I look up from my online shopping and give her my attention.
“What?”
“Pictures from Colleen McCafferty’s Facebook account,” she said, then holding a finger up, started to read from it.
“Some photos from our amazing weekend with old friends. Thanks to Tony and Molly Woods for hosting the Great Wakefield Photo Reunion.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing where this was going.
“There’s farking everyone there,” she said, “ Colleen, Chris, Marco, even farking Reza A.”
“Who?”
“He was there that summer at the Plattsburgh store that Tony managed.”
“Ok,” I say.
“You know what?” she says, “It isn’t ‘OK’. We were friends with those a-holes for ten farking years and they can’t even be bothered to contact us to let us know there’s a reunion?”
“Would we have gone?”
She shrugs.
“I dunno,” she says, “Been a while and it’s a three hour drive now.”
“So, why you getting your titties in a twist about this?”
“Because it should have been our decision to go or not.”
With that she goes off to make lunch.
I get it.
Unknown to her, I’ve been messaging Chris on and off every couple years on his birthday, just to say “hi, happy birthday and basically hope you’re doing OK”
Never heard back from him.
Guess he’s either moved on or we’ve done something to piss them off.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter; we have friends here now and it’s been twenty years since we moved, so I didn’t expect anything effusive from the guy.
But nothing?
Not even one, “Hey, doing great, talk later maybe”
We must have pissed them off.
Was it not sending a card when her Mom died?
A couple days later, she comes to me with a list.
“These are the people I want to re-connect with.”
I look at the list.
“Really?” I say, “Julie Schall?”
“And Donny Tremblant.”
“The guy from Cedar Point?”
“I hear he and his wife own a cottage resort up in the Blue Pine Highlands”
“And you thought he’d let us stay there, just because we knew him….twenty five years ago?”
“I just want to re-connect with a couple people, that’s all.”
So, that became my mission when she was off working overnights.
Trying to find these people I hadn’t talked to in two decades.
A couple of them I found.
Julie even wrote back with a long message about everything she’s been up to since those days.
Got married, got a job with a symphony out west, had a couple kids, got divorced, went gay.
It was a bit of an over-share, truth be told.
Of course, she ended with “ It was nice hearing from you two. Stay in touch.”
Translation: “We’re done here.”
Other than that, there wasn’t any success in tracking people down.
I wasn’t surprised; that time was so transient.
We thought we were all friends but we were really just co-employees with benefits.