Showing 3 posts tagged The Andre Stories
from the short story, “We’re Grownups, After All”
“He wrote me a letter a few months back,” Dennis said. His voiced cracked. “We didn’t know each other very well. Spent most of his life with his mother on Long Island.”
“Like his father,” Maggie said. She smiled, and it pulled Dennis in.
“He told me about this girl he loved,” Dennis said. “She’s it, he kept writing. Then he lost her. I think that was everything for him.”
“Did you visit him?” she asked.
“No. I got the sense he didn’t want to. He just needed to let me know that he was still there.”
Maggie nodded but said nothing. Dennis stared at her. He wanted to lean over the table and kiss her. He had countless questions to ask her, probably countless more to answer. Things had never really ended, at least not in any way that could be explained. Maggie, their life together, his feelings—everything had become too much and not enough and beyond reach. Dennis wasn’t the kind of man, ever, to demand. Instead, he just let her go. But none of that mattered. He hadn’t seen her in three decades yet, at that moment, she was his closest friend.
“It’s a good way to think of him,” Maggie said. “Still there.”
Dennis allowed himself to smile, really smile, and become caught up in the woman sitting in front of him.
“At the end of the letter, Andre asked if I remembered a particular baseball game—game four of the division series, when the Mets played the Giants. It was years ago, but of course I remembered. That Bobby Jones, he wrote. What a bum. It made me laugh out loud.”
Maggie was smiling when Dennis looked up at her. “That’s your word.”
“Yeah. That’s my word.”
√ Read “We’re Grownups, After All” in its entirety over at Assisi
√ Read another of The Andre Stories, “Based on True Events,” in Mixer
