Reunion: J-School, Class of 19--

Cutlery clatters into the sink. But always the characters, uniquely themselves, only some decades older. They search for their coats. You were, she reminds him, our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos: Morningside Heights, one of your lives. Thirty years since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes— East Africa his beat, Germany hers—he’ll visit the nephew, the namesake in Boston who drives a cab, sends a pittance each month to a wellhead in—we’ll call it Sudan. He explains how it works, this drip feed of cash to Sudan from the United States: cheap, fast. She’s not clear about this—he jots her a website: it’s a place she can go. So they won’t meet again...suddenly Can you forgive me? he blurts— a classmate’s apartment, Upper West Side, the grown child’s room, bears in tidy shrines, scrum of sloughed coats. In the kitchen friends wash up. Sound of laughter. Sound of water flowing out of a tap.Yes, she replies, shocked by the twinge, then ache, of remorse. She “forgot”? And him—thirty years— the place still hurts?It’s myself I can’t forgive, she knows later. Right now, vague shame. End of March. Maybe April. Street trees are trying to bloom. The irretrievable sits on the table, white as a plate. He holds her her coat.