his ears and in flour up to his elbows than kick a ball around a soccer field in honor of a man who’d abandoned him years before. It seemed like a logical conclusion to me.
As the end of my freshman year of college approached, I got busy with my own career plans. Well, kinda. It was more like tiptoeing around my options and hoping a vocation would rear up and smack me in the face. The problem was that I had absolutely no ambitions. I didn’t have a burning need for recognition or a passion for, say, stocks and bonds. And I didn’t want Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection any more than I wanted Donald Trump’s fleet of private jets. I was actually quite happy with one nice pair of pumps and Trey’s hand-me-down Civic.
Trey and I seldom saw each other during the week, as he was a commuter who spent too much time on trains going in and out of Chicago. But we always made it a priority, at some point on Saturdays, to crawl up to our hut and solve the world’s problems.
“The problem with soufflés,” Trey said on one rainy afternoon as we gazed up at the sagging sheet above us, “is that they’re incredibly finicky.”
“Uh-huh.” It was my standard response to Trey’s culinary monologues. Not that I wasn’t interested, but my fascination with food was more practical than theoretical. I wanted to eat it, not discuss it.
“If you don’t pull it out of the oven at exactly the right moment, it’ll either fall or overcook.”
“I liked you better when you were a sports geek,” I said.
He turned his head. “You did?”
I nodded. “Our talks made me less hungry.” I popped a Reese’s Pieces into my mouth.
“So have you decided yet?”
“I think Tom Cruise. He’ll make a better husband than Bruce Willis because he’s shorter—therefore he has more to prove.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d settle for Rob Lowe.” He came up on his elbow. “I mean,” he said patiently, “have you decided on a major?”
“The serious answer or the sarcastic answer?”
“I have a choice?” He seemed genuinely surprised, which made me wonder if I didn’t overdo the sarcasm sometimes.
“I’m going to major in nutrition—the donut variety; minor in potatoes—the deep-fried variety. And if I get bored, I might do an independent study on the health hazards of slimness.”
“So I didn’t have a choice.”
“Nope.”
He smiled. I liked it when he smiled. It reminded me of those months when all he’d done was snarl and sneer and generally be un-Trey. This post–Looney Tunes version was a vast improvement. I felt healthier when he was happy.
“I think I might need another decade or two before I decide on a major,” I said.
“You have a year, max.”
“Don’t pressure me.”
“What do you like to do?”
“We’ve been over this before.”
He sighed and tried again. “What do you like to do other than eat and watch I Love Lucy reruns?”
“I like to read. And I like to watch you bake. But as far as I know, a person can’t major in Erma Bombeck and minor in vicarious baking, so . . .”
“Shell.”
“Well, science and math are out. That narrows it down.”
“And underwater basket-weaving is a made-up thing, so that’s out too.”
“Really? Darn.”
“That leaves . . . ?” He raised an eyebrow and waited for me to fill in the blank.
“That leaves way too many options.”
“Your adviser’s got to hate you.”
“I think we’ve come to terms with it. She doesn’t tell me I have to make a decision quickly, and I don’t tell her plaid went out with the ’70s. It’s a great arrangement. Tell me more about soufflés.”
He laughed and plopped back down on his back. “You don’t care about soufflés.”
He was right. I really didn’t. But I did have an issue that I’d been tangling with for a while. I figured this was as bad a time as any to raise it, and I dove right in.
“Does life scare you?”
He didn’t laugh or sigh or anything like that. He pursed his lips and thought about it. That was one of the things I loved most about Trey. He only laughed at me when I was being really stupid. The mildly stupid stuff, he actually considered.
“There are things about life that scare me,” he said after a while. “But life in general? Not really—not anymore. I’ve learned a few lessons that have kind of de-scary-ized it for me.”
I pushed myself up into a cross-legged position, my mussed-up hair touching the lowest part of the