Chapter 1

March, 2028

My wife, Adriana was engrossed in her tablet when she looked up at me and said, “Honey, I just got an e-mail. My college graduating class is having a reunion next June. I’d like for us to go. Is that okay with you?”

My name’s Matthew, my friends call me Matt. My wife, Adriana, and I were sitting in our living room watching TV. Well, I was, anyway. Apparently, Adriana was more into her tablet than the TV. I groaned at what she’d just said. Crowds and I don’t get along. I have this serious hang-up, almost a phobia, about being around lots of people I don’t know. The last thing I could think of on my “to-do list” is a college reunion where I don’t know a soul, except one.

“Already?” I asked her. “It’s only been ten years since your graduation. Isn’t that kind of soon for a reunion?” I was thinking maybe twenty-five years would be a better time. Better yet, fifty!

She kind of scoffed at me, “No, I think they always have one at ten years. I want to go if we can.”

June, 2018

I met Adriana when I was selling knives at a trade show. It was “Here Comes Summer” in Ontario, Oregon. This gorgeous, exotic young woman stopped at my booth and was contemplating buying a six-hundred dollar set of knives. It was discounted from the normal selling price, forty-percent off, for the show, but was still nearly four-hundred dollars. Still, I have to admit they were vastly over-priced. The set she was looking at would mean a profit of almost two-hundred dollars for me.

She’d decided what she wanted and was ready to sign the paperwork to order them. At the last minute, I did what turned out to be the smartest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I told her, very quietly so that no one else would hear me, “You can get a set from Costco or off Amazon that’s just as good for less than two hundred bucks.”

She looked at me a little quizzically and finally smiled, saying, “Thank you!” Then she did something that took me completely by surprise. This stunningly beautiful young woman who I’d just met and had been talking to for about fifteen minutes said to me, “I’m hungry, go to lunch with me?”

To say that I was surprised is the understatement of the century. I was the ultimate shy nerd! I had gone out for a grand total of three dates in my life: High school prom with a friend-of-the-family girl that led to exactly – nothing; one date with a girl in college where my mode of transportation was my dad’s wheat truck. Needless to say, she wasn’t impressed; and, a brief make-out session with my brother’s new sister-in-law at his wedding. When I got up the courage to call her for a date a week later, she informed me that she already had a boyfriend.

Other than those three romantic encounters with the opposite sex, my dating history was exactly zero. Now, I’d just been asked to lunch by a very beautiful young woman. I didn’t even know her name yet. As you can well imagine it took me about a nanosecond to decide to close my little booth for a short while.

We walked over to the food court area of the auditorium and each of us ordered a cinnamon-sugar elephant ear for lunch. I know, “health food”, right! We sat at a little table with people milling all around and got to know each other a little. I learned her name, that she’d just graduated from college but didn’t yet know what she was going to do with her life. I told her pretty much the same about me, that I was selling these knives so I could accumulate enough money to eventually move out of my parent’s basement.

She laughed and told me, “You’re not going to get rich telling your customers to go to Costco instead.” We exchanged names with each other and I told her what a beautiful name I thought “Adriana” was. She complimented me on my name, Matt, as well, but it certainly doesn’t have the sexy annotation that hers does.

We discovered that we had both graduated from Ontario High School, but she was three years younger, so we didn’t know each other existed until that fateful day at the Convention Center.

The biggest thing she did at our little lunch, she gave me her phone number and asked me to call her.

Adriana and I dated the next several months. Those months were the most exciting times of my life. We had dated for almost three months when she finally invited me into her little apartment and we spent the night making love. That first time was the most incredible night of my life by a factor of ten. No, more like a hundred or a thousand! She showed me happiness and joy that I hadn’t even dreamed could exist in this or any alternate universe. For obvious reasons, I realized that Adriana wasn’t a virgin as I was, but we never discussed her previous love life. Ours was the only one that mattered to either of us.

My parents loved Adriana nearly as much as I did. She was sweet and innocent, exactly the kind of girl they had always hoped I’d meet some day. On February 14th, Valentines Day, 2019, eight months and seven days after she wanted to buy a set of knives from me and I tried to send her to Costco instead, the beautiful Adriana Hall became Mrs. Matthew Jeppeson!

When we married, she was working as an assistant manager of Maurice’s clothing store in Ontario, and I was working in the produce department of Safeway, when I wasn’t trying to sell overpriced knives. Adriana had a business degree from the University of Washington, so managing a major retail store certainly wasn’t out of the question for her. She had apparently impressed the right people since they offered her a manager’s job almost three years after we married. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the store in Ontario. Instead, they wanted to send her to Pendleton, Oregon, about 175 miles away, where they had a smaller store.

Neither of us wanted to move, so we spent night after night talking about different possibilities, followed by very passionate love-making. This was something Adriana wanted badly, to manage her own store and we were afraid that if she turned it down her reputation in the company might be damaged so she’d never get another offer.

Instead, we decided to use the small savings we’d accumulated and take out a loan to open our own antique/knick-knack store in Ontario. That way, she would be truly managing her “own” store. We knew it was going to be a big risk, but I still had my job with Safeway so we wouldn’t starve ... at least for a while.

It didn’t take long to discover that Adriana had an incredible business sense. She rented a small building in an absolutely perfect location, stocked it with the kinds of items people wanted and did a masterful job of low-cost advertising.

But the very best thing she did was remember a very brief lesson of selling knives to someone who couldn’t afford and didn’t need a six-hundred dollar knife set. What Adriana was selling was far more than antiques; she was selling integrity. Her customers soon came to realize that Adriana’s advice and words were golden. She lost many sales with her honesty to her customers, but that brought them back over and over again.

Before long, she opened a second store in Nyssa, then another much larger store in Boise, Idaho. When she hired employees and even managers to oversee the stores, she was careful to screen for the same type of individual as she was, honest and trustworthy to the core. Then she instilled in them her philosophy that sales were secondary to service to her customers. Each of the stores was as successful as that first one in Ontario. By the time Adriana received that reunion invitation, our store profits were exceeding two-hundred-thousand dollars per year and were still growing.

I quit my job with Safeway to help her with her growing chain. Since Boise was much larger and consequently that store was by far the largest of them, we made the difficult decision to move to Boise, about forty-five minutes from Ontario.

The stores were our business, but our lives were so much more than that. Adriana was an outstanding volleyball player and she was player-coach of an intramural team in Boise. Her volleyball team quickly established itself as one of the dominant teams in Boise, winning or playing for championship after championship.

We had two little babies, a girl, Katie first, then three years later, a boy, Kevin. When Katie was six and in first grade, we decided it would be fun to coach T-ball. Neither of us had any real knowledge of baseball, but there was one thing we knew we definitely could teach our team; to have fun! We started every practice and every game with the chant, “What’s our number one rule? Have fun!”

Other coaches seemed to pick the best players for every position and that’s where they played each game. We developed a rotation so that every player played every position during each game. We instilled in our players that sports at that age were meant to be fun, not about winning. That could come later when hopefully they would still realize enjoyment of the game was still the primary objective. Some of the parents, one dad in particular, wasn’t at all happy with our lack of seriousness. He was a “play to win” kind of guy, even for kids at that age, and his kid was probably the best player on our team. He rode us about our coaching style until he realized how much his kid was enjoying playing. Then he finally started to leave us alone. Thank God!

March, 2028

When Adriana asked me about the reunion, it was so far down on my list of fun things to do that it didn’t even show on the bottom of my imaginary bucket list. Even though we’d built a successful business together and had lots of outside interests, large crowds still terrified me. The shyness that plagued me all during school and after, was still alive and well. Adriana was outgoing, beautiful, and had fun no matter the circumstance. I was still, to be perfectly honest, a shy nerd!

I obviously acquiesced on going to the reunion but dreaded it with every fiber of my being! The only saving grace was that I knew I would be with my wonderful wife and she’d protect me from the scary crowd. I knew that Adriana felt bad about not keeping in touch with many of her college friends and looked forward to it as much as I dreaded it. She went shopping for new clothes and the closer it came, the more excited she became.

June, 2028

The weekend of the reunion, our parents in Ontario had agreed to share the two kids and dogs. We had two dogs; a little Rat Terrier named Rascal, and a Golden Labrador named Zuse. Rascal did everything he could to sleep between us and growled his displeasure at us when we crowded him out of our bed making love. Kids and dogs were going to stay with my parents Friday night, then Adriana’s Saturday night, and we’d pick them up Sunday evening. Since we moved to Boise, our parents loved every opportunity to have the kids with them. The doggies were just a bonus.

Before we left we made a monumental decision. We had been talking about having another baby and this trip would be the perfect time to make it happen. The timing was right and it would add a considerable amount of fun to the trip. Adriana always felt sexier that time of month but we had to restrain ourselves. This time we didn’t intend to hold back and hopefully we’d come home with a pregnancy.

We flew to Seattle out of Boise, then rented a car to drive to the Marriott where the reunion dinner was being held Saturday evening. An advantage of owning our own business was that we weren’t tied down in an eight-to-five job where we had to submit a vacation request to leave a little early. We had more than competent employees in each of our stores that didn’t need our presence, so we left early Friday and got into our hotel a little after noon on Friday.

We spent the afternoon visiting some of the have-to tourist attractions in Seattle; Pike Place Market, first on our list. Neither of us had been in Seattle for a long time. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had been there, and Adriana hadn’t been back since her graduation.

It was fun going to the little markets on Pike Street; they haven’t changed any in all the years. There are still musicians playing for change on the sidewalks, artists making paintings or drawing caricatures for fifty dollars, and fish-mongers tossing salmon. It was fun having a little money to spend for a change. The last time I was there, with my parents, buying a single-scoop ice cream cone was about the limit. As Adriana describes it, she was about the same.