Deja vu All Over Again by Larry Brill

Author:Larry Brill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: na
Publisher: Larry Brill
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Yearbooks and Yearnings

By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, Julie had mopped the kitchen floor even though it didn’t need it. She had folded the clothes, gotten in a brisk walk, bought roasted chicken and a lottery ticket at the Happy Yen Mini Mart and Texas Barbecue, stared at the weeds that were starting to overrun her planter box in the backyard long and hard as if that would wilt them away, spent twenty minutes on the phone with Tiffany and left a voice message for her son, Daniel, in Oregon. Eventually she ran out of tasks she used as excuses to avoid doing the thing she wanted to do most. It had been on her mind since Nate left her in the school parking lot Thursday.

She went to the closet in what used to be Daniel’s bedroom. The right side of the closet, behind the sliding mirrored door that seldom got opened, was stacked with different colored plastic storage bins. White bins were full of useful stuff. Blue ones belonged to the kids. Gray ones, under all the others, held memories. It was in the second bin from the bottom, right where she knew it would be. She pulled it out and walked her high school senior yearbook out to the living room, where she curled up on the couch. She meandered through the pages, spending time with the memories from some more than others. Some, buried deep by the decades, felt fresh again. Others teased her with things she should recall but created only vague and fuzzy feelings. She finally reached a page near the back of the book where the photographer got a camera-about-campus shot of her with Nate, yucking it up with friends on their bench near the fountain. Julie had leaned into Nate and bopped his shoulder with her head over some undoubtedly horrible joke he made. The photograph made it look like they were in love. A cute couple doing what cute couples do.

“Lord, the grief we took over that,” she mumbled.

Seeing that picture again warmed Julie not unlike the way she felt as she studied it endlessly when she was seventeen. The photographer got it on an early spring day during one of those brief periods when Julie thought her friendship with Nate was about to go to the next level. Silly girl.

Then she finally got it. Seeing that picture again made her feel something she had forgotten, the feeling Nate was chasing. Sure, if she could make every day give her the kind of innocent joy they shared when that photo was snapped, Julie would want to go back and relive those days, too. She almost made it, too, near the fountain after Popcorn Thursday when their hands touched as they walked. The feeling raised her spirits then, and it was stronger as she sat there with the yearbook in her lap. She laid gentle fingertips on the picture. They were a cute couple.

Nearly an hour later, the doorbell rousted her from a dream.

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