I considered asking about her day, it would have been the polite thing, but I was much more interested in Plato than Pete’s Potato Chips, the account I knew she’d been working on.
“What’ve you got your nose buried in?” Drea asked.
I flipped closed the cover of my Intro to Philosophy text, holding it up. She raised her eyebrows.
“A little light reading?”
I smiled. “Actually, I signed up for a class at the U. Not for credit or anything. Just for …” I stopped. I was going to say “for something to do,” but I didn’t want to imply that I was bored and she should be entertaining me. “Just to, you know, get ahead,” I finished instead.
Drea stared at me wordlessly, then frowned and turned toward the window. I figured she was worried about the money. “It didn’t cost a lot,” I assured her. “I’m covering it with what I make at the coffee shop.” I had no idea how much she was getting from Mr. Koumaras, if anything, and I’d been careful about not using up her stuff, eating at Cuppa whenever I could.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said absently.
I waited, but when she didn’t say anything more, I went back to Plato, remembering how much I preferred it when she was out.
“You know, your father taught there.” Drea was still looking away, her voice drifting, disembodied.
A-ha. I closed my book. “I did,” I answered. “Ancient history, right?”
She nodded, finally looking at me, then down at her half-empty glass. “He always liked that stuff. I remember him reading about castles and knights. Not picture books, but big, heavy things.” She made a C with her thumb and forefinger to show me the thickness. “A lot of kids are into that, but Danny always wanted the real story. Not the make-believe.”
Danny. The name ricocheted in my head, familiar and intimate. A real person, not the black-and-white photograph he’d always been to me.
She continued, “My parents were so proud when he got the professorship at Lennox. It was a big deal that he went to college—neither of them had—but to work at one? Teach?” She shook her head. “It was as if he’d been elected president or something.”
“Were you close to him?”
“He was seven years older so we were always at kind of different places in our lives, but yeah”—Drea paused, nodding—“we were pretty close. He was a good brother.”
This was the most I’d heard Drea talk. I didn’t know if it was the wine or what, but I figured this was my chance to learn something about my parents. “Do you know how he … Danny … and my mother met?”
Drea looked at me as if my speaking his name sounded as strange as it felt, though I’m sure that was my imagination. “You don’t know?”
“No. Nan didn’t really talk about them.”
“I guess not.” I couldn’t quite place her tone—bitter and wistful and amused all together. “They met when he was in Pennsylvania for a semester. She ran away from home and came back here with him.”
“What do you mean, ‘ran away from home’?”
Drea shrugged. “Just that. She was sixteen. I don’t think her parents would have let her go.”
“What?!”
“Wow,” she said, a little softer. “You really didn’t know, huh?”
I shook my head, trying to absorb what she’d said. I’d been expecting to hear about mutual friends or a blind date even. Not this. Nothing like this.
“Yeah,” Drea said, taking another sip and looking out the window again. “We didn’t realize she was so young back then. Danny kept that to himself. Kept the whole thing to himself for a while. He was finishing his graduate work in Wichita, so she just moved into his apartment, was there for months before we knew about it.”
“Wow.” I tried to imagine Nan’s reaction. Was this why she’d never talked about my mother?
“Was she …” I wasn’t sure how to ask it. I mean, I knew what I’d think if someone at school ran off with a guy in his twenties, but back then? In the kind of tight-knit, old-fashioned community Greektown had always sounded like?
Drea read my mind. “Your mother was a good girl, Cassie. Much more than I ever was, that’s for sure.” She paused, refilling her glass from the bottle beside her chair. “She missed your grandmother a lot. Talked about her all the time.”
“So why’d she leave? I mean, if she was so into my father, couldn’t she just have … I don’t know, dated him long-distance or something?”
“Who knows?” Drea said. “The way Danny told it, there was some bad stuff back home that she had to get away from. He was ‘rescuing’ her.” Drea said the last sentence with a bitterness that made it pretty clear what she’d thought of my mother. Or at least of “Danny” being with her.
“What kind of bad stuff?”
“A friend of hers died. Her best friend.” She sipped her wine. “Your mother was there when it happened and kind of lost it.”
“What?! Jeez …” I couldn’t believe Nan had never told me this. Any of it. “How did the friend die?”
“Stung by a bee.”
“Huh?”
“Some kind of allergic reaction. They were at your mom’s house with your grandmother and this friend, Roberta—God only knows why I remember that—swelled up, stopped breathing.” Drea paused thoughtfully. “I guess I can see it being pretty freaky, especially for a sixteen-year-old.”
“Yeah.” I pictured watching something like that happen to Tasha. Terrible. “But I still don’t get why she ran away. I mean, Nan would have helped her …”
“Dunno.” Drea shook her head. “Danny said the girl’s family blamed your grandmother, was furious that she’d let them play hooky. Maybe that had something to do with it.”
That sounded like Nan. I remembered plenty of “field trips,” as she called them, on days I should have been in school. Sometimes the museum, often the beach.
Drea drained the last of her wine before adding, “Or maybe your mom just jumped at a chance to get out of that shithole she was living in.” She glanced out the window again. “She talked about it like she missed it, but it always sounded a lot like this place to me.”
Drea stood, slightly unsteady and obviously finished with the conversation. I suspected these weren’t her first glasses of wine.