Maggie was twenty-three. She was starting at Yale School of Drama in the fall, specializing in set design. She’d received a full scholarship, but there were still living expenses to be met, and she was looking for a way to make cash fast. Word was there was a rich beach community called Serenity Point not too far from New Haven, plenty of money to be made off tourists in the summer. She went and got herself a job as a waitress at one of the Point’s more popular watering holes. The bartender was a twenty-six-year-old in between his first and second year at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Richard Flood. Richard and Maggie fell in love, only it was complicated. They were from different backgrounds: his fancy, hers not. Richard was home for the summer, helping his mom take care of his dad, in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s. Bartending was a slumming job for him, one he was doing more to get out of the house than to generate income. He was also seeing another girl, Martha Briggs. She was the daughter of his parents’ friends. It was a casual thing for him. He liked Martha well enough, and she sure liked him, and it made his mom happy. But it didn’t make Maggie happy. And once Richard proved unwilling to commit to her, be exclusive, she said yes to Phil, the horn player in the cover band that played in the bar on Friday and Saturday nights, who’d been asking her out all summer. It wasn’t just a revenge move. She genuinely liked Phil. They had a lot in common. Not only did he want to be an artist, but he was as politically engaged as she was as well. In fact, their first date was going to a NAFTA protest in Bridgeport. Richard, on the other hand, was totally apathetic as far as politics and human rights issues were concerned. And he was more than apathetic when it came to Phil, was downright hostile, referring to him as “that hippie,” which he wasn’t, and making fun of his Birkenstocks, which he didn’t wear. Still, Richard was the one Maggie was in love with, as much as they fought, as little as they saw eye to eye. And, slowly but surely, they were starting to work things out, figure out a way to be together. And then, Martha came into the bar one night waving around one of those pee-stick thingies. She was pregnant. She said it was an accident, though Maggie had her doubts. When Martha refused to even consider an abortion, Richard did the honorable thing and married her.

“Not that it wasn’t agonizing for him,” Maggie concluded. “We both cried and cried and cried. His dad was dying, though, and his mom was in too delicate a state to accept a bastard grandchild. So.” She shrugged. “We parted ways. But I never forgot him.”