Ivan frowned and squinted his eyes. “Ahh…I really didn’t get a chance to look at the menu yet.”

“I’ll have a beer and some fries,” Catherine ordered overtop of him.

“Okay,” the brunette perked. She wrote it down on her order pad. Then she looked back at Ivan. “I’ll be right back in a minute,” she promised him.

Ivan nodded. “All right.”

As soon as the waitress left them, Catherine changed her tone and reached her gentle hands across the table to place over Ivan’s. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” she told him. She had compassion in her dark brown eyes. She had heard about his mother’s funeral in Los Angeles through mutual friends. But her apology caught Ivan off guard. He froze for a second and daydreamed in her direction, before he shook it off and looked away.

He grunted, “It was gonna happen sooner or later.” He looked back into her eyes to finish his statement. “When you got any form of cancer, you’re fighting it to win or fighting it to lose.”

Catherine squeezed his hands tighter. “I know how much she meant to you.”

“Yeah,” Ivan grumbled. Then he forced himself to perk up. He said, “But the good thing she told me was to go ahead and live my life now, you know. I mean, I had been holding on for so long…”

“I know,” Catherine responded. She remembered it through their college years. Ivan’s mother had begged him several times each semester to stay away from home in South Central L.A. to finish his schooling in San Diego. She knew that her illness would be too much of a strain on him at home. And when he was offered an accounting job at the firm of Hutch & Mitchell in North Clairemont, his mother advised him to take it and stay there.

Now Ivan felt guilty about everything. Although returning home may not have changed the end result, he would have at least been able to see his mother more before she was confined to her deathbed.

Finally, he pulled his hands away from Catherine at the table.

“Look, we’re not here to talk about that. So, what’s up with this new job you got?” he asked her, changing the subject.

Catherine nodded and followed his lead. She wanted to make sure she got her empathy out of the way early. She had other plans for them that evening.

“Well, I may be moving back to the San Diego area if everything goes right,” she told him. She was originally from Sacramento. She said, “I had my interview this morning in Oceanside, but I made sure they put me up in a downtown San Diego hotel instead of all the way out there.”

Then she giggled. “I can get my way when I want it.”

Ivan sat back in his chair and smiled. “Yeah, I know it already.”