Things I Want to Say Read Free Page A

old-fashioned, but picking up a traveling salesman in a hotel bar wasn’t my idea of the start of a wonderful relationship. I’d had a good time, but wasn’t interested in taking things to another level, which I was pretty sure was what Mitch had in mind.
    As I said, I may be naive, but I’m not stupid.
    So room service it was. I called in my order, then decided to check in with Frannie.
    She answered on the third ring. I pictured her in her living room, piled on the sofa with both dogs at her feet, the TV tuned to that night’s lineup of sitcoms and crime dramas. “Just thought I’d call and let you know I got in okay,” I said.
    She turned down the volume on the television. “How was your flight?”
    “Fine. I would have called earlier, but I went down to the hotel bar for a drink right after I got here.”
    “You were in the bar for what…two hours?”
    It annoyed me that she’d bothered to do the math. “A guy bought me a drink.”
    “You picked up a man in a bar?” She couldn’t have sounded more horrified if I’d told her I’d done a strip tease in the middle of the hotel lobby.
    “I did not pick him up. We were both sitting there and got to talking and he bought me a drink. Nothing else happened.” Although it could have, if I’d wanted it to. The knowledge gave me a quiet thrill.
    “Was he cute?”
    I laughed. “Forty-year-old men aren’t cute! But he was nice-looking. It was good practice for the reunion.”
    “So you still think you and Marc are going to hit it off after all these years?”
    “I don’t know that. I’m just open to the possibility.”
    “When are you going to see him?”
    “I’m going to call him tomorrow.”
    “He’s liable to get the wrong idea.”
    I rolled my eyes. “This isn’t high school. A woman can call a man without having him think she’s fast.”
    “You be careful.”
    Frannie had repeated this advice so often there was a recording of her voice saying these words that automatically played anytime I did almost anything, risky or not. “I’ll be careful,” I reassured her. As I always did.
    I imagined husbands and wives had these little verbal rituals, too.
    “The reunion doesn’t start until Saturday, right?” Frannie said. “What are you going to do in the meantime?”
    “I don’t know. Look around. Maybe I’ll see some oldfriends.” I hadn’t planned a detailed itinerary, too nervous to think that far ahead.
    “Did you go by the house yet?”
    Her voice was strained, and her tension carried over to me. “No. I don’t intend to,” I said. “It’s not ours anymore.”
    “It’s not even cousin Lou’s anymore,” she said. “I heard he sold it.”
    “Maybe they tore it down.” The house hadn’t been in that great a shape when we lived in it. By the time Mom died, it was pretty run-down.
    “I’d have burned it down if I could get away with it,” Frannie said.
    After all these years, I didn’t react to her anger anymore. Her words just made me tired.
    A knock on my door saved me from having to reply. “Room service.”
    “I have to go now,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know how it goes with Marc.”
    I ate dinner while I watched the news, then got ready for bed and stretched out on the floor and did sit-ups. I hate to exercise. I mean really hate it. I feel like a sinner doing penance, which I guess isn’t too far off. But I’m scared enough of gaining back the weight I lost to keep at it. That’s probably a different kind of neurosis, but one I’ll keep.
    I said my prayers and climbed into bed. I don’t think of myself as an overly religious person, but I believe in a higher power, and he-she-it has helped me out a lot over the years. You don’t know what faith is until you’ve spent an hour praying you won’t go into the kitchen and eat a whole tub of frozen cookie dough from the freezer.
    I fell asleep thinking about Mitch from the hotel bar, who dissolved into Marc and the memory of a game of