Page 7 of Gone Before Goodbye
Bonnie straightens her spine.
“Wait, you?”
“The administration thought it best.”
“But my mother always thought you were a stuck-up tight-ass bitch, Bonnie.”
Bonnie’s eyes widen as though she’d been slapped. “Well!”
Maggie says nothing. Bonnie recovers.
“Either way,” Bonnie says, “you should leave. Your being here sullies the reputation of our class.”
Bonnie spins to leave. Maggie closes her eyes, opens them, stares out.
“Bonnie?”
Bonnie stops and turns back to Maggie.
“My mother never said that. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. She always spoke well of you. You’re a good choice to do this.”
Bonnie swallows. “I’ll do my best. I promise you that.”
She leaves Maggie alone on the terrace. From inside, someone starts clinking their champagne flute with a fork to get people’s attention. The crowd quiets. Someone asks people to gather around so they can begin. Maggie stays out on the terrace.
Bonnie is right. She shouldn’t be here.
She stares out at the foliage. From behind her, someone closes the glass doors so that she no longer hears what’s going on in the room. That’s okay. She is tempted to reach into her purse and contact Marc again, but that’s an awful crutch and just makes her feel worse.
“Hello, Maggie.”
The man wears a bespoke tailored suit of cobalt blue with a tie so perfectly knotted that one assumes he had divine help. His hair is gray, parted perfectly on the left. Maggie knows that he’s in his early seventies—he’d been a classmate of her mother’s and she’d been invited to his seventieth birthday party a few years back, but she’d been overseas and couldn’t attend.
“Hello, Doctor Barlow.”
“You haven’t been my student for a long time, Maggie. Can’t you call me by my first name?”
“I don’t think I can, no.”
Evan Barlow smiles. He has a good smile. He looks, to quote a sleazy classmate, so toned, so fit. She almost asks him if he does sweaty hot yoga. Evan Barlow heads up the Barlow Cosmetic Center, perhaps the most prestigious and discreet cosmetic surgery firm in the country. When celebrities want the work done so that no one knows, they trust Evan Barlow.
They stand now side by side, staring out at the quad. “Do you know this is my first time back on campus since I graduated?” he says.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“So why are you back?”
“I think you can guess.”
“Mom?”
“I loved her, you know.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She and your father are both gone, so I can admit it now.”
