Chapter 30: Moira

"So? What are you going to do, Joanne?"

She'd just gotten off the phone with her fiancé, Burt, back in San Diego, and her eyes were still focused half way around the world, it seemed to me. When she didn't answer, I moved over next to her and took her in my arms for comfort.

"You okay, Jo?" I added.

"Yeah," she finally managed to get out. She she gave herself a little bit of a shake, and I let her go.

"Yeah, I'm okay. Burt says to stay here until Gary and Kate get back. I think he wants me to go through a proper goodbye, so I'm not still here when I'm there."

I nodded in understanding and agreement. "Burt's a good guy."

Finally, she smiled. It was the first smile I'd seen on her face since we'd gotten back from the airport three days before.

"I miss him," she said, and I knew she meant Burt. "I'm pretty sure that's a good thing," she said, her eyes sparkling.

We laughed together.

But it still left her with two or three weeks in Fiji, waiting.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Saralinda through the connecting door, in her room next to mine. When we got to the resort, I'd gotten us a two bedroom suite, rather than a one. I don't think Saralinda minded the arrangement, especially since she was spending a lot of time with Malia.

Looking at her through the doorway, my thoughts drifted back to our house in Indiana when I was young. I remembered lying on my bed in my bedroom, which was next to the living room, and listening to my mother talk with her friends about 'grownup stuff'. Did Saralinda feel like that now, as she pretended not to be listening to us?

This was grownup stuff. Joanne was a good friend, a close friend, and I was about to have to say goodbye to her. It's not like I'd never see her again, but it would never be the same. We would no longer be on the same boat ... Nor in it.

And it wasn't really something I could share with Saralinda. I knew she understood, in a literal sense. But I doubted she'd really know what I could already feel myself trying to deal with. Pages turning that we're not finished with. Lord, why can't life be simpler.

"Penny for your thoughts?" Joanne's words brought me back to the present.

"Oh, nothing. And everything. I'm going to miss you, Jo. And we've got a couple of weeks together, which will only make it harder to see you go. But, Oh Well. I think we should have some fun, while Gary's gone and left us."

"Mmmm – my thoughts exactly," said Joanne with another smile. "We can hit the spas, and maybe do some shopping. Is there any good snorkeling right around here? We might have to drive down the coast a bit. Maybe get off island?"

Joanne popped back to her room to get a guidebook, so we could start our planning. Meanwhile, I heard a knock at Saralinda's door, and now I was the one pretending not to listen through the doorway.

"I'm in, I'm in!" I heard Malia all but shriek. This was too good of news to ignore. I went to over to Saralinda's room and added my congratulations, then stood back and listened as the two young women shared Malia's excitement. Gary's string-pulling, and some legwork by Jake and Malia, had gotten her a last-minute acceptance into the biology program at the University of the South Pacific.

The two of them seemed so young; Malia, and especially Saralinda. My college years were suddenly feeling like ancient history. Images of Indiana University Northwest, my lovely alma mater, couldn't be suppressed at that moment, no matter how hard I tried. IUN wasn't exactly Harvard, and I had been living at home, of course. I suppose it hadn't been all bad; I'd managed to get a useful degree, not that I'd used it much...

But USP was a bigger deal for Malia than IUN ever was for me. And her goals and drive were greater, too. "When do you start?" I asked, to distract me from feeling sorry for myself.

"It's, let me see, July 23^rd. I'll be coming in mid-year; it's the second semester down here. But that should be okay, as I've placed out of the first semester of Intro to Microbiology, so I won't be behind in my major. It will be a bit, well, awkward, I suppose, but I've got the textbook from the first semester, and I've got a couple of weeks for review. Plus, I think I'll have the advantage of being an older student.

"And, hey, guess where I'm going to be living? They put me in a residence hall for married people! It seemed like the best place, since the freshman residences are filled with, well, teenagers! I guess the actual room I have used to be a caretaker's room, but it's set up like a studio apartment. And I'll be on campus, which I really wanted to be, yet I won't be stuck with freshmen."

"Heavens," I said. "Things really seem to be lining up for you."

Malia just beamed for a second. Then she sat down, and her smile drooped into a rather serious expression on her face. Saralinda broke off in the middle of saying something. The room was suddenly quiet.

"I can't believe this is happening. For Gary to just do this for me – the tuition, the fees, the plane flight over here, money for books and food and everything ... And then, I don't know how he got me accepted. I thought I'd have to wait until next January, but Gary did something, and it's like a fucking miracle, so I figure money was involved. And all he said was that I owed him my hard effort to succeed." Tears began to run down her face. "How am I supposed to feel about all of this?"