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indeed , I would have demanded of Alak, so it was really for the best that he wasn't around to be party to my flirtations with madness.
"Touristy," I said to the large camera bag hanging from Nate's neck.
"Nah, it's kind of my job."
That wasn't too much of a surprise. Men like Nate who make ladies swoon on a regular basis usually don't tend toward staid occupations. They laugh in the face of the likes of accountancy and banking, and instead commandeer safaris, run Fashion Week and produce award-winning wines out of their own vineyards. They come in a packaged deal of exciting and ridiculous.
"Oh," I said, briefly imagining Nate hanging out of a Jeep, snapping pictures of a hungry hippopotamus intent on tenderizing him, "you're on assignment or something?"
Nate shook his head. "Not really. I'm trying to build up my portfolio a bit, see if I can get some good freelance gigs. Normally I do a lot of portraits and weddings, which is cool, but I kinda want something different." After a pause, he added, "But technically I'm just on vacation. Sometimes you just need to recharge, you know?"
"Yeah," I said, nodding slowly. "Absolutely."
As we walked out onto the main road, Nate said, "Mind if I ask what you do?"
"Speech therapist," I said. My degree says SpeechLanguage Pathology, but nobody ever knows what a speechlanguage pathologist is.
"Oh, cool. My niece is in speech therapy. Can't say her esses," he said, smiling at a memory I wasn't privy to. "How did you get into it?"
I've been asked some variation of this question approximately seventeen thousand times, mostly while I was in school. Meet anyone new at college and one of the first things they want to know about you is your major, and then all the explanations as to why. And then you meet new grad school classmates, and even though they have presumably gone through the same tiresome rote, they cannot stop themselves asking it all over again.
Being as personal as it was, I never liked telling anyone the real reason, and usually made one up, which was that I had been volunteering at a clinic and got interested in the discipline that way. Not totally untrue, because I did volunteer at a clinic, but only after I'd decided.
Maybe it was something in the bottled water, or maybe it was because Nate wasn't going to be secretly judging my dedication and worth as a colleague and future job competitor, but I felt no compulsion to keep the truth to myself this time.
"My grandpa had a stroke when I was fifteen. Oh, he was the one who taught me all about baseball," I added, remembering the similar history Nate and I had in being raised on the national pastime.
"Oh, yeah? He got you into the Cubbies?"
"Yeah," I said, smiling to myself, taking my turn now to indulge in the bits and pieces of remembrances that belonged only to me. "Every Sunday, we'd play catch in his backyard, and if the game was on TV we'd watch, and if it wasn't, we'd listen to it on the radio. He always let me sit in his La-ZBoy."
"Sounds great," Nate said softly.
"It was. He was great," I said, winning the award for understatement of the year. "But, y'know, when he had his stroke, he had hemiparesis and his language was shot. He couldn't communicate anything he wanted, and it killed me that I couldn't help him. Eventually he started working with a speech therapist, and it got better, and that's how I decided what I wanted to do."
"I bet he's incredibly proud of you," Nate said.
I shrugged. "He passed away a couple of weeks before I started college."
"Hm, I'm sorry to hear that, man," he said. "But I'm going to stand by my statement."
It shouldn't have meant anything, coming from someone who had no real idea what my relationship had been with my grandfather, and what was essentially a pointless sentiment, but sometimes sentiment hooks a way into your heart before you can intercept it, so I left it there.
Our walk came to an end outside a scooter rental place, a small wooden hut with 'For Rent' signs staked into the ground.