Page 56 of The Do-Over
THEA
“So tell me everything,” Rob said, picking up his taco.
Thea looked at him. “Everything?”
“I mean, presumably it’s been twenty years since you and I have seen each other.”
“Seventeen years, but yeah.”
“What’s been going on in that time?”
She sighed. “Do you really want to talk about this?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying not to lay too much on you all at once here, you know? With everything you’ve been through, you’ve got a lot to process without trying to catch up on seventeen years of history.”
“Well,” Rob said, “even if I hadn’t been in an accident, I would have needed to catch up on seventeen years of your history, right? Because you said that we don’t really talk to each other anymore.”
If you hadn’t been in an accident, I doubt we’d be talking right now.“I guess that’s right,” she said.
“So why should it be any different? We don’t have to talk about my past right now. Honestly, I could use the distraction.” He leaned in, and Thea was very forcibly reminded of the way he had behaved on dates—moving closer to her whenever he could. “You told me you went to Iowa State.”
“Well—yeah. I did.”
“That’s a good school.”
Not good enough for you, though. She forced herself not to think like that. It had been a long time, and besides, Rob had no memory of what had happened. She couldn’t hold it against him.
“It was pretty good,” she said. “I got a good education there.”
“And you went into nursing,” he said. “I don’t remember you talking about that when we were kids.” He frowned. “Did you talk about that?”
“No, no, I didn’t,” she assured him, not wanting him to think that this was another gap in his memory. “I didn’t figure out what I wanted to do until I was in college.”
“Why did you choose nursing?”
“I’ve always liked helping people,” she said. “Caring for people.”
Rob nodded. “I remember that about you. You were always taking care of me after my ball games. Making sure I stayed hydrated. Some days I thought hydrate was the only word you knew.” He smiled, and she could tell that he was remembering those times fondly.
But Thea had to search her memory. It was such a long time ago, and what she remembered of herself and Rob back then was obscured by a thousand more recent memories. “Did I tell you to hydrate a lot?”
He nodded slowly. “After every game, you’d pull my water bottle out of my bag and force it into my hands, and then you’d stand and watch me until I’d had a good amount of it. You don’t remember this?”
“I must not have spent much time thinking about it back then,” she said. “I probably did it automatically, without conscious thought, so it didn’t stay in my memory.”
“Well, it meant a lot to me,” Rob said. “Being taken care of…that was a new feeling. No one did that for me before you.”
“What about your father?”
Rob looked away for a moment and didn’t answer.
Then he looked back. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m not surprised that you became a nurse. You were always that kind of person.”
He had avoided the question about his father, but right now, Thea was more confused about the way he was talking about her. As if he understood—as if he really liked—the kind of person she was.
How could he claim to know so much about her?
