Virtual Café: Summary

Mystery upon Mystery

Let’s summarize the narrative.

Young man loves woman during high school but her father dies in her Junior year of college. She decides, unilaterally, to transfer to the young man’s college for his last semester before graduation.

There had been talk about medicine, but he decides a research career is a better fit.

Graduation: he has not asked her to marry, nor has he ever broached the subject.

She leaves in a huff.

A year after graduation, his research career begins to take off but she won’t have him when he asks, now he is settled and successfully on his way.

They are on-again, off-again until a research opening at UCLA comes up and he leaves the East Coast for LA.

There are rumors.

For some reason, she still continues to visit his mother.

He thinks of her often while she returns for a teaching degree on the East Coast. On a trip back east, either she will not see him, or, her mother lies about contacting her.

Decades pass.

A mutual friend from high school dies of a brain tumor and her email address comes up in the group letter. He finally tracks her down in Arizona and begins to learn what happened over the years as he became a funded academic researcher, married and had a family.

Her intent was to disappear.

His mother confides in him “It was about money…”

***

Later, on prompting, friends from the hometown report her being seen often with an older man, then she disappeared.

Only after her death, only after a strained occasional email between them did he learn about her husband. When she met him, he was a Cadillac salesman and she a student teacher.

He had five children and a wife of twenty years whom he deserted, and she and he moved to Arizona where he had connections. He had been a semi-pro football player for the Green Bay farm team, and later its manager.

There were rumblings about Roger Staubach and a Missouri expansion team relocating to Tucson, Arizona. Her husband missed the deal.

***
She never mentioned that her husband was twenty years her senior, a fact that did not come out until after her death of heart failure.

He had lost her once as a young man, tried to move on and reconnected years later. Then, suddenly, she was gone.

***