Todd’s occupation, but again, so what?
My office door flew open, and Benedict Edwards, a professor in the humanities department and my closest friend, entered. He didn’t bother knocking, but he never had or felt the need to. We often met on Fridays at five o’clock and visited a bar where as a student I worked as a bouncer. Back then it was new and shiny and hip and trendy. Now it was old and broken-down and about as hip and trendy as Betamax.
Benedict was pretty much my physical opposite—tiny, small-boned, and African American. His eyes were magnified by giant Ant-Man glasses that looked like the safety goggles in the chemistry department. Apollo Creed had to be the inspiration behind his too big mustache and too poufy Afro. He had the slender fingers of a female pianist, feet that a ballerina would envy, and he wouldn’t be mistaken for a lumberjack by a blind man.
Despite this—or maybe because of it—Benedict was also a total “playah” and picked up more women than a rapper with a radio hit.
“What’s wrong?” Benedict asked.
I skipped the “Nothing” or “How do you know something’s wrong?” and went straight to it: “Have you ever heard of a guy named Todd Sanderson?”
“Don’t think so. Who is he?”
“An alum. His obituary is online.”
I turned the screen toward him. Benedict adjusted the goggle-glasses. “Don’t recognize him. Why?”
“Remember Natalie?”
A shadow crossed his face. “I haven’t heard you say her name in—”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this is—or was—her husband.”
“The guy she dumped you for?”
“Yes.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“Apparently.”
“So,” Benedict said, arching an eyebrow, “she’s single again.”
“Sensitive.”
“I’m worried. You’re my best wingman. I have the rap the ladies love, sure, but you have the good looks. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Sensitive,” I said again.
“You going to call her?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Condoleezza Rice. Who do you think I mean? Natalie.”
“Yeah, sure. Say something like ‘Hey, the guy you dumped me for is dead. Want to catch a movie?’”
Benedict was reading the obituary. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Says here she has two kids.”
“So?”
“That makes it more complicated.”
“Will you stop?”
“I mean two kids. She could be fat now.” Benedict looked over at me with his magnified eyes. “So what does Natalie look like now? I mean, two kids. She’s probably chunky, right?”
“How would I know?”
“Uh, the same way everyone would—Google, Facebook, that kinda thing.”
I shook my head. “Haven’t done that.”
“What? Everyone does that. Heck, I do that with all my former loves.”
“And the Internet can handle that kind of traffic?”
Benedict grinned. “I do need my own server.”
“Man, I hope that’s not a euphemism.”
But I saw something sad behind his grin. I remembered one time at a bar when Benedict had gotten particularly wasted, I caught him staring at a well-worn photograph he kept hidden in his wallet. I asked him who it was. “The only girl I’ll ever love,” he told me in a slurry voice. Then Benedict tucked the photograph back behind his credit card and despite hints from me, he has never said another word about it.
He’d had that same sad grin on then.
“I promised Natalie,” I said.
“Promised her what?”
“That I’d leave them alone. That I’d never look them up or bother them.”
Benedict considered that. “It seems you kept that promise, Jake.”
I said nothing. Benedict had lied earlier. He didn’t check the Facebook page of old girlfriends or if he did, he didn’t do it with much enthusiasm. But once when I burst into his office—like him, I never knocked—I saw him using Facebook. I caught a quick glance and saw that the page he had up belonged to that same woman whose picture he carried in his wallet. Benedict quickly shut the browser down, but I bet that he checked that page a lot.