“Smitty,” she semigrowled.
“Don’t you dare let him eat my food.”
“Never.”
I grabbed a cold beer and joined her. “Go ahead, eat.”
“I haven’t had steak in a long time. I don’t really make it…ever.”
After a pull on my beer, I told her, “The dairy farmer said the grass-fed beef at the grocer is local, so I grabbed it. Back home, I’d have grabbed steaks from a neighboring farm.”
“And the corn?”
“Wish I’d grown that myself. It’s all right, but not like we grow.”
We ate in silence for a few beats, and then she asked, “So, websites? Only for farmers?”
“I’ve done a lot of farms. I know the SEO and all that junk. I’ve also done a few online fitness businesses and a doctor’s office and a preschool. Back home, I had a steady flow of farms. I think I did every single one in a few-hundred-mile radius. But I wanted to expand. I’ve also done a few fixer-upper sites. Ones that owners botched and broke, and I came to the rescue for a pretty penny.”
“And the farm? Your family farm?”
She set her plate on the table between our chairs and sipped her wine, her eyes staying trained on me.
“My dad’s still running it. We hired some additional help. When I was home, I did some. He wants it to stay in the family, but I got a good thing going. I draw a minimal salary from there. He insists. I think mostly so I’ll come back out of guilt.”
“Seems that you like your freedom, but I’m sure you don’t want someone else running something with your name on it.”
“Are you analyzing me?” I set my plate next to hers and leaned in closer.
“No.” She laughed. “Lucky guess? Or you know what I do?”
“The university has a website, Professor Richards. All I had to do was type your name, and like magic, there you were.”
“Stalk much?”
“Nah, I spend all day on my laptop. Workplace casualty. As a professor of developmental psychology, former head of developmental preschool, do you have any of those?”
She shook her head.
“By the way, I saw an old picture, thought you look even better now…and in person,” I said with wink.
A bittersweet smile crossed her face, mouth up, mouth down, settling somewhere in the middle.
“I didn’t mean anything…you’re a gorgeous woman. You have to know that.”
She paid my explanation no mind. “I never did a lot ofcounselingcounseling after graduation. During school, I worked with families affected by attention deficit disorder, helping them find order and peace. Mostly, I liked being a researcher, looking for patterns and solutions to help families. Mary and I made great partners way back when. She wanted to interact with more subjects, and I wanted to make sense of the data. For a long while, we kept a healthy balance doing this. When we came back here, we both moved into administrative positions. That was about seven years ago. She took over the whole department, and I…well, it didn’t quite work out for me,” she said from a place in her mind far away.
It pained me as she knocked back her remaining wine, struggling to maintain her composure.
“You wanna talk about it?” I couldn’t not ask. She was begging to talk.
“I was awarded head of the preschool. It was a prestigious job. The school was affiliated with the School of Psychology, so it was on the cutting edge. Lots of research coming in and going out. It was a laboratory school. I mentored the graduate students working there and collaborated with schools all over the country. I only taught graduate seminars…except for my summer intro class. And then everything happened, and I took a leave of absence. I decided I couldn’t go back to the school, not to work with all those innocent kids. I went back to teach undergrads for the most part. Something about them was settling. It was both painful and comforting at the same time.”
Her fingers restless, I gathered them inside my own.
“It’s okay to not be perfect, to have fears, Claire. I have them all the time.”
“You’re supposed to have fears. Me, not so much. I am…I was…a mother. You have your whole life in front of you.”
