The Last Time I Saw You Read Free Page A

so that he could get Jeanine off his back. He’d even asked her if she’d like to accompany him. Jeanine is married, seemingly happily so, but Lester thought she might get a kick out of going. He’d told her her husband could come, too; they’d find a way to sneak him in. Or maybe they wouldn’t have to sneak him at all—anyone who looked to be in their late fifties would probably be able to walk right in, once people deserted their posts at the registration table. “That’s true,” Jeanine had said. “I used to think sometimes about crashing high school reunions, walking around asking people, ‘Do you remember me? You remember me , don’t you?’ just to see what they’d say. But no, you need to go alone or you’ll never meet someone. Not a wife, just someone to go to the movies with. It’s your last reunion !” What she had not said, but what Lester heard, is, “You’re getting old, now. It’s not funny. You’re going to need someone.”
    “All right ,” he’d finally said. “I’ll go. ” And Jeanine had clapped her hands together and asked if she could pick out what he should wear and he’d said no, thank you. She’d asked if she could refer him to a good hairstylist, and he’d said all right because he actually did need to find someone new to cut his hair—his barber’s cataracts had gotten so bad, Lester always came out of the shop looking a little electrocuted.
    As soon as Lester agreed to go to the reunion, he’d actually started looking forward to it. Not because he was thinking of meeting someone he could go to the movies with, no. He doesn’t need anyone to go to the movies with, he likes going alone, in fact. He likes sitting there with his popcorn and small Coke (“small” being roughly the size of a silo) and watching movies and thinking about them on his walk home. He likes putting in a garden every spring, nourishing it every summer, and putting it to bed every fall. He likes traveling to Europe every October. He loves reading, mostly history or biography, but classics, too; he never tires of rereading Proust or Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert. He also likes sitting in the living room of his small, well-tended two-bedroom house, listening to jazz while he enjoys a little scotch. He likes the way Rosaria changes his sheets every Thursday, the way the bed always smells so good then. He’d asked her once what she did to make the sheets smell so good and she’d put her hand up over her mouth, over her gold-filled teeth, and giggled. “Nothing especial; is detergent only, Doctor,” she’d said. And he’d said no, it was something more, it must be that she had magical powers, yes, that must be it, and she had giggled again.
    Rosaria had worked for him for many years, and occasionally he accepted one of her frequent invitations to have dinner at her house—both she and her husband, Ernesto, were inspired cooks, and Lester also enjoyed the company of their ever-expanding family, especially the black-eyed grandchildren who crawled all over him and brought him their stuffed animals to examine and treat. Rosaria had tried for a while to fix him up with various single women she knew—she would invite women to dinner on the nights he came, all kinds of women—but he never felt drawn to pursuing a relationship.
    Over and over, it seems, he has to explain that his life is fine. He has his work and his friends and the beauty of the rotating earth. He does not feel he lacks anything, and he certainly does not think going to a high school reunion will put him on the path for finding a replacement for Kathleen. No, he’s going to the reunion because there is something about it being the last one; and he also wants to go because, after he spoke to Pam Pottsman, he learned that Don Summers had become a vet, too. He wants to talk shop in a way he feels he couldn’t do otherwise—surely a high school reunion permits a kind of honesty one does not often encounter in one’s adult life. A