She lounged desultorily on the deck behind her Brentwood home in Los Angeles, waiting for the arrival of the pool man, and idly thought back on what had brought her here....
As a co-ed at Southern Methodist in Dallas, she ran in "all the right circles", a reach for a Big Thicket country girl from East Texas - but she was smart, smart enough to get a full-boat scholarship to S.M.U. She'd been the first in her family ever to go to college.
Recalling the day she'd met her future husband at a Southwest Conference baseball game with Texas - one of her Tri-Delt sorority sisters' brother was the first baseman for the Longhorns, while the man who became her hubby played third - she smiled wistfully; since their whirl-wind courtship and his graduation with a degree in Petroleum Geology, she'd seen less and less of him. And where was he now? Malaysia? Indonesia? While she was grateful for the lifestyle his salary brought them, his continued long absences in the service of Tenneco were straining their relationship.
The sound of a truck engine in the drive snapped her out of her reverie. Putting down her mimosa, she went to open the fence gate to admit the pool serviceman. She was surprised to see, instead of the tanned teen-ager she'd expected, a man of about forty. He smiled, and said with a trace of an accent, "Here to clean your pool, Ma'am"
Returning to her drink and her Jackie Collins novel, she glanced over at him as he assiduously went about his business. When he was about done, she offered him a glass of lemonade; he accepted with alacrity.
Shortly emerging from the kitchen with another mimosa for herself and a tall glass of homemade lemonade for him, she motioned him to the picnic table under the canvas canopy in the yard. Evident of her growing curiosity over a man who didn't "fit the mold" of the standard Southern California pool-boy, she asked him, "Where are you from? Louisiana?" She thought his speech was redolent of the Cajuns she'd known from across the Sabine River near her hometown in East Texas.
"Me? I'm from Montreal.", he replied. "I'm a masseur by training; I used to be employed by the largest service in Quebec, but one of our clients had a stroke while being massaged, a fatal one, and we kind of scattered because we couldn't afford, either personally or professionally, the law-suits we feared were sure to come...."
"Mmm", she replied, "I would just love a massage right about now - how'd you like to give me one?"