Page 55 of A Fabulously Unfabulous Summer for Henry Milch

“Just kids.”

He looked at me, a bit concerned, and said, “I think I’ll go with Henry.”

“Okay,” I said. Henry hadn’t actually been a choice. It never was. I didn’t like it, but apparently everyone else did. The waitercame over again and asked Edward if he’d like something to drink.

“Should we get a bottle of wine?” Edward asked me.

“Oh, um—”

“We’ll have a bottle of the Wyandot Cellars Cab Franc,” he said with confidence.

The waiter hung around for a moment and told us the specials. Edward added an order of popcorn perch as an appetizer. After the waiter walked away, Edward asked, “So,Henry, how did you end up here?”

I considered being cute and saying I drove from my grandmother’s house, but I knew that’s not what he meant.

I said, “I came out from L.A. to take care of my grandmother.”

Yes, I know, that was a total lie. But I was hardly going to tell him I’d taken one Oxy too many and ended up in the psych ward. That was not first date chit-chat. In fact, I’m not sure I’d tell a man as sexy as Dr. Edward Stewart something like that until our twenty-fifth or thirtieth anniversary.

“You’re here for good then,” he said.

“Oh God no! I’m moving back to L.A. Soon, I hope.”

“Oh, I see.” He seemed genuinely disappointed. Which was weird. “Someone else is going to take care of your grandmother?”

“No. She’ll be able to take care of herself.”

“But she recently had a stroke?”

“Yeah. She’s getting better.”

“Well, that’s good.”

I suspected he was doing math in his head, asking himself why I came to take care of my grandmother months before she had the stroke and why I was going to now be able to leave. I smiled in hopes of distracting him from tiny little details.

“Why don’t you tell me what you plan to do when you get back to Los Angeles,” he said.

Crap. WhatdidI plan to do? I hadn’t thought much beyond getting back there. Would I go back to being a barista and hustling drinks at Rage? I probably would, but it sounded super lame. I needed to be more ambitious than that. I mean, he’s a doctor, which was like the definition of ambitious. And ambitious people didn’t really like un-ambitious people, right?

“Oh, you know, I have a degree in communications. UCLA,” I said.

“Oh, good school,” he said. And that was exactly why I mentioned it.

“I might look for something in the entertainment industry.”

Of course, I’d already done that. Most of what was available to me were unpaid internships and desk jobs that paid worse than being a barista. I mean, the only step-up I could imagine would be waiting tables in a decent restaurant. And that would be my life for, like, forever.

“Maybe I’ll go to grad school,” I said, though it was certainly news to me.

“And what would you study?”

“Film?” You know, something steady to keep me from that dreaded waiter’s job.

“Production?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Theory.” I was, after all, very good at watching movies. Though, I really had no idea where I’d find a job doing that. But then graduate school might answer that question.

“I like an ambitious man,” he said. I almost jumped out of my chair. I was right to make up an ambition. Then he said, “I hear Central Michigan University has a very good film theory program.”