Tom Ward got the letter in July, the same month he'd gotten the other three letters announcing the class reunion of the Monroe County High School Class of 1982. There had been a letter for the fifth year reunion and every five years after that. He'd ignored them all and intended to ignore this one as well.
Judy Mason's name and address had been on every letter. Judy had been the class secretary during Tom's senior year at Monroe High School, and after graduation had appointed herself as the keeper of names and addresses of all the people in his class. She'd kept up with him even though he'd spent four years in the US Army, gone to college, and then changed jobs and cities three times. Every year before the homecoming celebration she called his sister and asked if he was still in the same place.
Monroe High School was the only high school in a very small county where most of the people lived on farms or worked in a factory in Newton, twenty miles away from Millburg where Monroe High was located. The entire high school had only about a hundred and fifty students, and he graduated alongside thirty-eight other seniors.
A few had gone to college, and once they got their degrees, left for bigger cities with more to do on Saturday night than sit in Harry's Bar and talk about how they won that big football game against Stevens. When it got later, they'd talk about Wilma, a woman a year older than Tom who'd been married and divorced three times. Wilma sat at the bar and drank white wine every Saturday night in hopes of going home with one of the late drinkers.
She was usually pretty drunk by three in the morning, so taking her home was easy. Fucking her once you got her there was easy too, though a couple of the guys who done that said she wasn't all that great. Only old Max thought she was, but like they said, Max was almost seventy so any woman who'd suck his cock was great to him and Wilma did like sucking cocks.
Most of them didn't go anywhere once they graduated. Some boys went to work in the factories in Newton until their dads retired and then took over the family farm. The rest of the boys, except for the two who'd gotten into drugs and ended up in prison, stayed in the factories.
The girls went to work too, but usually were married within a couple of years, often to one of those farm boys, and had settled down to raise a family.
Tom knew that's what had happened to his class because although he'd avoided the class reunions, he did go home a few times a year to visit his sister and their parents. He'd drive through the one street that was downtown Millburg to see if everything was still there and once in a while, he'd see somebody he recognized, but he never stopped to talk. That would mean explaining what had happened and he didn't want to do that.
His mother was the one who kept him up to date on his classmates. She was the town librarian, so she either saw and talked to them from time to time or talked to someone who knew what the others were doing. She never actually explained in plain language about anything she considered risqué, but he knew how she talked about those things so he understood what she meant.
Through her, Tom knew about John Lambert and Jackie Wallace getting married the month after they graduated because Jackie was "pg". He knew about Lucy Dobbs and Mary Allen. His mother said she thought two young women sharing the same house had to be doing more than just sharing the rent payment.
He knew about Wilma from his mother too. His mother didn't just come right out and say Wilma was easy, but not that good in bed, and she liked sucking cocks. She said Wilma must have round heels on her shoes, but that she'd heard two of the men agreeing that the cobbler wasn't as good as the crust. She then said that Wilma had always had a Tootsie Pop in her mouth from the time she was six, but evidently had traded her Tootsie Pop for something else. She also said Max was old enough he should be ashamed of himself.
He knew something about them all, but they didn't know anything about him. He wanted it that way. That's why he'd avoided the class reunions.
It wasn't a feeling of being better than his former classmates that kept Tom from attending those reunions, and it wasn't that he didn't have anything in common with them anymore except Monroe High School, though he didn't. The reason was the ten pounds of fiberglass and stainless steel that he wore where his left leg had once been. The only fortunate thing was that Grenada was just a blip in history that most people didn't even realized had happened, so nobody would connect his age with the invasion like they would have if he'd served in Vietnam.
It was supposed to have been an easy mission to protect several hundred students at a medical school from capture by the communist government that had seized power in 1979. That's what his company commander had told them on the flight from Bermuda to Grenada. There were a few Cuban construction workers on the island, and though they were suspected of also being Cuban soldiers, they wouldn't be much of a threat.
That had proved true for the most part. The construction workers were indeed part of a trained Cuban military force and though they fought hard, the entire operation was over in three days. There were some US casualties, nineteen killed and a hundred and nine wounded, but considering the unforeseen difficulties they encountered, those casualties were considered acceptable by the commander of the US forces.
Tom was one of those casualties. He had been part of a patrol that was ambushed by Cuban soldiers from an encampment near Caliste. Immediately after the ambush, the encampment was attacked with the full fury of Navy fighter-bombers and howitzer fire and destroyed, but that didn't save Tom from the grenade that shredded his left leg from the knee down.
After the doctors had amputated his leg from half-way up his thigh, Tom spent a month waiting for the leg to heal and then another six months learning how to walk again when one leg was stainless steel and didn't weigh as much as his right leg. Even after that six months, he still had a noticeable limp, but at least he could move around on his own without crutches. After a year, most of the limp was gone. It wasn't gone from his mind though.
Tom had realized he'd never be able to do the physical work of most blue-collar jobs, so he'd enrolled in the local junior college. He'd had a fondness for electronics since that Christmas when he'd gotten a set of components you hooked together with wires with clips on the end, so he'd chosen electronics as his field of study.
During the course of his studies, Tom realized the associate's degree would get him a job, but that job would probably be maintaining electronic equipment, and that meant standing up and walking a lot. He'd learned enough to want to learn more, so he enrolled in electrical engineering at the state university once he had his associate's degree. Most of his classes didn't transfer, so he had to complete the entire four year program, but what he'd already learned made the technical subjects a lot easier to understand.
When he graduated, he'd gotten a job with a company that made automated equipment and began designing control systems using discrete components. When programmable controllers came on the market, he changed jobs to another machine builder to get experience with them. After five years there, he'd looked for and found a supervisory position with a large corporation in Farmington that was based in Japan, but built robots in the US. Farmington was about forty miles from Millburg, far enough he'd have his privacy, but close enough he could see his parents without driving half a day each way.
Tom knew he had a lot to be proud of. He'd accomplished a lot more than most of his high school classmates had even thought about doing. In some ways it would have been fun to watch their faces when he told them he was the manager of manufacturing operations for Myoko Robotics. It wouldn't have been fun to watch their faces when he walked around. The limp was gone, but he still didn't walk like everybody else, and sooner or later, one of them would ask him about that and he'd have to explain.
Tom would have tossed the letter in the trash like he had all the others except for the hand-written note that accompanied the laser-printed invitation. The note was from Judy and said, "Tom, we haven't seen or heard from you in twenty years. Please come to the reunion. A lot of us would like to see you again."
Tom couldn't figure out why Judy would take the time to hand write the note. It couldn't be that she wanted to see him because according to his mother, Judy was happily married. He couldn't think of anybody else he'd called a close friend in high school except for other guys, and they probably wouldn't care. He put the note on his desk at home though he didn't really know why. He wasn't going anyway.
His mother called him the first of August and after they'd caught up, she asked if he was coming home for the reunion.
"Tom, every time I see Judy at the library, she asks about you, and now she's asking if there is some way I can convince you to come to the reunion. I know you don't want to, and I know why, but Honey, she really, really wants you to come. I don't think she wants you to come for her. She and Billy just celebrated their twenty year anniversary by getting married again with a reception and everything else, so I don't think there's anything going on there. She never says why, but I can tell it's really important to her."
After five more of the same type of phone call, Tom finally relented. At best, he'd get to catch up with the few people he'd liked back then. At worst, he'd spend an hour at the reunion and then spend the rest of the weekend with his mother and father.
He was surprised when he walked into the Legion Hall. He didn't recognize any of the people there at first. Most of the men were balding and fat. Most of the women weren't really fat, but they were a lot rounder than he remembered any girl in his class being except for Mae Parker. Mae had been chubby in junior high, and by the time she was a senior, she was about the same size around from her shoulders to her hips. All the guys made fun of her and most of the girls did too. Tom didn't, because he'd always liked her. She was a smart girl and had a sense of humor.
He was still looking at the crowd when he heard a voice he remembered.
"Tom, you did come. I hoped you would. Come get your nametag."
He looked to his right, and then had to look again. Her face looked familiar, but her body was a lot different than he remembered. Judy had been really slim, and the guys used to joke that you wouldn't be able to find Judy's tits even if she let you try. Tom knew that to be true, because he'd dated her a couple of times. She hadn't let him take off her bra, but she hadn't minded giving him a hug when he dropped her off at home. She'd changed, and she'd changed a lot.
Judy wasn't fat now by any measure, but her breasts wouldn't have been hard to find at all. He could see why Billy had stayed with her for twenty years. Judy was sitting at a table with the nametags on it and her big breasts were sitting on the tabletop. It was pretty neat that her low cut top proved they were real. There was no way that deep, soft cleavage could be the result of implants.
Two couples he didn't recognize came in then, so he walked to the bar and bought a club soda, then stood there and looked at the people some more.
