“Pneumonia. At least it was quick. Sometimes I think she was relieved to go. She was never the same since we lost Deirdre—and my dad.” Deirdre had been two years his junior. She’d died at the age of nine, hit by a drunk driver while she rode her new bike home from a friend’s house down the street. His father couldn’t stand the loss of his adored daughter and deserted them soon after. His mom had done her best, but they couldn’t afford the house. She’d spent her remaining years in a cramped, single-wide trailer.
“Deirdre,” Kelly softly whispered. Her eyes welled with sudden tears.
He did reach across the table then. “Hey.” She let him take her hand. Damn, it felt good, just touching her. Her palm was soft and cool. “You would always cry, remember, whenever I talked about DeDe?”
She swallowed, nodded. “I…I knew you loved her very much. And nobody should die that young. It’s just…so sad.”
Even now, he could close his eyes and see her, his lost little sister. She would look up at him through those wide-set hazel eyes, trusting and proud to have him as her own big brother. “She was the greatest little kid. Nothing got her down, you know?”
Kelly glanced away. She swallowed again. “Mitch, I…”
“What? What’s the matter? Whatever it is, just say it. I can take it, I promise you.”
“Yes. I…well, I…”
The waiter arrived with their appetizers.
Kelly gently pulled her hand from his so the waiter could serve them. He asked if they wanted refills on their drinks. When they both passed, he left them.
“Now,” Mitch said, “what is it you keep trying to tell me?”
“It’s only that I…” she picked up her fork “…I want you to know that I did come back looking for you, a couple of months after I left….”
He shook his head. “Not a trace, huh?”
“No. The trailer had strangers living in it. They knew nothing about you. The guy in the park office told me about your mom and said he had no idea where you went. You’d left no forwarding address.”
“I had no forwarding address. And we were renting the trailer. The weekly payment came due. I didn’t have it. I realized I didn’t want to be there, anyway. So I took what I could fit in my backpack and I hit the road.”
“And you went…?”
“To Dallas. By way of L.A. and Las Vegas and Phoenix. I lived on the streets for about a year.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry….”
“Why? It wasn’t your fault. And living on the streets can be damn instructive—and you know what?”
“Hmm?”
“We’ve got this one evening. And then I’m on a plane tomorrow. Here we are again, after all these years. It’s like magic. And I don’t want to waste another minute of tonight talking about all the grim stuff we’ve been through since we were last together.”
Another of those beautiful smiles trembled across her mouth. “Oh, Michael.”
“Mitch,” he corrected.
She sighed. “Mitch.” She sent him a teasing look. “I like your attitude, Mitch.”
“Well, I’ve been working on it for the past decade or so. It’s good to know you see improvement.”
“Oh, I do.” She glowed at him. “I truly do. But as for the grim stuff, well, it’s what made us who we are, right?”
“That’s true.”
She sipped the last of her wine. He had the feeling she was about to reveal something important, one of those secrets he couldn’t wait for her to share with him, something about her life now that she found difficult to speak of. But then she only asked him more about himself.
“Your name. Why the change?”
He teased, “What? You don’t like the name ‘Mitch’?”
“I do like it. It just seems like a big step, I guess.”
“People do change their names. It’s more common than you might think.”
“I’m not asking about ‘people.’ I want to know why you changed your name.”
“I wanted to be…someone else. And now I am.”
“But you are still Michael. Deep down. No matter how much you change.”
He reached out. And so did she. Her fingers met his in the middle of the table, by the white magnolia blossom, in the candle’s golden glow. Met. And held.
He said, “I’m not Michael. Not anymore. I’m someone different. Someone named Mitch. And believe me, I like myself as Mitch a whole lot better than I ever liked Michael.”
“When did you change it?”
“When I was nineteen.”
“A year after…”
“We broke up. Yes. By then I’d created my first video game and I was working on the second one. I had a little money, at last. I’d rented an apartment. It seemed like total luxury to me. To sleep in a bed, to finally stop wondering where the next meal was coming from.”
“That must have been a great feeling.”
“Clean sheets and food in my stomach. Oh, yeah.”
She laughed again. “Actually, I meant how you came from nothing, and within a year you found success.”
“Well, I still had a long way to go. But things were definitely looking up.”
He’d still missed her like hell back then. It was an ache that never completely left him. But time had been kind and dulled the pain more year by year. He’d thought himself over her the past couple of years….
And then, last night, there she was, standing off to the side, her smile nervous and hopeful.
Since then, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Again, she pulled her hand back. She picked up her fork and went to work on her asparagus salad. He ate some of his stuffed portobello mushroom appetizer. They were quiet for a few minutes. The food was good and the silence held promise it seemed to him.
Eventually, she asked, “Why Mitch Valentine?”
“Well, it starts with the same letters as my given name, so it was a change, which I wanted, but at the same time, it felt comfortable, you know? It felt… right. Familiar.”
“But why Valentine?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not a name I can picture you choosing, I guess. It’s a little too…” She couldn’t find the right word.
He gave her some help. “Soft? Girly? Romantic? Imaginative? Kelly. I’m hurt. You don’t think I’m imaginative…?”
She groaned. “Excuse me while I remove my foot from my mouth—and actually, I like it. It just surprises me you chose it, that’s all.”
“I actually did have a few reasons for making the choice. I’d already chosen Mitch some time before. As I said, I wanted a last name that started with a V, like Vakulic. And it was Valentine’s Day when I went to see the lawyer about making the change. I thought, hell. Valentine. Vakulic. Same first two letters, just like Mitch and Michael. And I thought Valentine sounded like the name of somebody famous. I liked that. A lot.”
She sat back in her chair. “So. That was nine years ago today….”
“That’s right, now you mention it.”
They