MILES

He stood by the bar of what this little town considered a fine restaurant, sipping brown microbrew ale and listening idly to snippets of the faux-friendly patter swirling around him. Annual get-together with old high school classmates, this, started since their 20-year reunion by a woman he had called a friend, when she was a girl and he was a boy at Central High.

His wife stood a few feet away, talking to his best friend's wife. Watching from afar the woman who had given him their daughter, seeing her thick blonde hair fall on her shoulders and her polite nods as she chatted, made the slightly pained, sometimes forced smiles of his ex-classmates, well, damn near tolerable. He did not know if he could tolerate the hour or so more he and his wife would have to wait to take their table for dinner.

He had for the most part enjoyed growing up with these people, all those years ago. Some of them had seen him as a dork or a freak back in the 1980s, with his big head and even bigger personality. Nearly all of these people, though, had to a greater or lesser degree ended up being his friend during their school years. These people had apparently seen for themselves back then, that he was not just a dork and a freak, but a dork and a freak, who could act, sing, get good grades, provide class leadership and do impersonations that made them laugh. He had never understood or really cared why these things had made him almost popular in his last two years with these people at Central High, but he accepted the friendship he supposed his talents gave him and returned the same in kind. But when he had left this small town and these people for college in 1984, he had really never looked back.

The summer of 1986 and a few weeks in 1991, after leaving his girlfriend and before taking a job in western New York, were the only times he had lived anywhere near his high school classmates after graduation. Despite his return to the area in 1996, brief move to Kentucky in 2000 for IT contract work and decision to live locally ever since late-2000, he had spent significant time with only one of the people chatting around him as he stood at the bar.

As he stood there watching his old classmates, individually and collectively, he nodded and chatted amiably when necessary, catching his wife's eye once in awhile. He remembered that he had genuinely cared for almost every person in the room, way back when they were kids together. So though he had spent significant time

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