that she doesn’t recognize them, when she sees Buddy. Whether he’s been there all the time or just materialized, she doesn’t know, but there he is, 30 feet in front of her, turned to the side so that she can see that he doesn’t part his hair on the right any more.
    She picks up a couple of chicken wings and does a 180-degree turn, not wanting to confront the past while carrying a plate full of finger food.
    But, as