“Jesus! I scuba dive a little, and I’ve only been to ninety feet with tanks.”
“I use a weighted sled to help me get down quickly.”
“That’s one extreme sport I’ve never heard of.”
“It’s pretty intense. As solitary as you can be on this planet, I think.”
He squats beside the pool, his eyes filled with curiosity. “Do you like that? Solitude, I mean?”
“Sometimes. Other times I can’t stand to be alone. Literally.”
“I learned to fly five years ago. I’ve got a little Cessna 210 out at the airport. That’s where I get my solitude.”
“Well, there you go. Flying scares me to death. If I got into your Cessna, I’d need a doggie bag in the first two minutes.”
Michael laughs and blushes at the same time. “You’re just trying to save my pride.”
“I’m not. Flying scares me, especially small planes.” I look toward the trees that conceal Malmaison. “Have you met my grandfather yet?”
He smiles in a way that’s hard to read. “The lord of the manor? Yeah. He still comes to the occasional staff meeting at the hospital, even though he’s more of a wheeler-dealer than a surgeon these days, from what I hear.”
“For a lot of years now. By the time he was forty, surgery was just a prestige hobby for him.”
Michael glances toward the woods, as though my grandfather might be watching us. “I saw him out running one day. He didn’t recognize me. I tell you, he’s a tough old man. He’s what, seventy?”
“Seventy-seven.”
“God. He can run me into the ground. And he doesn’t have that old-man jog, either, you know? He runs.”
“He’s strong.”
“I haven’t seen him much lately. He’s apparently out of town a lot.” Michael bends and dips his hand into the pool. “There’s a rumor that he’s buying up most of downtown Natchez.”
“What?”
“When the paper mill closed, the real estate market here crashed. But then a front company started buying up downtown by the block. Like it’s boom times again. Word is, the front company is really your grandfather.”
I can’t fit this into my frame of reference about my grandfather. “Why would he do that? Where’s the profit in it?”
This time Michael shrugs. “Nobody seems to know. But some people say he has some grand plan to save the city.”
I shake my head. “He’s always done a lot for the town, but that seems a bit crazy, given the local economy.”
“Maybe he knows something we don’t.”
“He always does.”
We look at each other without speaking. Michael doesn’t feel compelled to fill every silence, as some men do. But then this is his property. I’m the interloper.
“You know I didn’t finish med school, right?” I say cautiously.
“I heard.”
“What did you hear?”
He replies in a neutral tone, careful to keep any judgment out of his voice. “Depression. Nervous breakdown. The usual.”
“Nothing else?”
“Something about an affair with an attending physician. Or a professor, something. He flipped out over you and lost his job, you got booted, something like that. I don’t care much about gossip. Everybody’s got a past.”
I smile. “Do you?”
“Sure.” He chuckles softly. “Maybe not as colorful as yours.”
We both laugh.
“I had a terrible crush on you in high school,” he says. “I have to tell you that. I didn’t have the nerve to back then. The most beautiful girl at St. Stephen’s … my God.”
“And now I’m standing in your swimming pool in my underwear. How do I look?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. I’m surprised by the anxiety I feel about his answer. Why do I care so much what a virtual stranger thinks?
“You haven’t changed at all,” Michael says.
“Now I know you’re lying. You should have told me about the crush back then.”
He shakes his head. “Nah. You only dated jocks or bad boys.”
“What were you?”
“The chubby geek. You know that.”
I don’t insult him by arguing. “You seem to have reinvented yourself.”
He nods, his eyes reflective. “Sometimes you have to. It’s not easy, either.”
“You’re married, of course.”
“Nope. One girlfriend all the way through med school, but we ended up splitting.”
“You must be the most eligible bachelor in Natchez.”
Michael expels a lungful of air with obvious frustration. “The local matrons and divorcées certainly treat me that way. It’s a new reality for me.”
My cell phone rings in my jeans pocket on the side of the pool. I slide over to it on my knees and check the screen. My mother is calling again.
“Mom?”