Odette said, “Hey, Chick. I can’t get up and hug you, so you’d better come to me.” He stepped closer to Odette, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek. He turned toward Clarice and she reached out and shook his hand. Then, after a pause that was just a little too long to feel comfortable, Barbara Jean said, “Hello, Ray. It’s been a long time.”
Odette sat up as much as she could on the infusion lounge and took in her old friend, getting her first good look at him in almost thirty years. He reminded her of a seasoned hiker who had just stepped in from a brisk stroll on the mountainside. His cheeks were red and his gray and black waves of hair had either been tousled by the wind or he had spent hours with a stylist that morning to give him the air of a gracefully aging action-movie star. Odette caused his cheeks to redden even more by saying, “All these years and you still look good enough to eat.”
She told him to pull up a seat, but he claimed that he was already running late and couldn’t stay long. Chick said he had seen James on his way in to work that morning. James had filled him in on Odette’s condition and told him where he’d find her.
Odette asked, “So what brings you back to us after all this time?”
“I’m in charge of a research project,” he said. “We’re working with birds. Raptors, actually—hawks, owls, falcons. They converted the old tower for us.” He waved his hand in the direction of the tower even though there was no window in the room and in spite of the fact that the Supremes, like everyone else in town, knew exactly what tower he was talking about.
The tower was all that was left of a tuberculosis sanatorium that had once occupied the land where the hospital now stood. TB patients had been brought there to take the fresh air cure. Five stories tall, it stood atop a rise at the edge of the campus and was visible from nearly any vantage point in town. Now Chick, the boy who had always been covered with feathers, kept birds there.
“You really should see what the university has done with it,” he said. “The facility is incredible. Twice as big as the space I had in Oregon.”
“Oregon?” Odette said. “I thought you went off to school in Florida.”
“I did, but I only lasted a few months there. Too hot for me. After a year, I transferred to a graduate program in Oregon. The college offered me a teaching job after I finished and I ended up staying till I came back here.”
Odette, who was never shy about obtaining information, proceeded to grill him. Within a minute or two, she’d found out that Chick had lived in Plainview since the summer, had been married and divorced twice with no children from either marriage, and lived in one of the new houses in Leaning Tree.
Chick felt himself beginning to sweat. Since the day he accepted the job that meant returning to his hometown, he had thought about what he would say when he crossed paths with the Supremes. He prepared a short speech, a few sentences about his life in the Northwest followed by a brief description of the work that had brought him back to Plainview. But he had envisioned reciting his carefully practiced patter to the Supremes in a safe environment like a grocery store loaded with distracted, chatting customers or a busy street corner. Now, because of a chance meeting with his old buddy James that morning, he found himself fumbling through a scattered version of his little speech in a hospital room whose walls seemed to be inching toward him more quickly with each passing second. He had been thrown hopelessly off balance by Odette’s questions, this place, and the presence of Barbara Jean, still painfully beautiful after what seemed like a million years and like no time at all.
Chick veered away from his prepared remarks, speaking faster and faster. He described, floor by floor, the state-of-the-art veterinary facility that was housed in the tower. He told them about the two graduate-level courses he taught at the university and how the brightest of his students now formed the eager young staff that assisted him in his work with the raptor project. He detailed the plans for releasing the first breeding pair of rehabbed falcons sometime that coming