Page 12 of Single Malt

I shook my head. “He said he’ll get back to me by the end of the month.”

“I like the guy,” Fury said, “but you know how there’s that whole ‘absent-minded professor’ stereotype? That’s him.”

“He lost my paper onLord of the Ringsand the Industrial Revolution,” Cory said. “It was a good thing I always kept my papers for an extra semester, or I might’ve ended up flunking one of the literature classes I needed to graduate.”

“Did he ever go off on tangents that you could barely understand?” I asked. “I mean, I know I didn’t go to college, and I wouldn’t have been able to get into Stanford if I’d applied, but I don’t think I’m a stupid person, and I could hardly follow anything once he got going on some paper he’d had published.”

Cory laughed. “Yeah, he would always get so caught up in whatever subject he was into at the time that he could spend an entire class off the syllabus and never even notice that no one had any clue what he was talking about.”

None of us said anything for a couple minutes, but that wasn’t unusual with those two. Neither of them were very talkative. I didn’t mind, though. Everyone else was talking enough that it wasn’t quiet in the room.

I wanted to ask them about Freedom. She had the sort of name that would stick out even if they’d just heard it in passing, and if they’d ever seen her, they’d definitely remember. Except I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to know if they knew her. If they did, I’d have to ask if they’d hooked up with her, and that wasn’t something any guy wanted to ask his brother, let alone two of them.

Fortunately, another topic of conversation came up when Alec joined us.

“Have any of you heard from Eoin?”

“He talked to Da and Theresa yesterday,” Cory said. “Wished her a happy birthday.”

Like me, the twins went back and forth between calling Theresa by her first name and calling her Mom. Also like me, they tended to use her first name more often when Alec was around. Out of all of us, he’d had the most difficulty accepting our stepmom, and it’d taken him a long time to call her mom at all. He loved her and our family, but not everything in life was simple.

“He still coming home in the spring?”

“As far as I know,” Cory answered. “Seems like things are going pretty well.”

We all knew that ‘pretty well’ was about as good as we would get. Eoin never promised that he’d be fine, not like that, anyway. He wasn’t superstitious, and he never minded talking about plans for when his tour was over, that sort of thing, but he’d told me once that he felt like saying anything like “I’ll be fine” would be like lying because he couldn’t promise that.

Still, he’d made it through two tours overseas without any injuries more serious than scrapes and bruises. Not even a broken bone. It’d be the same this time too.

And maybe next year, he’d get to be home for at least one holiday or birthday.

Eight

Freedom

I lookedat the checklist that Dr. Ipres had given me, even though I’d already memorized it. When her TA had abruptly left at the beginning of the previous fall semester, I’d volunteered to help her until she could find a new teaching assistant, and while I’d known that there was a possibility of her not finding one for the spring semester either, I hadn’t realized that my unofficial volunteering would include party preparation.

Of a sort, anyway.

Technically, the event was an exhibit of a Greek art collection recently purchased by a wealthy friend of hers, but a surprising number of the same elements went into planning both types of events. For example, Dr. Ipres wanted background music. She said she trusted me to find the right kind to set the mood.

I probably wouldn’t have laughed at her word choice if she hadn’t written it in a slightly different way for the list –mood music, she’d called it.

Fortunately, I’d been able to disguise my laughter as a coughing fit because that wasn’t something I really wanted to have to explain to my advisor. She was fluent in English, but one of the things I’d learned when studying various languages was that no matter how much a person knew when it came to pronunciation, grammar, sentence structure, those sorts of things, there would always be phrases and plays on words that didn’t carry over. Non-native speakers gradually picked them up over time, but which ones they learned depended on numerous factors.

Apparently, Dr. Ipres hadn’t gotten to ‘mood music.’

I’d spent the last couple hours figuring out what that meant for an art show. I had ten days from today to put everything together, and I wanted it to be perfect. Classical seemed like the best choice, but that wasn’t a small genre. Other people might’ve just pulled up something generic and gone with it, but there was a big difference between Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” and Debussy’s “Claire de Lune.” And that wasn’t even taking into consideration how many different instruments and centuries the genre spanned.

Finally, I decided to make several lists for Dr. Ipres to choose from. Most would be traditional classical music, such as Hayden and Mozart, but I thought I’d go outside the box for at least one of them. Dr. Ipres had sent me a handful of pictures of the collection, so I intended to use those pictures to create a playlist out of movie and television scores. I didn’t know how well it would come across, but I liked the idea of taking some initiative to try something different. I didn’t often get that opportunity in my field.

Now that I knew what I planned to do with the music, I could put that aside while I took care of something that needed to be done within normal business hours. Like the next item on my list.

Alcohol.

Champagne was a given, and I remembered what we’d had at the New Year’s Eve party, which meant I just had to place the order for the same. That took half an hour. Technically, sparkling water and apple juice weren’t alcoholic, but I lumped them under that same category since the place that supplied the champagne also offered non-alcoholic drinks, so it made sense to do it that way. The next was to order the red and white wines. The last one on the list was whiskey.

I thought it was a little odd that Dr. Ipres had specifically requested whiskey. While I hadn’t been to a plethora of art exhibits in my twenty-five years, I had gone to a few charity events with my parents, both as a child and an adult. Whiskey wasn’t that common unless there was an open bar that was offering a greater variety of liquor, but Dr. Ipres hadn’t put any sort of mixed drinks on the list. Just champagne, wine, and whiskey.