SEVENTEEN Luke signed the credit card bill and put down the pen. “Ready?” he asked. I wasn’t. I didn’t want our time together to end even if it was only until the next time. Driving over here I had been so afraid that it would be ending for forever. Why was it that I must always leap to the worst case scenario? Never ever a happy ending. It wasn’t part of my mental make-up, at least not for myself. In my work it was very thing that I counseled clients not to do. God—I even had the bumper sticker Visualize Peace. When was I ever going to practice what I preached? Luke and I were as we had been, maybe even as we had always been, except for those two decades in between, and here I was, still kind of stunned by it. “Okay,” I agreed, compliantly folding up my napkin and placing it on the table. He had to go work even if I didn’t, although I supposed I could now, energized, as it were, by a world now made of marshmallows. “Busy day?” Luke asked me. “To be honest with you,”
