Chapter 3

Somebody set up a little snack cart at the entrance to the pier while I was out admiring the scenery. The owner is still busy putting up a cloth awning, which is giving him a hard time in the breeze. I help him out, holding the cloth straight as he connects it to the support poles, and I get a free coffee in return. The snack cart proprietor is from Malaysia, a tall bald guy with a friendly smile and a soft voice. We chat for a while. He says he is out here every weekend, making good money. It's been long time since I have met somebody so at ease with their place in the universe. He has the most basic of professions, buying goods and selling them again for a profit. He fulfills a basic need, and if he suddenly stopped coming to the pier on the weekends, he'd be missed by his regulars. If I stopped working all of a sudden, only a few people would even notice. We thank each other for our respective services, and I make my way back to the car. As I pull out of the parking lot and past the little snack stand, the Malay gives me a friendly wave, and I smile and wave back.

I drive off the Marina, taking University Avenue all the way up into the heart of Berkeley. The city is transversed by two large avenues that cross each other in the middle. University Avenue runs from West to East, and Shattuck Avenue runs from North to South. The two intersect near the UC campus, and my favorite stores and restaurants are near that intersection. When I was in high school, I probably left a few thousand dollars at the McDonald's that sits on this street corner.

I drive past the McDonald's, take a left turn onto Shattuck Avenue, and look for a spot to park the rental. Most of the metered parking spots on Shattuck are still empty. Later tonight, this place will be packed with cars. I select a spot in front of a bicycle shop and set my blinker as I slow down to claim the spot. Suddenly my car gets thumped from behind, and the jolt spills my coffee all over the cup holder. I look in the rear view mirror and see the roof of the car that just bumped into me.

I turn on my hazards and pull into the parking spot I had picked out, signaling the unseen driver of the other car to pull over and clear the road. As I pull into my parking bay, I can see the slightly dented snout of a Volvo station wagon behind me. The driver pulls next to me and then slowly moves into the parking spot in front of my car. I open the glove compartment to check for the registration, and as I look up again, the driver of the Volvo has gotten out of her car to inspect the damage. She's probably my age, a very fit-looking girl in jeans and an oversized leather jacket that she probably lifted from her boyfriend. The expression on her face is far from happy as she inspects the mangled front end of her ride.

As I get out of the Blazer, she looks over to me and gives me a distraught little smile.

"Shit! I can't believe I hit you!"

She gets up from her crouching stance and comes walking towards me, and I suddenly do a mental double-take as I get a full view of her face. The girl that bumped into my car has a striking resemblance to someone I knew back in high school, and since we are right in my old home town, the coincidence would be too great for a look-alike. Her name instantly comes back to mind: Nicole Benning, our class artiste. I try to reaffirm her identity by matching the face in front of me with the one I knew all to well in high school. Even though time has done some adult refinement, it is the same face, right down to the distinct miniscule earlobes and the freckles. I just want to close the distance and give her a hug, but her face doesn't show any recognition yet, and I'd rather not end up on the sidewalk with a face full of mace.

"Is it bad?" Her face shows serious distress. I grin and shake my head.

"Should we call the cops or something?" She mutters curses under her breath as she examines the rear end of my rental car.

"Long time no see, Nicole," I say.

She gives me a startled look, and I can see the glint of recognition on her face as she studies mine. Finally, her distraught half-cocked smile gives way to a grin.

"No fricking way."

She takes a step back to muster me up and down.

"Frank! Why didn't you show up at our ten-year reunion?"

"You do remember my name," I say. "I am flattered."

She gives me the full-blown smile that made me have a crush on her for my entire four years in high school.

"Don't be a moron! Why wouldn't I remember you, after all the school days we skipped over at the Wharf?"

Nicole was my partner-in-crime on many unauthorized absence days. It never did take much effort on her part to convince me to skip school with her. I knew I was convenient, since I had a car and we were almost neighbors, but I didn't mind. I would have traded off a body part for a chance to have her all to myself for a day. I happily caught the flak for all the unexplained absence days later on.

We finally hug each other, and she smells just like I remember. We have both grown since then, but our height difference has remained in proportion, her head still only reaching up to the tip of my nose.

"Good to see you again," I say. "What happened to your hair?"

Nicole used to wear her hair long, and now it is cut to chin level and permed into a wavy curl. She goes through it with one hand.

"Too much of a pain to maintain at work. You know how long it takes to tie up all the long hair and tuck it away? Never mind the half hour that you have to spend every day washing it."

"It looks good. Gosh, you haven't changed a bit. Don't you ever eat anything? You're still a rail."

"It's the breadless arts," she says. "When you make the kind of money I do, you stay thin whether you want to or not."

"You're still dancing?" I ask. She used to go to ballet practice three times a week, and I never let her know that I did go to all of the shows she was in, even if it meant sitting in the last row among soccer moms and proud grandparents, ducking behind blue-haired ladies so Nicole wouldn't catch a glimpse of me sitting in the audience.

"Yeah, I'm trying to make a living with it. I live in New York now, you know?"

"Get out of town! I ended up moving to Boston. New York is that sinkhole 250 miles south of Boston Common, right?"

We grin at each other like nervous prom dates. I like the way her clear blue eyes go with the dust of freckles on her nose. She punches me lightly in the arm.

"Hey, can you believe I ran into you, of all people?"

"Yeah, you literally did."

"Did I mess up your car?"

"Dunno," I shrug. "I haven't looked yet."

We walk around the Blazer to take a look at the tail end. The plastic bumper is barely scratched, and the rear license plate has a slight dent in it. A few paint marks and glass pieces are embedded into a corner of the bumper, and I pick a shard out of the plastic to look at it.

"Well, it doesn't look like it's fatal," I say.

Nicole frowns. "That's my dad's Volvo. He'll sure appreciate me driving his insurance payments up."

"This thing is going back to the rental company the way it is. It's a company rental. If they ever notice, I'll tell them I got bumped in a parking lot by someone."

"Really? God, that saves my ass. Maybe I'll feed Dad the same line. This thing is almost as old as I am, anyway."

"Is your dad still teaching at UC?" I ask.

"Yeah." She grins at me, obviously surprised that I remember this detail after fifteen years. "He's still professor of Geology."

We look at each other for a moment, both of us shifting on our feet, grinning like idiots. Then my stomach reminds me that I haven't had anything decent to eat in forty-eight hours.

"Hey, you busy with something? I'm starving."

"I'm game," Nicole says immediately. "You need to tell me what you've been doing all these years. Don't they have mailboxes where you live now?"

--"Pot? Kettle?" I ask.

We pick the Lotus for lunch, a Chinese veggie and seafood restaurant that's been on Shattuck since I was in grade school. The place is tiny, usually packed with students, and decorated with cloth banners depicting Chinese cartoon animals. The Japanese have nothing on the Chinese when it comes to the kitsch factor.

I chew on sweet-and-sour shrimp while Nicole picks at the soy beef in her broccoli beef plate. I am hungry, but I try to retain at least some dignity by not dropping food on my lap or slobbering all over myself. We catch each other stealing glances between bites.

"So you live in Boston now?" Nicole asks me.

"Well, it's not really Boston--Andover. It's a bedroom town for the Boston area. It's just a thirty-minute drive into town, though."

"How do you like it there?"

"It's not bad. Techie-friendly, with all the schools around, and big on geek culture."

"You make a good living doing that computer stuff?"

"Yeah, it's decent. Last contract offer I had was for eighty an hour plus per diem."

"Wow." Nicole is visibly shocked. "I took dance and ballet for twenty years, ever since first grade. If I give private lessons, I can make fifty an hour, and that's insanely good money for us artsy types."

"That may be true, but aren't you your own boss? I am tethered to my desk all the time. They give me a pager and a cell phone, and you wouldn't believe how often those go off. I haven't had a forty-hour week in months."

"Poor baby. I bet you don't live in a studio the size of a coat closet, or eat Ramen Noodles four times a week. So what are you doing back here?"

"I have to change out the email software at one of our local sales offices here. Exciting stuff, let me tell you."

Nicole stirs her iced tea with a straw and looks at me quizzically.

"Isn't that what you wanted to do all along? I mean, even before this whole Internet thing, you were always so into technology."

"In my freshman year at UC, I think I went to a dozen lectures in that entire semester. On some days, I didn't get out of bed till five in the afternoon. Took me a while to figure out what to do for a living."

Nicole sips her iced tea, while I finish off my plate of shrimp. Her meal is barely touched.

"You know I wanted to follow in my dad's footsteps and study Geology?"

"Yep. I was going to get you one of those Professor Livingston helmets for graduation, but I couldn't find one."

She smiles again. I always tried to be funny around her just to see her smile.

"I went to Stanford on scholarship. I didn't really want to go to Berkeley and have my own father as a professor. He doesn't do undergrad stuff, so I would have been safe for a while, but sooner or later he would have gotten something on his desk with my name on it. Didn't want to find out whether he could stay impartial or not, you know?"

"That's understandable. I was actually kind of surprised that you didn't move to the opposite end of the country. From what I remember, you always had plans that involved getting the hell out of Berkeley."

"Yeah, it took me a while to figure that one out myself. Anyway, I took five semesters at Stanford before I figured out that geology is the most mind-numbing scientific discipline on the planet. I was miserable, and my grades just took a nosedive. They told me that I had to improve my grade average in order to keep my scholarship, and I knew that there was just no way. I could have changed majors, but I was burned out on school. So I dropped out, took out my savings and went to Europe for a summer."

Back when we got out of high school, I had intended to go to the same school as Nicole, but I had to scuttle those plans when she got accepted to Stanford on a full academic scholarship. My parents had no money, my grades weren't all that great, and my savings were not sufficient to get me out of the Bay area, much less to Stanford. Of course I don't mention that part to Nicole. Everything from here on is new to me, since I lost track of her shortly after she packed her bags for college.

"Where did you end up going over there?"

"I started out in London and visited with some of dad's friends. Then I took the train over to Belgium, and from there on it was basically a round trip. I went to Holland, too—Amsterdam was so cool! I had one of those Eurail monthly train passes that lets you take the trains all over the continent for free. It costs you like three hundred bucks these days, but there's no better way to get around. Their gas prices are through the roof. Anyway, I got to see Berlin, took the train down to Salzburg and Vienna, and Venice and Rome."

Nicole draws an outline of Europe on the napkin with her fingernail to illustrate her path through the continent. Her hands are small and delicate, and her fingernails are cut short.

"From Rome to Marseilles, then to Barcelona and Madrid, and I ended up in Paris. I was a little ahead of myself when I got to Paris, so I had to spend five days there. It was summer, so the city was full with tourists, and all the street cafes were open. I know it sounds tacky, but there was this accordion music coming from every other street corner, and I'd just sit there and sip Pernod and listen to the musicians all night long."

She rests her chin on the knuckles of her hand and smiles at me.

"I blew all my savings that summer, enough to get me through at least another year at Stanford, but boy, was it worth every cent of it."

"I believe it. Did your parents give you any grief when you dropped out?"

She rolls her eyes.

"The dropping out was hard to swallow for them, but I think the empty savings account sent them over the edge. When I got back, my father wouldn't even talk to me for two days. He was so pissed off, I thought he'd have a stroke and keel over. Remember when we got drunk after that party over in Sausalito, and how pissed he was after he had to come and get me at the police station? That was nothing in comparison. We fought World War Three in the house after I got back from Europe. It was embarrassing."

She leans back in her chair, and her grin returns.

"Then imagine my dad's face when I told him that I wanted to take up dancing again."

"No second generation fossil digger in the family. I'm sure he was happier with your first choice."

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Buy at Bookapy.com

Fringe Benefits

Michael Lindgren

$2.99