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“She thinks my hair is interesting?”
Joan laughed again. “She also said you’re a retired professor.”
“I am.”
“What did you…profess?”
His turn to laugh. “Art history. Harvard,” he added before she could ask.
“Impressive.”
“Never hurts to name-drop Harvard,” he said with a smile.
Joan felt her own smile pulling at the lines around her mouth. She quickly brought her lips together. “And what do you do now that you’re retired?”
“The usual. Read, travel, play a little golf and a lot of bridge, spend time with my grandkids.”
“How many do you have?”
“Four. Two girls with my older daughter, a boy and a girl with the younger one. I’m lucky. They all live relatively close by. You?”
“Not so lucky. My son lives in New Jersey. He has two boys I don’t get to see as often as I’d like. And my daughter isn’t married. Not that that matters anymore.”
“Like the man sang, ‘The times, they are a-changing,’ ” Harry said. “So, what do you do? Still working?”
“No. I never really did, to be honest. I mean, I had jobs after college—secretary, receptionist, bank teller, that sort of thing. But never anything you could generously call a career. A degree in English doesn’t exactly qualify you for a whole lot of professions, unless you want to teach, which I didn’t. No offense.”
He smiled. “None taken.”
“I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I was never all that ambitious, and after I got married, I was quite happy to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. I toyed with the idea of going back to school and getting my master’s degree once the kids were older, but something always seemed to come up.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. I seem to be at some sort of crossroads. I have all this time, and I’m not sure what to do with it. I don’t golf and I don’t play bridge.”
“You could take lessons.”
“At my age? I’d never be any good.”
“I’ve been playing both most of my life and I’m still not any good,” Harry said with a shrug. “What about traveling?”
“I like traveling,” Joan said. “But my husband was pretty much of a homebody. We’d go to Florida, Mexico, the Bahamas. He liked to go where the weather was warm and he didn’t have to cross an ocean to get there. And now, well, I guess I’m not all that keen on traveling alone.”
“It can be a little daunting at first, I admit.”
“You travel a lot?”
“Whenever I can.”
“What’s your favorite place?”
Harry gave the question a moment’s thought. “I guess I’d have to say India. The people, the sites. It’s all so different, sointeresting.”
“Don’t laugh, but when I was younger,” Joan said, putting her elbows on the table and leaning toward him, “I had this fantasy about swimming in the pool in front of the Taj Mahal. Until I realized it was more of a wading pool, and the water was filthy, and the guards would probably shoot me if I set foot in it. You’re laughing. I said, don’t laugh.”
“Sorry,” he said, still chuckling. “That’s really quite charming.”
He thinks I’m charming,Joan thought.
