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Seeing Natalie chatting with his parents as if they hadn’t just met was going to be enough to question anyone else he might bring. Not that he had ever been close to bringing a woman here.
“Sammy, I’m heating you and Natalie some supper. You sit with her and explain some of the pictures. She probably doesn’t know what your brothers look like.” His mom was busy in the kitchen.
Sitting down next to Natalie, he saw she was flipping through the photo album. It was something Sam wouldn’t have even guessed was at the cabin. There were dozens of them at the house he had been raised in, and it seemed there were a few here. Just his luck.
Looking up, her eyes were sparkling with excitement. “You need to bring more girls home, Sammy.”
He cringed at the nickname he had long outgrown. “I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
Watching her as she went back to looking at pictures, he wished for a moment that it was real, that she was his. But he knew that wouldn’t happen. She was, after all, his former student.
Turning, she looked at him with a smile as she pointed to one. “This is you?”
Looking at the picture of a little boy in only shorts holding up a fish almost as big as he was, he said, “Yes, I was four, I think.”
“You haven’t changed at all. Still blonde and so sure of yourself.” She looked up from the picture, and their eyes caught.
“I am not,” he argued but couldn’t not smile at her.
Reaching out, she touched his hair. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not sure of myself,” he insisted.
“Since the first day I met you. Why do you think I had to come up with a nickname? It was to bring you down a notch,” she whispered, pretending to analyze another picture.
“You said Hanna did that.” He squinted at her.
“Hanna, me … Same thing in those days.” She pointed at people in the pictures, and he gave their names and how they were related if needed. Even the backstory on the photo if he knew it. Some stories were embellished a bit to make her laugh—he had always liked her laugh.
Looking up at one point, he saw his parents watching them, both grinning. Before long, his mother brought the soup and sandwiches to the table, and Natalie closed the photo album and put it aside.
As the younger couple ate, the older couple watched and talked.
“How long have you known Sam?” his dad asked Natalie.
“Six years, I suppose, but I’ve been away from town for many of them.” Natalie took a big bite from her sandwich, probably hoping his parents would stop with the questions. Sam knew it wouldn’t work. These two were tenacious.
“Were you his student? You look young enough.” His mom said it as a compliment, but it was more of her looking for information.
“Thank you, Mrs. Sullivan. I don’t feel young some days. Yes,” she admitted with a nod, “he started my senior year.”
“She made my life miserable,” Sam interjected, hoping his parents would stop seeing them as a couple, because they were not.
“I have apologized for that.” Natalie shot him a smile.
“All I remember from your first year teaching, Sam, was that it was bad. I don’t remember much about why.” His mom scrunched up her face as she tried to remember.
Sam glared at her, hoping she would get the hint and would stop talking about it.
“Wasn’t that the year you were going to quit? Around Christmas time? It had to be, because you had just started there,” Steve asked Sam, all interested in the timeline.
“Yes,” he said through clenched teeth, but he didn’t think his parents were catching on.
“Was I that bad?” Natalie chuckled and stopped eating, looking over at him with those big green eyes.
“No, dear,” his mother assured her. “There was a bad car accident that he worked on that really got to him. It took months for him to get over it. Or maybe he just got better at covering it up. He stopped talking about it.”
“Oh,” was all Natalie said. Putting her spoon down, she got up and silently went to the bathroom off the kitchen. Her movements were stiff and shaky, and Sam wanted to follow her, to explain everything.
