Read No Time for Goodbye for Free Online

out with anybody, doesn’t go out to things. Nice rack, though.”
    She was pretty.
    It was the only course I shared with her. I was in the School of Education, preparing to become a teacher, in case the whole bestselling-writer thing didn’t happen immediately. My parents, retired now and living in Boca Raton, had both been teachers, and had liked it okay. At least it was recession-proof. I asked around, learned Cynthia was enrolled in the School of Family Studies at the Storrs campus. It included courses in gender studies, marital issues, care of the elderly, family economics, all kinds of shit like that.
    I was sitting out front of the university bookstore, wearing a UConn Huskies sweatshirt and glancing at some lecture notes, when I sensed someone standing in front of me.
    “Why’re you asking around about me?” Cynthia said. It was the first I’d heard her speak. A soft voice, but confident.
    “Huh?” I said.
    “Somebody said you were asking about me,” she repeated. “You’re Terrence Archer, right?”
    I nodded. “Terry,” I said.
    “Okay, so, why are you asking about me?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    “What do you want to know? Is there something you want to know? If there is, just come out and ask me, because I don’t like people talking about me behind my back. I can tell when it’s going on.”
    “Listen, I’m sorry, I only—”
    “You think I don’t know people talk about me?”
    “God, what are you, paranoid? I wasn’t
talking
about you. I just wondered whether—”
    “You wondered whether I’m the one. Whose family disappeared. Okay, I am. Now you can mind your own fucking business.”
    “My mom’s hair is red,” I said, cutting her off. “Not as red as yours. Sort of a blondy red, you know? But yours is really beautiful.” Cynthia blinked. “So yeah, maybe I asked a couple of people about you, because I wondered if you were seeing anybody, and they said no, and now I guess I can see why.”
    She looked at me.
    “So,” I said, making a big thing of stuffing my notes into my backpack and flinging it over my shoulder, “sorry and all.” I stood up and turned to go.
    “I’m not,” Cynthia said.
    I stopped. “You’re not what?”
    “I’m not seeing anybody.” She swallowed.
    Now I was feeling my neck. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole there,” I said. “You just seemed a bit, you know, touchy.”
    We agreed that she’d been touchy, and that I had been an asshole, and somehow ended up having a coffee at a campus snack bar, and Cynthia told me that she lived with her aunt when she wasn’t attending the university.
    “Tess is pretty decent,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t have a husband anymore, didn’t have any kids of her own, so my moving in, after the thing with my family, that kind of turned her world upside down, you know? But she was okay with it. I mean, what the hell was she going to do? And she was sort of going through a tragedy, too, her sister and brother-in-law and nephew just disappearing like that.”
    “So what happened to your house? Where you lived with your parents and brother?”
    That was me. Mr. Practical. Girl’s family vanishes and I come up with a real estate question.
    “I couldn’t live there alone,” Cynthia said. “And like, there was no one to pay the mortgage or anything anyway, so when they couldn’t find my family the bank sort of took it back and these lawyers got involved, and whatever money my parents had put into the house went into this trust thing, but they’d hardly made a dent in the mortgage, you know? And now, it’s been so long, they figure everyone is dead, right? Legally, even if they aren’t.” She rolled her eyes and grimaced.
    What could I say?
    “So Aunt Tess, she’s putting me through school. Like, I’ve had summer jobs and stuff, but that doesn’t cover much. I don’t know how she’s managed it, really, raising me, paying for my education. She must be in debt up to her eyeballs, but she