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Chapter 2 - A Nice Room
Barbara and Michael had little interaction before Sunday morning. When the tour assembled in the waiting room at Kennedy, Michael noticed both Barbara and Charlie paying attention to Sonya, but he thought little of it. Everyone who saw Sonya immediately had an opinion about her. Her beauty, her smile, her clothes were such that women admired or hated her from one glance and men dreamed of making her happy or ran from her, knowing she was out of their league and could only make them miserable.
Barbara had paid attention to Sonya but also to Michael. She noticed how Michael followed Sonya’s movements around the waiting area. When Sonya returned from the ladies room, she saw how Michael immediately caught her eye, how he stood up as she approached him, offered her his seat, and gave her his newspaper to read. Wow, Barbara thought at the time, Chuck expects me to give him my seat and my newspaper, and then to run off to the kitchen to get him something to eat.
On the tour’s second day the Ashes, Clarkes, and Nortons, the only three couples of the tour’s twenty-five members in their thirties and early forties, had dined together. Barbara at 33, was the youngest. Sonya was 34, and both Michael and Charlie were 36. Though Cynthia Norton was 40, her children were only 6 and 3 years old, the exact same ages as Barbara’s children. Her husband, Thomas Norton, was 42.
Michael had said very little at that dinner and, still feeling the effects of jet travel, he and Sonya had gone to bed early. However, he had heard Barbara tell Sonya she was a lawyer and he thought to himself that Barbara was one of those flakes the law schools should have never admitted. He was surprised a minute later when she told Sonya she had graduated in the top ten percent of her class. After that dinner, Michael had never sat at the same table with Barbara and had only exchanged pleasantries with her when they found themselves admiring the same aspect of a castle or waiting for their spouses next to the bus.