Chapter 2 of 9.

See Chapter 1 beginning on Friday, July 26. Or check link to author archive – https://www.evesun.com/authors/31

After so many years, it was disconcerting to see that address book again … like a long-forgotten high school friend, viewed from a distance. Still recognizable, but a little shopworn around the edges.

Old friends are familiar unknowns, as potentially hazardous as un-detonated bombs. Initially they are glad to see you. Next thing you know, they want to borrow money. Lastly, they can’t resist the impulse to remind you of what a loser you were when you were a teen.

Is it ever worth the risk to renew such old acquaintances? Or is the price too steep for a quick stroll down memory lane?

I shut the drawer, and continued to poke around on my desk.

I put all of my ballpoint pens into one pen cup, all of my pencils into another, and my magnifying glass, ruler, letter opener, and scissors into a third.

I organized my paperclips by size.

I picked up the business card that I didn’t want to look at, and I looked at it.

I returned it to the middle of my desk.

I bit off a hangnail.

I decided to learn how to cook and threw out all of my Take-Out menus. Then I dove into my wastebasket and retrieved the ones for the Panda Garden and Pepperoni Pizza Cafe.

I thought about my open cases at Precaution Property and Liability. There was a garage fire in Ronkonkoma, a car theft in Queens, a trip-and-fall in Bridgeport, and…

My hand crept toward the drawer.

Within seconds, the address book, with twelve years of my life from age eighteen to thirty was open on my lap.

Which was when something odd happened.

Have you ever looked through an old address book? They smell of vintage reality. The joys and pains of friendships in motion.

Photographs evoke memories, but the incidents that they immortalize are frozen in time. A single dot in the infinity of dots that start when you are born and end when you die.

An address book, though, is a continuum. It brings to mind the 500 times you called Pete, or wrote postcards to Tina and Ralph, or sat lonely by the phone waiting to hear from Jonathan. It recalls the names of friends you scratched out in anger, and the letters you wrote to borrow money or repay a loan. It sings of cards conveying congratulations, and it weeps of letters sent in sorrow to those who had lost their mate.

An address book is the White Pages of your life. The time chart of your wheres and whens. The Manhattan Blue Book of your heart.

Okay. Now I’m getting carried away.

As I did that day when I flipped to “M,” and began to stare at the old addresses and phone numbers on the page headed “Me.”

There, spread out before me, were a memory, a vision, a sense, and an essence of each of my past homes.

I winced.

The past carries a hell of a wallop. More so for someone like me who had lived thirty-five years without giving it a moment’s thought. I’m the kind of a gal who throws out old love letters, expensive jewelry from suitors whom the Queen No Longer Favors (“Off with his head!”), and faded roses from days gone by.

I had not, however, thrown out that address book.

My first listing was for 1456 Mt. Joy Road, Yonkers, New York. Eighteen-years-old and right out of Cleveland, I had rented the attic room in a nice old house that smelled of furniture polish, sheet music, and shortbread.

As I sat at my desk in the here-and-low and stared at that address from so long ago, the sheer magnitude of the years between now and then seemed centuries. Eons. Impossibilities. And as I contemplated my teenaged self, I had a curious desire … no … more than a desire. A passion … to talk to her. To find out who she was and what she was like.

I looked at the telephone number. Area code 914 followed by seven familiar digits.

It was at this point when common sense flew out the window, and a bizarre sort of alternate reality flew in.

I dialed.

“Hello,” I said to … I knew not what.

The voice that answered was alert. Wary.

Who is this?” she asked.

I hesitated for a moment. Then, instantly recognizing who had picked up the receiver, I inwardly began to chuckle.

I said, trying to sound both sober and solemn, “You aren’t going to believe this.”

Continued Next Week

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com