Page 9 of Love Again

“My ass,” says Travis.

“No, your ass is the right age.”

Geo hands me a glass of wine and sits down on an ottoman. I settle on one end of the couch and Travis sits at the other.

“So do they treat you like a savant? The shining wunderkind?”

Travis laughs. “No. They think I’m thirty.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“They do. They all think I’ve come back to school.”

“What do they do when they find out you’re not old enough to drink?”

He raises his beer bottle. “They don’t know.”

Talk shifts to Geo—his volunteer work and the fact he still has no pets—and then to me.

“I came here to see you two, of course—”

“Because we’re the special men in your life?” interrupts Travis with an old joke.

I smile, but it feels thin. “I have to tell you about something that happened to me in Colorado.”

They both instantly look concerned. Travis scoots over to sit next to me. That’s how he is. Whenever there’s trouble, he comes and sits next to the person. If there were two upset sisters at once, he would move back and forth between them, even as a very little boy.

“It’s not something bad,” I say. “But it had bad effects.”

The silence needs a nudge.

“Well?” Geo’s voice is soft.

I take a deep breath. “I fell in love.”

There’s a beat.

“And?” says Travis.

“Well, that’s what happened. I fell in love in Colorado.”

Travis folds his arms behind his head and stretches, sighs, and lays an arm over my shoulders. “Okay, well, we need a little bit more than that.”

“He’s here now, in Echo Bay. At the firehouse. He’s going be here for a month.”

Geo has a wide grin starting. When I was little and he’d hoist me up on his shoulders, I could tell when he was smiling by leaning over and seeing his cheeks rounding out. My dad would laugh and say, “What’s Uncle Geo doing now?”

I’d warble, “Poofy cheeks!”

This is not a poofy cheek moment.

“No, this is not a good thing,” I try to explain.

Travis squeezes my shoulder. “Yeah, I can see that must be bad. A horrible situation for you.”

“I mean it. I left him.”

Geo goes into parental mode and starts checking off all the boxes. “Did he hurt you?”