The Drifter(87)

“Every time I see the two of you together I expect her to come around the corner at any minute,” she said. Stacy was the first one, the only one, brave enough to mention the missing piece. “It’s got to be hard to be here without her.”

Betsy and Caroline heard what she said, but they were speechless. Their eyes were locked on the photo. Neither one could tear them away.

BACK ON THE bus, it was standing room only in the thick, stifling air, since more people had joined the reunion tour. The part of Betsy’s brain that retrieved faces and names from the distant past on demand was on overload. She just nodded and smiled at anyone who looked her way. Once they were parked, the shimmering purple bus door with the celestial scene slid open and spilled forth a clown car’s worth of middle-aged women who were off to find their respective visor-wearing mates in Izod shirts. Lacoste had created a staggering variation of orange and blue stripes, wide-wide-narrow, narrow-wide-narrow, all narrow, all wide, which were all on display here. Betsy fought her way through the crowd on Caroline’s arm, dazed from the heat and the beer, hobbled by swollen feet in her defiantly non-athletic shoes. Gavin had mentioned that Teddy would be in for the game from Savannah, where he was an architect who designed mammoth beach houses for red-faced, Atlanta businessmen and their grandchildren. They had talked about Gavin coming, too, but in the end she knew this was something she had to do on her own. She made a note in her phone of the parking space where Teddy would be tailgating, thinking how much less fun things would have been back then if you were so easily found, textable, traceable, identified by a pin dropped on a tiny, electronic map. She spotted Teddy through the crowd instantly, same rumpled blue oxford, a red cap pulled low to the top of his glasses, a few graying blonde curls springing around the back of it.

“Betsy Young, in the flesh,” he said. “Jesus, it’s like seeing a ghost.” If any of Gavin’s other old buddies in his immediate company was interested in seeing her, they didn’t show it. Their wide, dark, black glasses concealed any glimpse of enthusiasm for life they might experience until kickoff, when all of the rage and passion they’d been storing up during the off-season let loose. If they’d always been boring, Betsy hadn’t noticed in school. She had interpreted their aloofness as proof that they were special, above it all, but she realized now that it was in fact a kind of smoke screen to conceal that they didn’t have much to say, or at least not to her. They had become exactly like their own fathers, the graying men in khaki shorts with the giant RVs, wearing hats to cover beleaguered hair follicles clinging to their scalps like sparse, windswept scrub on the side of a cliff.

Whatever trouble she was having with Gavin, she was sure she’d ended up with the best from the lot and was grateful for the renewed perspective. Teddy was a close second. He had come up north for Betsy and Gavin’s wedding with Melanie, and Gavin had seen him a handful of times for fishing trips. Betsy only half remembered his attempts to reach out to her during the blurry days she left Gainesville for good. But she remembered that he tried.

“Teddy, you remember Caroline,” she said, stepping aside to let them shake hands.

“How do you forget Caroline?” he said.

“Yeah, right, scary Caroline,” she said, looking over her giant sunglasses at Betsy. “I was nothing compared to the bitches who run this place now.”

“I’m fully aware that this will make me sound like a Quaker,” said Betsy. “But do you think these girls are aware that their butt cheeks are hanging out of their shorts?”

“Sorry, I hadn’t noticed,” laughed Teddy. “That would make me a sad, divorced, middle-aged man, trying to relive his youth. And I am far from it.”

“Hey, Betsy, do you think any of these girls wear giant T-shirts over their bathing suits when they’re in the hot tub like we did?” said Caroline.

“Watch your use of pronouns, Car. There was no ‘we’ in the hot tub, because, you know . . .”

“Yes, I know that you thought you were going to get the clap from some residue left behind.”

“Doesn’t the chlorine kill all of that stuff?” asked Teddy.

“Not according to my mother,” said Betsy. “Anyway, I don’t think any of the girls I’ve seen today would get in a hot tub. It would ruin their blowout,” said Betsy.

“Anybody want a beer?” Caroline nodded hello to the grumpy semicircle of men protecting the cooler, poured one into her cup, and started a roundtable discussion about the Florida quarterback at the time, Tim Tebow, and his alleged virginity.

“So did Remi start that preschool? You know, the labor camp one where they all have ‘jobs’?” asked Teddy.

“Oh, yeah. She started this year,” said Betsy, surprised that Teddy and Gavin had spoken so recently.

“And Gavin? How’s he?”

“Well, it sounds like you could answer that question as well as I could.”

“I remember that night I saw you together at Weird Bobby’s, before you took off for New Orleans,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought, ‘They’re going to hate each other’s guts, or they’re going to get married. Nothing in between.’”

“Or both?” added Betsy, with a weak smile, but she quickly regretted it.

They could hear the distant sound of the marching band through the crowd.