Chapter 9

CHAPTER

9

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.”

“Actually, I was hoping we could talk first.” He sets his glass on the table. It’s already half empty. “We haven’t really had a chance to catch up.”

Since the moment I walked in the door, I’ve busied myself with looking everywhere else—at the table, at the waitress, at my notepad—but now, I set down my pen and force myself to look at him. He’s not wearing his glasses for once, his honey-brown eyes cast almost black by the dim Edison bulbs dangling from the ceiling. He looks tired. There are dark circles under his eyes and a few days’ worth of stubble dusting his cheeks and jaw.

“Sure.” I flip the notepad closed. I’m not sure what sort of catching up he has in mind, but I recall the question I’d meant to ask him last week, and I decide to start there. “How are your parents?”

“My mom is good, for the most part,” he says, staring into his drink. There’s a pause, and I almost think he might leave it at that. But then he adds, “My dad passed away, December before last.”

I’m stunned into silence. I never met his father—from everything Teddy told me, he was a difficult man to get along with, and they’d had their share of ups and downs. But he’s still wearing his dad’s ring, so they must’ve made their peace, in the end. “Teddy, I’m so sorry.” My voice is small, strained, almost lost in the chatter of the bar and the Van Morrison song drifting from the smart jukebox. “Your ring—” I’m thinking out loud, letting my mouth get a running start on my thoughts. I swallow, looking down at my notepad. “I should have known.”

I should have guessed, at any rate, but I also should have been there. Maybe if I hadn’t been so tactless all those years ago, I would’ve been. It would have been me, and not Mindy, who helped him through it all.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” he says quietly.

My words catch in my throat. I’m thankful when the server delivers my coffeetini, giving me an excuse to tear my gaze away. I mumble a thank-you and take a large gulp to loosen the fist-sized lump that’s wedged itself in my esophagus, and then another for good measure.

He clears his throat. “They moved to Dormont to be closer to his sister after he had the first stroke. Almost nine years ago, now.”

He locks eyes with me across the table, both of us remembering the same thing. And my heart, I’m certain my heart is breaking for him, for us—except I’m pretty sure that part of it chipped off a long time ago, lost somewhere in a dark cavity of my chest. “That’s how you ended up in Pittsburgh,” I whisper.

He nods, folding his arms on the table. He only just got off work, so he’s still wearing one of his button-up shirts. But the top button is undone, and he’s rolled up the sleeves a little, revealing lean forearms dusted in dark hair. “I finished my last year at Chicago and then I moved back down to be closer to them. Taught at a community college for about a year before I got offered a tenure track position at Carnegie. I didn’t know how long my dad would be around, and I knew Mom would need someone there for her after he was gone.”

I give him a weak smile. “I’m sure she’s glad to have you close by.”

There’s an irony to all of it, so bitter that I could almost cry, but I don’t. I keep it together, sipping my martini, because that’s what adults do. But it feels like I’ve missed out on so much, and worse, it feels like so much of it was for nothing—insisting that we go live our own lives, chasing our dreams on opposite ends of the globe, refusing to repeat the mistakes our parents made… only to end up teaching at schools two hours away from each other, in the same states we grew up in.

“With Dad gone now, she’s sort of put down roots, figured some things out,” he’s saying. “She says she’s fine on her own, so I guess I’m trying to get a feel for other opportunities, but it’s just…” He blows out a breath, running a hand through his curls. “It’s different now. I don’t know that I want the same things I wanted when I was in my twenties.”

“Mindy?” I ask, before I have a chance to stop myself.

“We ended things,” he says. “A couple months before my dad passed.”

Almost two years ago, then. I have so many questions. Most of them are probably none of my business, but I don’t get the chance to decide whether I want to ask them, because we’re interrupted by the legs of a stool grinding against the plank floor.

“Sorry I’m late,” Bel says, climbing up next to me. Her long pinafore dress is rumpled and she’s slightly breathless. “I got totally mixed up and thought the meeting was on campus. James Stambaugh talked my ear off about the Schleswig-Holstein question for twenty minutes. Still confused, for the record.” Her gaze follows a direct path from me to Teddy, like my unspoken questions are somehow palpable, an invisible thread dangling between us. “Am I interrupting something?”

“It’s nothing,” Teddy says in tandem with my very emphatic, “Not at all!”

We look at each other. Bel looks back and forth between the two of us, frowning.

I need another drink. “We were just catching up a bit before getting started,” I say.

“Right.” She doesn’t sound convinced, but she must decide that it’s not all that important, because she folds her arms on the table and says, “I rescheduled my Krav Maga lessons for this, so this better look good on my resume when I buy a one-way ticket back to Atlanta.”

“It will,” I promise.

“So,” she says, leaning into the table, “what’s my title?” Before I’m able to say anything, she points an accusatory finger at the notepad and pen. “And don’t you dare try to pawn secretary off on me.”

“Treasurer,” I offer. She purses her lips, displeased.

“Or vice chair, maybe?” Teddy suggests.

“Excellent,” she says, planting her bag on the table in front of her—a recycled tote that proclaims LIFE IS SHORT & SO AM I .

I glance at Teddy, holding his gaze for a split second before dragging the notepad toward me. I need to banish his breakup from my thoughts. At least for tonight. “So. First thing on the agenda is to pick a location for the gala. Any ideas?”

He rubs a hand along his jaw, pensive. “The Alumni House, maybe. It’s university property. So long as we can work around wedding rentals and other events, it should be available at no expense.”

“You’ve done your research,” I say, impressed. I jot down the suggestion. “Okay. We can circle back to that. What about timing? I was thinking maybe sometime in late October.”

“Isn’t that a little soon?” Bel asks. “That’s less than two months to plan, send out invites…”

“November is already swamped for me, and I need to have something to show the advisory committee by December,” I say. Plus, the sooner I get this knocked out, the sooner I can focus on everything else—putting together the rest of my dossier, coordinating the guest speaker from Edinburgh, submitting to journals. When there are no further objections, I press on. “So we see about securing the Alumni House, and then what about asking the Alumni Association to mention something in those emails they send out?”

“That could work,” Bel agrees. “We could also post an event on Facebook. I feel like most of our donors would be in the Facebook age group, wouldn’t they?”

I make a note. We iron out a few additional details—finding someone willing to cater for a reasonable price presents a challenge, so we agree that we’ll ask around and see whether we can unearth any connections before reconvening in two weeks. We also touch briefly on the dress code, and while Teddy nods along with my suggestion of business casual, Bel emphatically shoots me down. “No one has ever, in the history of galas, been like ‘Wow, you know what I really want to wear tonight? That pair of khakis I bought off the clearance rack at Kohl’s.’”

“Thank you, Anna Wintour,” I mutter, scratching out the idea with my pen. “What do you suggest?”

Bel splays her hands and leans into the table like she’s about to divulge a juicy secret. “A costume party.”

Teddy and I exchange a dubious look.

“Think about it,” she says. “It’s the weekend before Halloween. All these donors on the invite list, half of them haven’t been to a proper Halloween party since they were kids. Give people an excuse to wear a costume, and they’ll show.” When I don’t look entirely convinced, she adds, emphatically, “I promise.”

“All right,” I say. “But we need to make sure we keep it secular, you know, avoid ostracizing anyone who doesn’t celebrate.”

“We could call it a fall festival,” Teddy suggests.

I tap my lips with the end of my pen, thinking.

“I’ll create a Facebook event,” Bel says excitedly, already tapping away on her phone. I can’t help wondering whether she’s the one who’s looking for an excuse to wear a costume. “Get a feel for how much interest we can generate.”

Afterward, Teddy goes up to the bar to pay the tab while I collect my bag and stow the notepad. “Thank you for being here,” I say to Bel. “Really. It means a lot.”

In the middle of reapplying her ChapStick, she shoots me a smile. “Hey, that’s what friends are for.” She rubs her lips together, popping the cap back on. She casts a glance over at the bar, where Teddy appears to be caught in an awkward encounter with a drunk student while he waits for the bartender to cash us out. “You mentioned that you know each other from camp,” Bel says slowly, “but is there something—” She cuts herself short but raises her eyebrows, expectant. Like I’m supposed to fill in the blank. There’s a couple seconds’ delay before I catch her meaning.

“No,” I say. “Nothing like that.”

She purses her full lips. “You want my honest opinion, or my work opinion?”

“You already know what I’m going to say.”

“Maybe you’ve gotten used to telling yourself that it’s nothing, and maybe you’ve started to believe it, and if that’s the case then I assume you have your reasons.” She stands on tiptoe to hoist her oversized tote off the high-top table. “But for what it’s worth,” she says pointedly, “I don’t believe you.”