“Man, I was grounded for a month! I didn’t even try to hide what I’d done from my parents; I was so miserable and just wanted my mommy!” Matthew and I continued laughing at the memory, periodically blurting out “Remember that one time?” and “Whatever happened to?” memories from our junior high and high school years.
After a bit, and after I’d taken my own sip of schnapps (still as gross as I remembered; thanks a lot, Sally), our laughter subsided and we became quiet, gazing sheepishly across the table at one another and playing absentmindedly with our glasses, which were sweating in the heat. The napkins underneath each glass were soaked through; but the condensation on my hands helped keep me cool in the summer night air. And they disguised the fact that my hands were sweating from nerves.
“So…Molly Timmerman, huh? How’d you meet her?” I asked, while also making a half-hearted attempt to hide my distain by plastering a fake, bright smile on my face.
“Ohhhh, tell me how you really feel!” Matthew said, with a mischievous look in his eye. I had missed that look; he had given it to me often as kids when we were about to do something our parent’s might not have approved of. “You never could hide your true feelings; you always wore your heart on your sleeve. I could read you like a book,” he said as smiled and gave me a wink.
Ha, I thought to myself. He has no idea the feelings I kept inside. “I wasn’t able to keep much from you, was I?” I agreed, going along with his assessment while looking back down at my glass.
Seeing that I wasn’t going to answer in regards to Molly, Matthew explained, “Molly works at my firm, in the marketing department; we met at a company picnic, actually. I run the youth outreach program for our foundation and was there to coordinate the kid’s baseball game. We’ve only been dating a couple of months; but when she found out I had meetings this week over in Lincoln, she asked me to fly here with her. She hadn’t originally been going to come to the reunion, but at the last minute she rearranged her schedule in order to make it. She’s actually flying back tomorrow, but I’m staying the week.”
In my mind, I quickly processed the information Matty had just provided me: Only dating for a bit, only with her here because he was coming anyway, and she was leaving tomorrow without him. There might be hope after all. Maybe the Matty I remembered hadn’t become a shallow man who only dated girls based on their looks. It certainly didn’t sound as though they were serious.
“It’s not serious,” Matthew said with a shrug of his shoulders, seemingly reading my mind. “She’s fun and we know a lot of the same people at work, and my parents both like her.” He inadvertently took another sip of schnapps, before wrinkling his nose and pushing the glass away. “But enough about Molly; what have you been up to all these years?”
“Oh, nothing too exciting,” I said. I hated talking about myself; and I really hated having to tell Matthew about my boring life. I tried to sum it up quickly: I left home to attend Lakeview College and ended up staying. My parents retired and moved down to Florida; and both of my younger sisters had followed them. I left out the series of loser boyfriends that I had had over the years; no need to bore him with those details. And I didn’t mention the broken heart he had left me with that took me years to heal. No sense in going there, either.
“Why did you end up leaving home? There was a great university in the next city over,” Matthew asked as he propped his elbows on the table and set his chin in his hands. I was immediately brought back to my parent’s kitchen table, where we would both sit while working on homework or eating snacks. He always sat the same way when he was done with whatever he was doing and wanted to talk. His hair, which had always alternated between dark blonde and light brown depending on the season, was a couple of shades darker and in a much closer cut than it had been when we were kids; but his light blue eyes still shone the same. His skin was still tan, which was not surprising as we had spent so much time outdoors as kids, and of course he now lived in sunny California. He was bulker than I remembered, too, taller, more muscular; but boys grow the most after sixteen years of age, so that was also to be expected. Except for a few faint smile lines on his face and an overall look of greater maturity, he appeared very similar as he had the last time I saw him, sixteen years ago.
“Well…. I guess I wanted to try for a fresh start, to just get away from everything and everyone I’d known,” I said, looking down at my glass, leaving out how I’d been so lost after he moved away that my last two years of high school were miserable and that I’d wanted to move away in an attempt to forget him.
“Well, Krista came here, too,” I continued, “so, I still had a piece of home with me. And after getting my B.A. in English here and not
