After a dinner of pasta with his mother’s marinara sauce, a tossed salad and bread, they moved to the couch. They sat for several hours finishing up a bottle of Chianti Classico talking comfortably, like Tony and Margo, the friends of a thousand years, not awkwardly like lovers of only one day.
Until he said, “Okay, there’s something else I need to say to you,” and she felt tension return to her shoulders. He must have seen it because he said, “It’s nothing bad. It’s more like a confession.”
“Doesn’t that require a priest?”
“If I started with a priest tonight, I might still be with him the next time you came back to Philly. No, this is something I have to confess to you.” He took a sip of wine. “It … ah … wasn’t your mom’s idea to sign you up for the reunion . It was mine.”
“Yours? Why?”
“Mary Ellen’s wedding reception. Our unfinished business.”
She looked down into the wine glass. “I half expected you to call or email me after that.”
“When I went back to the room and you weren’t there, I figured you’d changed your mind. I wasn’t sure you wanted to hear from me. I decided I’d start over the next time you were in town, maybe cook dinner for you, like tonight. But I was in D.C. when you were here in April. Then the announcement about the reunion arrived. I told Dolores about it and she said … ”
“She always wants me to do something other than take care of things for her when I come to Philly but I never do.”
“Heard that before, have you? Anyway, she signed you up. Told me when you’d be at her house and suggested I ‘accidently’ run into you and ask you to go with me.”
“So you ran a con on me with my mother’s help? Or was it vice versa?”
“I’m not really sure. Whatever her plan was, mine was to get you here after the reunion dinner, which was where I was headed before my nephew interrupted us at the reception.”
“But we were slow dancing at the reception — well, before you danced me down the hall to that little dark room. And you didn’t want to slow dance at the reunion .”
“Do you remember what song we were dancing to at the wedding?”
“No, do you?”
“It was ‘I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’ and I’d asked the DJ to play it at the reunion . But the plan sort of went south because you wouldn’t wait until the right song was playing.”
“I can’t believe you remembered something like that.” She reached over and touched his hand. “But I’d say the pager going off was more to blame for the plan blowing up than my insisting we dance to the wrong song.”
He laced his fingers through hers. “Yeah, the damn pager even fucked up Plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“Sunday. My goddamn pager goes off when I’m in the middle of kissing an almost-naked woman thinking my luck was holding.”
“So last night was Plan C. I thought maybe it was because we were both, you know, happy about how well the presentation had gone. Or that we’d had too much to drink.”