I’ve spent a good five hours becoming impressed with Ava and how she single-handedly runs the business. She’s not only beautiful and kind, but she seems crazy smart. AndI’mthe one who’s supposed to be a doctor.
“How much was I involved in the business?” I ask when we settle into a booth at Goodwin’s.
I wonder for a second if we have a booth here like we have at the coffee house.
She looks pleased. She always looks pleased when I ask questions about my life. So I resolve to ask more.
“Not much really. When you were younger, it was the plan to have you take over the coffee shop, but those plans changed.”
“When your mom died?”
She nods, seemingly impressed that I’ve remembered the conversation. “You were going to school for a business degree so you could run the coffee house after Dawn and Chuck retired, but you ended up double majoring in business and science because you loved science. You got the job as a paramedic to save up money for grad school. You loved being a paramedic so much, I think even if my mom hadn’t died, you’d have become a doctor. I’d never seen you happier than when you were helping people. So instead of grad school for an MBA, you went to med school.”
“Which the military paid for, which is why I was serving overseas.”
“That’s right.”
A thought crosses my mind that has me a bit scared, and a lot more concerned. “Ah, shit. I was told the accident happened just a few weeks before I was set to go home for good. Do you think they’re going to expect me to go back and finish out those weeks after my memory returns?”
Her head shakes. “You completed your service. I’m actually surprised no one told you this. Your replacement’s deploymentwas delayed. You actually stayed on an extra month just so they wouldn’t be without a trauma surgeon.”
“We must have been upset about that.”
“Maybe a little, but we knew about it well in advance. It’s not like they plucked you off your return flight and I was stuck wondering where you were.”
“Yeah, but if my replacement had been on time…” I scoff, furious for the umpteenth time at the endless fuckeduppedness that is my life.
“I’ve thought about that a million times,” she says sadly. “But no amount of anger will change what happened. And, honestly, it didn’t take me long to know that when you’re in the military, plans change all the time.”
“Was it hard on you? On us? Being apart all those years? The not knowing?”
A waitress interrupts to take our orders. “Hey, Ava,” she says, then turns to me. “Um…”
“Trevor,” Ava says, “this is Claudia Milano.”
I hold out my hand. “Pleasure.”
She shakes it and I’m struck once again by how strange it must be for people who may have known me my whole life to be looked at like a stranger.
“Sorry,” Claudia says when she realizes she’s staring. “It’s just so weird. I mean, we went to school together.”
“Weird foryou?”Ava says in a joking manner. “Weslepttogether. Walked down the aisle together. Heck, we’re having a—” Ava tenses and looks like she swallowed a bug. The almost imperceptible flash of horror in her eyes tells me she’s having to hold back. BecauseI’veasked her to. “Uh… we’re having lunch together.” She sighs. “I’m on a date with my husband and he doesn’t even know me.”
The joking tone has left her voice and now Claudia is looking at her in pity.
I hand her our menus. “We’ll have the bacon mac-and-cheese.”
Claudia leaves, and the uncomfortable silence surrounds us once again. It surrounds us so much, it’s almost choking me.
“Yes,” Ava says quietly.
I cock my head.
“Yes it was hard on us. Being apart. I mean, probably more for me than you because you were so busy and doing what you loved to do. But it was okay. I never regretted it.” Her eyes close briefly. “Well, maybe I do now. But I wanted you to be a doctor just as much as you wanted it. It made you happy and that made me happy.” She turns and looks out the window. “Sorry, I’m doing it again. I know you don’t want to talk about all that stuff.”
I reach across the table and touch her hand to pull her attention back to me. “It’s okay. I asked the question.”
She stares at my hand as it sits atop hers. I wonder if we did stuff like hold hands in public. She did grab my hand the other day at the party, but it could just have been for support. We’ve been together for decades. Do people who’ve been together that long still do things like hold hands?
