Missed Connections (5 page)

"Me too. And I want to make sure Patrick got home safely."

Connor looked at him, wondering if Paul was having second thoughts about ending his relationship with Patrick. As if reading his mind, Paul turned to Connor and said, "I still mean to end it with him, but dammit, I want to know he's alive.

"I still have your card. It's waterlogged but legible. I assume your new cell phone will have the same number."

"I'll make sure it does."

"You don't have a landline?" Paul asked.

"Just the cell."

"I'll call you later. I still have a landline."

The taxi dropped Paul off first, then Connor. Despite his long list of things to do, Connor couldn't keep his mind off Paul. What if Patrick hadn't been found yet? What if he was home and so glad to see Paul that he wouldn't hear of breaking up? What if Paul himself had a change of heart when he found himself at home among familiar surroundings?" He worried his way through the afternoon and through the first decent meal he'd had in days.

Finally his cell phone rang. It was Paul.

"How'd it go?" Connor asked without preamble.

"All's well," Paul said, easing Connor mind with just two words. "Patrick's safe—and he had the same epiphany I did. Life is for living, not just for existing, and it's meant for true happiness, not just comfort. I didn't have to sell him on the concept of breaking up. He was already there. He's going apartment-hunting tomorrow.

"Hey, is it too late to come over this evening?"

"It's too late for dinner but not for—um—'dessert.' I presume there are no strings anymore, no barriers?"

"Nope. No strings. No barriers. Would it be all right if I planned to spend the night?"

"You'd better! When I called in to work, they'd heard about the ferry capsizing and surmised I was on it. They were
very
glad to hear I'd survived and been rescued. They gave me tomorrow off. So I don't even have to get up for work in the morning."

"Same here. When I called in to the store they said that they'd figured I was on the ferry that went down. I have tomorrow off too."

"Think we can figure out something to do with each other in the morning?" Connor teased.

"Definitely!" Paul enthused. "I already have a rental car. Just give me driving directions. The car doesn't have a GPS."

"Here's to a great night—and morning!" Connor said.

"Here's to a great future!" Paul replied.

Connor grinned. A great future indeed!

In the beginning, a few words

Nobody really goes to college meaning to meet their soul mate, but Rob had hoped to at least pick up a temporary steady boyfriend along the way. He dated a little, and in junior year, he kinda-sorta lived with a guy, though it hardly counted because they had already been roommates in a large communal house before they got together. When Vaughn moved back into his own room after three months it had hardly made a dent on either of them.

"It's weird, you know," his sister Emily said. Every so often she liked to trot out her high school psychology class wisdom and analyze her big brother over the phone. "You're not the picture of a loner. You're cheerful and social, everybody likes you. But you don't like anybody—"

"I like lots of people," Rob said. "I like most people, just—"

"Not in
that way
," Emily said. "It doesn't matter. You're graduating this year, finally, and when you go out into the world you'll meet that Mr. Right. Remember what Mom said—sooner or later, a lid for every pot
.
"

"What if it was sooner, and I was too young to notice?" Rob said. "I might have missed my moment. It doesn't matter, though."

"I don't think childhood friends count," Emily said. "Or I'd be getting ready to marry Junie Marquez by now, and that's just not something I want to think about."

"I wouldn't expect you to be so horrified by the thought of marrying a girl, with me in the family," Rob said.

"It's not marrying a girl that's horrifying, it's marrying Junie Marquez. She's squeezed in so many Thomas Kinkade knockoffs onto her walls you can't see out the windows."

*~*~*

Then it was Christmas, and he was home for the holiday, the house was full of his siblings, half and step, and there were a lot of family-intensifying activities going on, like making tamales and reminiscing.

Serafina, Rob's mother, let out a big sigh right in the middle of the tamale making party. "I wish Constance could come over like in the old days, it was fun having you and Rab running all over. And Constance was always good for a laugh."

"Who's Rab and Constance?" Rob's youngest half-brother Stanny asked.

"Constance is my very best friend who you have met, and Rab is her son who was best friends with Rob in the old days. But they're never around for the holidays anymore because of her boyfriend. They go to his family in the mountains."

Rob didn't remember ever having a friend named Rab, but he didn't remember a lot from his childhood. Emily, on the other hand, remembered everything that she had ever done, everything that had ever happened to her, and everything that she had said or had been said to her. It was obnoxious.

Before Rob could ask about this unknown former best friend, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a cloud of stepfamily. Sera had remained on good terms with her former husbands and boyfriends, and they all came over for family celebrations. She said it was the effect of living in a small town, but there are smaller towns than San Luis Obispo, and not everybody gets along like that. Rob's opinion was that they all
got along like that
because his mother was just that friendly and laid-back, like himself.

The name of Sera's best friend came up again during dinner. "Constance is finally going to marry that boyfriend of hers next summer," she said. "It's about time."

Rob's most current stepfather had the nerve to smirk and say, "Persistence and endurance are all that matters in relationships anyway. Romantic emotions have nothing to do with it."

"But people have to have some romantic feelings to get started, don't they?" Emily asked.

"Or something," George said, smirking again.

"Please don't," Rob said. "That's my mother you're making insinuating references to."

"Don't worry," Sera said. "He won't go too far. He's afraid of what I can say about him if I feel like it."

"So," Rob's first stepfather said, clearly in a hurry to change the topic from one that might be embarrassing to the elders to one that was embarrassing to the younger generation, "You going to graduate at last this year, Rob?"

"Yeah," he said. "Next semester's my last. It shouldn't be too hard. Mostly just a seminar to write my thesis in."

"Nice, calm, uneventful term to cap off the college career," George said. "I approve. Though you'd have been done and gone and working at a nice lucrative job by now if you had taken my advice and not changed your major."

"But he'd have been bored," Stanny pointed out. "Being bored is the worst."

*~*~*

Rob was used to cracks from relatives and acquaintances about how long it was taking him to graduate but it wasn't that bad. He was a "super senior," yes, but it was only his fifth year, and at his school, a lot of science majors took that long at least. And, as his stepfather said, he had changed his major late. It wasn't until junior year that he'd decided to throw off the shackles of a mere geology major and take up the banner of environmental science. But he hadn't slacked off. He was looking forward to a semester where all he had to do was write a fat paper about something that interested him.

The seminar met in a room that was dominated by a large window overlooking the scrub oak margin of a vast meadow. At this time of year the desperate deer came right up to the building, expressing no disappointment in the lushness of the plantings there. The first day of class the professor was late and Rob counted twelve deer before a man Rob had supposed to be one of the students spoke up.

"Dr. Fleischmann is apparently still in Baja," he said. "So I'll just get us started. I'm Jack, I'll be your reader and sometimes a substitute for Dr. Fleischmann. Since the class is meant to be mainly peer revision and discussion, you aren't really missing anything with Dr. Fleischmann gone."

Rob couldn't help the grin that broke out as he watched Jack and listened to him speak. He had to be a new graduate student: he couldn't be any older than Rob.  His soft voice held surprising authority, though, and in a few minutes he had the class at ease and ready to work. Rob couldn't help noticing his tan and outdoorsman's posture, and warming up to his welcoming ways.

As the first class went, so went most of the rest. Apparently, Dr. Fleischmann was too busy to make it to most of his own classes. More often than not Jack presided. They met together for a half hour and then broke into small groups to discuss the science of their projects and the work of writing them up. Rob just as glad Dr. Fleischmann didn't make it most of the time, because Jack's leadership was better.

One day he let it slip that the topic of his thesis had been similar to Rob's. Rob was delighted. They were interested in the same things—that was promising! Because now Rob had a new reason to count down the days till the end of his last semester: as soon as Jack wasn't his reader anymore, Rob was going to ask him out, at least for coffee.

Jack was even helpful when it came to the numbers. The overall plan of Rob's thesis was a meta-analysis of research on pesticide persistence in agricultural soils. This involved some pretty fancy statistics, since the methodology had changed pretty drastically over time. Since Jack's had been a similar analysis of studies on the persistence of lead in urban soils, he had encountered the same problems in comparing studies, and hacked a couple of methods for doing it which he was happy to share with Rob, even sitting with him for an hour while Rob worked out how to hack the hacks for his own purposes.

But the friendly expression on Jack's countenance faded whenever Rob inserted even the slightest off-topic remark into their conversation. Even a comment about the weather (almost always gorgeous in the spring, occasionally oppressively hot as the semester lumbered along), or the purple plum blossoms blooming on every street, caused Jack to withdraw. Rob wondered if this was Jack's general way with the students, or whether he was just that way with him. Jack was not so standoffish with the others. At least it seemed that way to Rob. He saw Jack have a three-minute exchange about the new roller derby team with Lisa who was doing a thing on erosion and irrigation. He actually
asked
Miguel about his weekend. But when Rob volunteered that he'd also gone to the same street fair as Miguel, Jack shut down and moved away.

So Rob was pretty sure it was just him.

It wasn't a tragedy, because you don't go to senior thesis seminar to hook up, right? But Rob was used to being liked. He had a couple of friends from high school who still called him "Golden Boy" because people tended to give him unsolicited offers of employment and invitations to parties. So it was annoying not to be liked by someone he liked. And he liked
Jack a lot. He wanted Jack to like him.

Entremets: A slight dip into confusion at a party

At last he brought his hopefully
final
final draft to his sponsor. The last day of class was a party at Dr. Fleischmann's house. Rob brought a spinach and artichoke dip his mother had taught him to make. He was pretty smug about its snazzy presentation in a hollowed-out round of sourdough French and a pile of bread cubes and cut-up veggies to surround it. People liked it as usual. He was taken aback by Jack's reaction, though.

Jack approached the spinach dip on the alert, as if he didn't believe such a yummy thing could be sitting out on the coffee table in his professor's living room without some kind of trap associated with it. Then he parked himself on the sofa. He began eating slowly, savoring every drawn-out nibble. He even closed his eyes and hummed on particularly pleasurable bites. Rob's mom's spinach and artichoke dip was very nice, but it was only dip.

Lisa started laughing as she said almost the exact thing that Rob was thinking, "Rob's dip is pretty good, Jack, but I wouldn't expect to see you getting your rocks off on it."

This seemed to cool Jack off immediately. He looked around and found Rob watching him bemusedly, and scowled. He stood up, crossed the room, and whispered fiercely to Rob, "If you think you're going to change things one iota with your mom's
dip
, you are mistaken," and then stalked out of the room to join a group of soon-to-be grads who were passionately lamenting Congress's latest cuts to EPA funding.

Stacey asked Rob, "What
was
that?"

Rob said, "I have not the slightest idea, but apparently he knows my mom."

Commencement

Graduation was a great relief. It was also terrifying. Because of the fifth year Rob had accumulated more debt than he had intended to. And because of those budget cuts that the students had been complaining about, he was worried about getting a job to pay the debt off. But he refused to be ruled by terror.

His mother came up for graduation, and two of his stepfathers, most of the gaggle of half-siblings and stepsiblings, fictive cousins, as well as some old friends from high school. It was an amazing weekend. His mother said they must have accounted for a full tenth of all the motel rooms in town. Rob showed her by doing the math that she was off by a couple of orders of magnitude and she just beamed.

She beamed a lot over the weekend. She sometimes would just stare at him and break out laughing. When Rob asked "What?" she shook her head and said, "Just—look at you. Graduating."

"Did you ever doubt it?" he asked.

"No, but it doesn't make it any less wonderful. I mean, I only graduated ten years ago, and now here you are, graduating on time."

"Fifth year, mom," he said.

"Yes, but you're only twenty-three. I was—"