Chapter 23
After our waitress left, I asked Liam in a lowered voice, “What are your regrets?”
* * * *
Late-September, a month after my father died.
So hard to imagine fall had arrived, and the summer months were now a fleeting thought.
The green leafy foliage slowly turned to pallid, delicate yellows and oranges, and the leaves broke off their limbs and pirouetted in the air. A seagull perched on a light post and cawed.
Classes were finished for the day and I lay on the dry lawn near the refurbished pond, gazing up at a sky cast with electric blues and cumulus clouds rushing by. A chill in the air snaked up and down my bare arms, blowing across my face. Overgrown blades of grass brushed and tickled my neck, evoking a memory from my childhood when I had walked for miles to the community park and climbed the steep hill to the top. I went there to rejuvenate when things at home and school got to be too much to handle, or I just wanted to be alone.