We still had a few beers every Saturday at the dingy little pub, but now the attendance was irregular. Sometimes we were all there; more often we were two or three. We all had things to do or rehearsals to attend to or female persons to take to dinner, or in my case, a novel to write. I once waited two hours and none of them showed up. I had a beer and a sandwich that tasted like granite, then I went home. We were gradually disbanding -- it was a sign of age. Pretty soon there'd be weddings, then diapers, then nursery school...
But we tried to have our weekly beer sessions, and we still found things to talk about. Bicker about. No one brought Alicia's name into the conversation. Rick mentioned her once, but Chip leapt into the breach with a critique of Ivan Lendl's service. There was no further mention of her. I figured Rick had gotten over the rough spot because he seemed like his old self, meaning he was playing somebody else. Dino quit the new wave band that no one had ever heard of and formed a band called Patagonia. Chip kept his old job and played tennis on weekends -- he was dating a girl with a fantastic backhand. We'd spent high school and college worrying about the future and now wer were up to our ears in it.
-- from "Romeo et. al." by Jessica Zafra. For Russ Vera Liyo.
