You Lost Me There Read Online Free PDF Page B

type of achievement, though, whether or not it panned out, Lucy deserved her own lab, her own glory. But she’d yet to show any interest in establishing herself. When I’d moved north from New York, NYU had said they’d find her space if she locked down a grant. Instead, Lucy packed up and drove to Maine.
    Also, Lucy had known Sara. They hadn’t been close, but friendly enough. And no one had been more supportive after the accident, no one more hands-off.
    “Fine, try me,” I said, leaning forward in my chair, attempting to block out an image of Regina dancing. “But tell me it’s not Deke.”
    “Deke?”
    Deke was Lucy’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, a radiologist at Maine Coast Memorial Hospital. He’d proposed to her back in January, without success.
    She laughed lightly with a scratchy voice, humorlessly. “No, it is not Deke. Enter Terry, stage left.”
    “Tell me about Terry.”
    “Terry is a senior-grade ranger with the Acadia park service. He has a name tag that will explain this to you. He is thirty-seven. I met him online three weeks ago. Turns out, Terry is a musician of considerably mediocre talent. Also, he has a lip ring.”
    I laughed. “Very interesting.”
    “No, because Terry is neutered, except he’s able to compose twenty songs about his ex-girlfriend.” Lucy picked through a bowl of cashews. “‘Amy slim as grass, sweet as cream,’ that’s one of his lyrics, about Amy the perfect girlfriend until she left him for some ski bum in Idaho. Now Terry plays the orphaned lover anytime there’s an open-mic night. How do I know? Because that was our first date: an evening featuring Terry and his guitar, and all the chai tea I felt like buying for myself.”
    “There won’t be a second date.”
    “He has a song called ‘O Death.’ Victor, tell that to your mother, next time she calls wondering when you’ll be married.” Lucy stood up and stretched her hamstrings. “So, what about you, how are you, I haven’t seen you all day. You talk to that guy from Chemistry yet?”
    “Me, with a dozen evaluations to complete?”
    You try not getting an erection, I wanted to say.
    “Fine, run your scorecards,” Lucy said. “You know, for a genetic sample, the middle-class single male? This could be a fire sale for research. I mean, as a consortium, progressing from Neanderthal to, what, passive-aggressive North American. You should see Terry’s MySpace page, it’s like an Elliott Smith memorial.”
    Lucy picked up her watch.
    “Tell you what, I will leave you to your assessments. Some of us have real work to muddle through.”
    A minute later, I heard her on the phone in the hallway, bawling out Soborg’s IT department about another PC on the fritz.
    Gradually the rest of the team left, and Lucy and I ordered pizza and revisited our recent grant. The application had already been submitted, but considering the new budget cuts, we wanted to amend a few pages. Around eleven I called Russell and left him a message saying he was welcome to visit for the weekend. At one in the morning, we smelled chimneys from the parking lot. Bar Harbor was quiet. The mountains behind us were transformed by clouds into pillars of black salt. And suddenly there was Regina. Under the phosphorus lights, wearing a puffy down vest, walking to her car beside an older woman on crutches, her lab director, the two of them laughing in conversation. Regina as the opposite of La Loulou: a modest acolyte in glasses, striding by her director’s side, jogging to reach the car first, to unlock and open the door and sweep her arm out, fully stretched, like a valet’s, my Regina, the amicable junior scientist, leaving work after a long day’s slog.
    But actually not mine at all.
    “The young ones always are eager,” said Lucy in my ear.
    Regina was startled to see me, but she masked it. Her large eyes didn’t change, except to intensify behind her glasses. Not here , they messaged to me silently across the parking lot.