Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death Read Free Page B

with what I guessed was some form of paté, and more—and I realized how hungry I was when I started drooling like one of Pavlov’s dogs. When had I eaten my last meal?
    I decided to grab food first, since it was disappearing rapidly, and then a glass of wine. Thus supplied, courtesy demanded I get out of the way so that the next wave of hungry travelers could follow suit, so I followed the crowd up a short flight of stairs into the single large room above. There was a fireplace immediately to the left with a log fire burning briskly, and already a lot of women were sitting or standing around it, many still wearing jackets or windbreakers. A couple of long tables and a scattering of smaller round ones were set for dinner, all garnished with bouquets of wildflowers and grasses, and good smells wafted up from the small kitchen. I wondered briefly how that small cooking space could produce enough food for forty people, but I doubted that we’d go hungry.
    I had barely made it up the stairs, juggling a wineglass in one hand and a napkin wrapped around some of the tempting appetizers, when a woman bore down on me. “Laura! Is that really you?”
    I looked at her face and drew a blank. I sneaked a look at her name tag and the light dawned. “Connie! You look great!” I meant it: she looked nothing like she had forty years ago, when she had looked like a schmoo, a style not improved by the saggy jeans and sweaters she had favored then. “I saw from the list that you were coming. Let’s sit down and you can fill me in on what you’ve been up to.”
    “Great,” Connie beamed. She waved to a couple of other people. “Hey, Pam, Ginny, come join us.” As they approached, she said helpfully, “You remember Laura, right? Art history, wasn’t it?” Pam and Ginny gave hopeful smiles, and I was pretty sure they didn’t remember me any better than I remembered them. At that point I made an executive decision to forget about learning everyone’s surnames and try to keep their first names straight in my head. Luckily, Pam and Ginny sat down with us, and when someone on the staff came around and poured another round of wine, nobody said no. Our chatter followed predictable paths: you look great (did anyone ever say you look like hell?), are you with anyone (apparently it was politically incorrect now to ask if someone was married or even about the gender of a partner), do you have any kids (no pictures, please), what are you doing (more PC talk—it wasn’t cool to ask do you now hold or have you ever held a paying job). But as the talk went on, I relaxed. Nobody was here to judge or to claim superiority in her lifestyle choices—and there was a pretty good range, based on what I was hearing. This might actually be fun.
    After half an hour of talk, the volume escalating as the drinks flowed, someone suggested that we find seats for dinner. Our group of four filled one of the smaller round tables, so we stayed where we were. I watched the dynamics of the crowd: obviously some old friends had reconnected, or maybe they had never disconnected, but there was nothing cliquish about the seats people chose. All good. And then food started appearing and the talking died down—fast. Everything tasted wonderful—not fancy, but clearly fresh and local. We dug in with healthy appetites, whetted by travel and by the clean fresh air of the Tuscan hills.
    Halfway through the main course, out of the corner of my eye I noticed some new arrivals, including my wandering roommate, Cynthia. Past and present roommate, that was. We’d shared an apartment in Cambridge for a few years right after college, surviving each other’s company without killing each other, and we’d kept in touch since. But life had taken us in different directions, both geographically and professionally, so we were no longer as close as we had once been. I hoped that this sojourn to Italy would help us reconnect.
    The latecomers were greeted by Jean and Jane and made