Now she sat at the kitchen table with a stack of invitations wondering what on earth she had been thinking. John had actually been pretty excited about the idea. He had asked about meeting some of Gretchen’s friends a while ago, but she thought he liked the idea of a party because that meant there would be more people around to distract her parents. Sitting next to Gretchen at the table, John was busy planning the menu for the party while she was addressing envelopes. Luckily, all she needed were first names. Pretty much everyone she knew in town were people she worked with, people she lived near, or the nurses at the hospital. She would slip the invitations for her co-workers into their mailboxes at work and John was going to drop off the nurses’ invitations at his physical therapy appointment the next day. Of the three sets of neighbors she knew well enough to invite, Gretchen was actually only inviting one of them. Two were elderly and didn’t go out after dark, the other was a young family with a baby they routinely put to bed by eight o’clock every night, and then there was Carl.
