Page 23 of Given Our History

“Oh. Must be me, then.” I pat around my messenger bag until I find my phone and withdraw it.

Teddy: 116 Bridge St, Irving, MD 21532

Teddy: For the meeting on fri

I furrow my brow at the screen. Strange that he’s sending me an address as opposed to a room number. Bridge Street is downtown, a good six or seven blocks from campus, but I haven’t really familiarized myself with all the businesses there because I have no social life. I tap the address to pull up the map. The Falconer, 4.2 stars. Beneath that, in the business category, my worries are confirmed: it’s listed as a bar and grill. I tap out a quick reply.

Clara: This address is for a bar

Clara:??

“You’re texting Professor Hottison?” Reagan asks over my shoulder.

I angle the screen away from her, swatting like she’s a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but she manages to dodge my hand. “Didn’t Mom ever teach you that it’s rude to read other people’s messages?”

“Mom doesn’t know texting etiquette,” she reminds me. “She still thinks ‘lol’ means ‘lots of love.’” I concede the point with a dip of my head. It’s an exaggeration, but only just. We pass Martin Hall, where construction is ongoing—at the moment, a two-man team is hauling a crumbling roll of carpet padding through the eastern door, making way for whatever shiny new flooring they plan to install. “What’s going on with you two, anyway?”

“I’m supposed to meet him Friday for a subcommittee meeting.”

“At a bar.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Would you like to give another dramatic reading of my journal while you’re at it?”

“Diary,” she corrects me, her expression a tad too smug for my liking. A memory surfaces of a nine-year-old Reagan standing barefoot on the glass coffee table in her pajamas, reading a particularly angsty passage from my teenage diary while I was home from college for the holidays—apparently, she’d been rooting around my room while I was away. Mom didn’t even try to stop her. She sat on the couch, glass of Shiraz in hand, roaring with laughter over the fact that teenaged me had tried to use sanguine in a sentence. And that Reagan had then tried to read it out loud, but she pronounced it like it rhymed with linguine.

“You know, if I were a lesser woman, I’d almost think you were overdue for a good old-fashioned sibling beatdown.” Not that I ever gave her those when she was little. Our age gap was too drastic. But now we’re both adults, so maybe it’s overdue.

“I’m just saying”—she holds up her hands—“he’s asking you for drinks. That’s totally a date.”

“Maybe things are different with dating apps these days, but in my world, drinks between colleagues don’t have to mean anything.” When she opens her mouth to argue, I rush to cut her off. “Please, just drop it.”

Reagan sniffs. “Maybe if you showed some interest in someone else, I could bug you about them instead.”

I don’t have a retort, because she’s right. Maybe, if my life was the slightest bit interesting, she’d find something else to pester me about. And really, it’s my fault for bringing up Teddy with her in the first place. She probably wouldn’t have even recognized him after all these years, had I not said something beforehand.

My phone chimes again.

Teddy: Yes

Teddy: Happy hour til five on Fridays

Not much of an explanation, but at the very least, drinks will help break the ice. A nice public setting to slice through the tension. I copy the address and send it to Bel, even if it’s a long shot. The more, the merrier.

CHAPTER9

PRESENT

It’s Friday, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m headed for a bar. It’s a crisp evening, the first whiff of autumn on the air, but inside The Falconer Restaurant and Pub is warm and stuffy. It’s a poor imitation of its counterparts overseas—it’s not distinctly English, nor Irish, nor even Scottish or Welsh, but rather an amalgamation of them all, with Guinness on tap next to Newcastle and politically incongruent flags dangling from the wood-beamed ceiling. But it seems to be popular, a mix of students and townies mingling in front of the bar. I find Teddy at a high-top table toward the back, water stains stamped into the worn finish and a highball glass of gin and tonic already in front of him.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m going to have to play catch-up?” I ask, hooking my messenger bag beneath the table and hoisting myself onto the stool.

“I was giving a lecture until three thirty,” he says. “Only got here ten minutes ago.”

A server stops by our table to take our order. “I’ll do the cold brew martini, please, except could I get that with gin instead of vodka?” Someone once told me that it’s not technically a martini without gin, and now I can’t order it any other way. I bend beneath the table to extract a pen and notepad from my bag.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking the minutes,” I say, flipping past my grocery list to a blank page, where I scrawl Gala Subcommittee—September 13th. “This subcommittee doesn’t exactly have a secretary.”