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“They’re the only former students I’d consider friends. I teach in a small town, so I see my kids everywhere, but those two are the only ones with permission to call me by my first name.”
I take a bite of the sweet cake. “Man, these are good.”
“My Aunt Vivian’s recipe. I’ve been making them since I was a teenager.”
“Tell her I’m a fan.”
Her smile is soft. “She passed away. Viv was a very special lady.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Viv was eighty-one and she was not herself towards the end. Maybe in some ways it was a blessing. She was such a smart woman, so losing her cognitive skills probably felt like a slow form of torture.”
“Dementia?” She nods as I shake my head. “That’s the worst.”
“Agreed.” She watches me for a moment while I eat and then says, “Hey, thanks for not going all investigative reporter on me a few minutes ago when I aired my dirty laundry.”
“The truth isn’t dirty laundry. You just have stuff weighing on your mind.”
“No one else knows about Jack.”
“Your boyfriend?”
She nods. “Ex. And it was just a few days ago, so...”
“I get it. It’s still in that messy stage.” I answer the question in her eyes, “There’s still the occasional phone call, you have to return the last of his things, or move out and settle the financial stuff if you were living together.”
“We weren’t living together.” She looks up to the sky and shakes her head when she adds, “That would have been so much harder.”
“I’ve been there, and it makes it one hundred percent harder to cut ties.”
“You’re assuming I was the one who did the breaking up, not him?”
I cover my smile by taking another sip of my beer. “You just told me you broke it off a few minutes ago.” She palms her forehead. “And I would have assumed that’s how it went down anyway. You didn’t come off as content the night I met you.”
“I think I came off like a scatterbrain that night.”
“No. I could just tell you had a lot going on. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious, but I don’t ask nosy questions because I kind of can’t stand it when people do it to me.”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to ask.” Shrugging, she says, “I know your type. I assumed you lost your leg in a circus accident. You’re a lion tamer, am I right?”
I laugh so hard that I’m damn near choking. “Close, but not quite. Guess again.”
“Slipped while climbing Mount Everest?”
“Nope.”
“Shark attack off the Great Barrier Reef?”
“I wish. That’d be a much better story to tell.”
She looks at the t-shirt I’m wearing, zeroing in on the small skull insignia with IYAOYAS written underneath. “Armed forces?”
“Navy. And, yeah, the leg was a casualty of war.” I don’t want her pity, even though she doesn’t seem like the type who’d go all sappy and sympathetic on me, but I laugh it off just in case she’s about to go heading down that road. “It happened during a routine recon mission...Boring story.”
“Yep,” she nods, “you’re a dime a dozen. If I were you I’d lie when people asked me. I’d say it was a snake bite that got infected while you were stranded in the desert after your plane went down or something.”
“You’re pretty good at coming up with stories on the fly, aren’t you?”
