Deja vu All Over Again Read online

  They stopped at a snack trailer, and Nate bought a couple of pretzels before they found a place to sit between the kiddie rides and the thrill rides. Eppie waved to her husband. He was standing near the rail of the bumper cars arena.

  “I still have trouble imagining you with kids.”

  She held up two fingers. “Who would have thought? And three grandkids now.”

  “I’m surprised. You know, your injury and all. I didn’t think it was possible.”

  “Everybody assumes that. But it is very possible. Though Sarah was a really difficult birth and I swore off any more after that.”

  Nate drummed his fingers on the armrest to her wheelchair and asked her if she knew pregnancy was possible when they were in high school.

  “No way. The doctors said it’d never happen. Why?”

  She had put on pounds over the years, and her face was wider than he remembered with big, round cheeks, but it was as full of freckles as ever. It made her appear younger than she was. She gave him a crooked grin.

  Nate shrugged. “No reason.”

  Unconvinced, she said, “Maybe. Maybe not.” If quiet reflection was possible in the middle of a carnival, it settled on them as they sat back to enjoy the moment and their renewed friendship.

  She said, “Tell me, how serious do you think Cooper is about this fellow, the principal, Mr. Festerhaven, right?”

  “Like I said, she’s going to marry him. I’d have to say that’s beyond serious. That’s, like, fatally serious.”

  “I don’t see it as fatal. Not yet. Now look at me. Back in the day, when we were whatever we were, not only did I think having kids was impossible, I assumed finding a husband was, too. Who’d want me? I spent a lot of years believing that, but then Will came along, late but better than never. So without getting all sappy on your ass, things always seem to work out even if it takes a while.”

  It was the most optimistic, sunny thing Nate ever heard from her. “But if you tell anybody I said that, not only will I deny it but I’ll grate you into little tiny bits and feed you to the seagulls.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.”

  Eppie had mellowed through the years but managed to retain some of her attitude. It was a nice mix and he liked it.

  “Seriously. What do you think I should do? I didn’t expect to feel so down about this.”

  “I think you need to decide once and for all if you’re in love with some made-up version of Cooper, the dream Cooper, and the real Cooper isn’t what you want in the long run. Or if she really is your soul mate you keep jabbering about. Don’t you want to at least know that?”

  “Well, of course. But I certainly can’t do anything that might screw up what they have. Not fair to her or to him.”

  Eppie told him that he should find out. “So you’re going to put your tail between your legs and slink away. You’re thinking about what’s best for her. You’re thinking about what’s best for him. But think for a minute of what’s best for you.”

  “To slink away like the dog I am?”

  Eppie shook her head, disgusted. “Back in high school, the way I heard it, she would have done anything for you.”

  He knitted his eyebrows and his mouth twitched to one side. “She never said anything like that.”

  “She was too shy to tell you, and you were too stupid to figure it out. And that, my friend, is why you two never got together. So this time, if you think she is the real deal and not some fantasy you’ve cooked up over the years, you need to tell her, straight up. Yeah, straight up. Nothing ambiguous.”

  No way. What Eppie was suggesting rankled something inside him. Even though Julie wasn’t married yet, he didn’t want to be like the guys that hit on his wife and made it so easy for Valerie to cheat on him.

  Then again, he was sure Julie would never do anything like that. They would both respect the ring, so he had a safety net. “Hell, she’ll blow me off and probably hate me for even bringing it up.”

  Eppie told him he was supposed to be a creative guy. “You can come up with something that isn’t rude. Gentle. Honest, but most importantly, leaves no doubt. Leave it up to her and see what happens.”

  “Suppose she tells me to get lost?”

  “That’s what I would do if I was her. But then I was never in love with you. Much,” she added with a grin. “And what if she does prefer this other guy to you? You still have another option.”

  “And that is?”

  "Guido, the hit man.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Confession at the Dairy Barn

  At the end of the first day of classes, the boy took the girl aside and revealed he had hidden his strong feelings for her since they were children. She realized she felt the same, and love triumphed.

  Delete.

  At the end of the first day of classes, the girl cried on the boy’s shoulder looking for comfort after breaking up with her fiancé, and love triumphed.

  Delete.

  At the end of the first day of classes, there was no girl, no boy and no hope of getting them together.

  Delete. Delete. Delete. Nate stabbed the button repeatedly in frustration.

  He leaned on a fist in the light of his laptop on the desk in his bedroom, full of gloom as he stared at the pages on the screen, variations of scenes he had imagined and fiction he had committed over long nights leading up to the first day of school. It was almost midnight. The Righteous Brothers were singing “Unchained Melody” on the headphones plugged into his computer. He had a long iTunes playlist of melancholy songs for times like this. He opened his favorite scene, the one where, at the end of the first day of classes, word spread the principal was dead. He was bitten by a wild beaver while trying to take a selfie with the animal he had dragged from a creek on a weekend hunting trip. The girl, his fiancée, turned to the boy for consolation, and love triumphed.

  “If only real life worked like that,” he mumbled. He tried to come up with a way to sneak a rabid beaver into Festerhaven’s office. Oh, well.

  He leaned back in the chair at his desk in the corner of his bedroom and ignored the computer screen while his mind wandered to some spot where it looked back at him from an objective distance, intrigued by how his life and his fictional story were at the same intersection. If he had a shrink, she’d tell him that it was not only inevitable but also deliberate. He reached into the bottom drawer to the right of his knee and pulled a snack package of Fig Newtons from where he had hidden them underneath a handful of Playboy magazines.

  His mother would have a fit if she looked there. The magazines served two purposes. First, they were from the 1970s like the one he stashed under his mattress as a curious boy. Nate hadn’t had a peek at Playboy in too many years to count but lamented the end of the era when he heard the magazine decided to bounce nudes from its pages now. So he was preserving a bit of personal and cultural history. Second, if Regina found them, she would shake her head, disgusted with Nate’s bourgeois taste, but might leave well enough alone and not discover the worse sin of Fig Newtons and Snickers bars hidden beneath them. All that sugar and processed food was totally unacceptable, and she would lecture him long and loudly about it. In Mandarin. Regina had taken up lessons in that language with passion. She thought it best to develop good communication skills early and be prepared for when the Chinese took over running the world from the US. She told Nate it was more than being practical, it was the polite thing to do.

  Lacking the creative energy to make something up, Nate typed what had actually gone down at the end of that first day of classes.

  He enticed Julie and several others on staff to mark surviving the first day of classes with a trip to the Dairy Barn after school. He hoped the principal, Festerhaven, would join them so Nate could observe the dynamics of Julie’s relationship with him.

  “Russell doesn’t like getting too cozy with staff,” she whispered when he asked why the principal laughed off Nate’s invitation.

  “He seems to be okay getting cozy wit
h you.” Nate gently pinched her arm, teasing, like two good friends sharing an inside joke. It’s what I would do.

  Naturally, Julie was the only one with his shared history to understand the significance of a group visit to the Dairy Barn after school. He was pleased she didn’t let it pass without a comment. “This feels familiar.”

  It was a comfortable mix of folks that he found himself easing into. Carla, the science teacher, and Seth, the music guy, were there. Beverly and Barbara, the chatty twin sisters of different mothers from the English department, came along, as did Festerhaven’s secretary and Ray, the black vice-principal in charge of discipline with a thousand-watt smile and biceps like a pro linebacker.

  When Ray mentioned having gone back for his high school reunion that summer, everyone chimed in with stories of their own. Nate had come back for two, the ten- and twenty-year reunions. Julie said she had neither the time nor much inclination to attend either.

  He couldn’t resist posing the question, “Let’s say high school is your fork in the road. One direction leads you right where you are today, and the other, well, who knows? Would you do things differently if you could?”

  Carla said she might consider doing a lot of little things here and there through the years, “But I’d still be teaching. It’s what I do.”

  Seth, the music instructor, said he would buy a guitar and join a rock band instead of taking up the tuba. “Maybe I would could’ve been a roadie for Journey.”

  “Wild,” Nate said. And then he looked directly at Julie. “And you? Would you change your life?”

  She never hesitated. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Because if I did, I wouldn’t have my children. And I wouldn’t have the grandchildren. I might have had different children, but I kind of love the ones I have.”

  “That,” Nate had said, “is the perfect answer.”

  He liked these people, and they provided a lot of advice about everything from which office directives could be safely ignored to tips on engaging high school students without losing their respect. Out of habit, he caught himself making mental notes about them, characters he might later spoon into his Mulligan story.

  He rejected offers for a ride back to campus, even though no one was headed that way. It was only five blocks; he would walk.

  “I think I’ll walk, too,” Julie said. She had left her car at the school and caught a ride with Carla. It was a pleasantly surprising development.

  “You know, I’ve never spent much time looking back, but you have a way of making the past out to be more fun than I think it was,” she said as they walked out of the Dairy Barn. She circled the air with her finger. “This was certainly interesting.”

  They walked a route back to the school that took them down neighborhood streets lined with ash and maple trees. He asked about her children and the grandkids. Did she have any pictures? She told him she didn’t want to be one of those grandmothers who believed everybody should be as interested in the kids as she was while she pulled her phone from her purse and then scrolled through several for him.

  A block later, he asked about Festerhaven. “He seems a decent enough guy.”

  “He is.” Try as he might, Nate couldn’t find much to dislike about Festerhaven based on Julie’s account. He listened closely to her words, the tone of her voice and the energy of her convictions, hoping for some chink in her fiancé’s shining knight armor. He was successful, practical, passionate about sports but willing to suffer through a chick flick she wanted to see even if he didn’t always manage to stay awake.

  “A true Renaissance man,” Nate said. “A man after my own heart.”

  She said he got along tolerably well with her family. “Though I don’t think he likes the idea of being a grandpa.” She added a snicker and slight shake of her head, amused by that.

  “Yep. Sounds decent to me, lots to like there. But you left out his best quality, the most important one, in my mind.”

  “Really? And which is…?”

  “He’s in love with you. And in my book, that makes him damned near perfect.”

  Julie stopped and looked at him with wide eyes. It was a lightning-quick sense of wonderment that puzzled him. The fact that Festerhaven was in love with her was hardly a news flash, so that wasn’t what he saw in her face. Maybe she had never thought about what another person’s love in general, and Festerhaven’s love specifically, said about her. Made her special. Maybe she was amazed that someone like Nate would think so. Maybe nobody had ever told her.

  “Thank you for saying so.”

  The pause that followed was only a single heartbeat, but long enough that he was sure something passed between them. She was the one who flinched first and started walking again. He stayed behind. She turned, he knew she was watching him but he didn’t mind. He closed his eyes and savored the moment.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Who knows if we’ll ever share this feeling again? One thing I’m trying to get better at is taking more time to enjoy each moment, in case this, this walking with you again becomes nothing more than cool memory thirty years from now. I wish I had that kind of perspective when we were in high school.”

  Julie raised a thumb to her lips, nibbling on her nail thoughtfully. “I guess it takes years to appreciate a moment. It isn’t special until then.”

  “Yeah, but I want it to be special now. Is that asking too much?”

  “Yes, it probably is. But still, I’m glad you fixed it up for this little field trip, as you called it, getting a group together for milkshakes and sodas, of all things.” She was watching her feet as she added, “And I’m glad you’re back. You got me thinking about a lot of things, like what good friends we were and how it feels to have a friend like you again.”

  Nate never had a problem being a friend. Tried and true, someone who would have your back whether you deserved it or not. But if she thought of their relationship now as being just friends—that was friends with a little “f” as opposed to the big “F”—well, how the hell was he going to get around that? Back in high school, they had dated a few times but had never gotten serious because, as Eppie pointed out, he was a doofus who didn’t tell her how seriously “in like” he was with her. Back then, he had plenty of time to tell her, an entire life ahead of them. But now, he was fifty-five and he didn’t have time to be “just...”

  “Friends?”

  “Of course. What else would we be?”

  Nate knew there would never be a better moment to make his case for better or worse. It was the moment he wanted. Even if she rejected him, she would know the truth, and he could live or die with that. He stopped on the sidewalk so that she was forced to turn and face him with the sunlight in her face. She raised her left hand to shield her eyes and the light set off a miniature fireworks display bouncing off the diamond on her ring.

  He had perfected the fraud of hiding disappointment through the years, and Julie put him at the top of his game that afternoon by dropping the F word—friends—on him. “We could be Best Friends. Best ever,” he said. Then he laughed.

  They walked the rest of the way to the school chatting about things he paid no attention to. In his ear, he heard Eppie whispering over and over.

  “You pussy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Keeping Score

  “Nate Evans, you are a stud. Let me kiss your big stick.”

  “Russ, if it wasn’t for the sexual connotation in that, I’d be happy to oblige. Better if we just high-five. Maybe a chest bump?”

  “Then let me buy you a beer, buddy.” The Master Batters, Festerhaven’s softball team in the over-fifty league, gathered around three tables they pulled together in the clubhouse of the softball complex. Whoopin’ and hollerin’ was the sport of the moment. You’d think they’d just won the World Series after knocking off the best team in their league for the first time ever.

  “Thanks, Captain.” Nate was sipping on a Pepsi. On most
softball days, a beer would have been natural, but not today. Julie was sitting to his right. She had ordered a soda, and Nate didn’t want her to drink him under the table. He leaned in as she checked the scorebook she had kept during the game. “I take it these guys don’t win many games.”

  Julie smiled. She added up the totals for hits, runs, runs-batted-in on the bottom row. “Hardly ever.”

  “You’d never guess our Mr. Principal could let his hair down like this, that is, if he had any hair to speak of. Totally different dude away from campus.”

  “It’s not just on campus. Trust me.”

  Well, if anyone would know, Julie would be his go-to resource on the matter. Festerhaven appeared much more relaxed away from school, but Nate still thought he was wound tighter than a girdle on a three-hundred-pound diva.

  “Yeah, when I got here, he was supervising the players during warm-ups like they didn’t know how to stretch or play catch. He busted that guy over there —Mike?—for sneaking a beer before the game like he was coming down on one of the students. He takes this manager role way too seriously.”

  Julie disappointed Nate by defending her fiancé too quickly. “He can be a sweetheart when the mood strikes him—and it does, I think, more often than he realizes—but he also has this competitive streak you wouldn’t believe. When we win, he gets a little crazy. And when he gets to drinking and winning, well, things can get interesting.” Julie said this with an air of amused tolerance.

  It had been a month since their trip to the Dairy Barn and their walk back to campus when he’d declared his undying “friendship” for her. In that time, he had established ground rules for the relationship. Of course, Julie had no idea the rules existed. She would treat him like a good friend back from the past, and he would spend their time together trying to convince himself he was good with that. The problem was, it was getting harder to live with his self-imposed rules of engagement—hers to Russell. The trade-off was he got to spend more time with her than he might otherwise.