Chapter Thirty-Eight
Old Albert
After book club I’m always on a high. Who would have thought I’d find such great friends?
I’m learning from them. Zephyr, so prickly, so combative, reminds me of my granddaughter back home.
It’s a bit of fun riling her up. I’m an old man, stuck in my ways, I don’t see that changing soon.
I will say, I’m glad I found book club when I did.
Retired life is great, but I was missing something – human connection.
We retired to Porto on a whim. Relocated much later than planned – because I didn’t want to pull the trigger on leaving all I knew.
My wife Marcella yearned for her homeland, her family, the culture she missed so much living back in the Midwest of America for too many years to count.
Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to come to Porto too.
An adventure at our age! No work to slow us down.
No alarm clocks. Nothing but long, sunny days stretching out in front of us.
We’d sip port in a dimly lit little vinh?o.
Eat cheap petiscos until our bellies were full as the sun sunk over the Douro River.
A dream of orange-hued skies, the tinkling of my wife’s laughter as we got to the stage of our lives where we had time to enjoy it together.
And we’ve done all that and more. My wife has reconnected with her family and friends and is having the time of her life.
And I love them too, I do. Oftentimes there’s the language barrier, my Portuguese is still a work-in-progress, so finding the book club was the connection I didn’t know I needed.
It’s something just for me. My wife kisses my cheek and goes and does her thing, and I go and do mine.
Without book club, I think I may have succumbed to a touch of homesickness, so for that I’ll always be grateful.
It helps we’ve got a mystery to solve too.
Although I fear our skills are not quite up to scratch, since we haven’t progressed very far.
There’s been hardly any time to commit to my conspiracy theory research, but eh, maybe my wife was right about that, and it was a bad habit?
Solving this Lucinda mystery makes me feel young again, like I have a job to do.
Even with young Zephyr by my side, teaching me about toxic masculinity, gaslighting and all that nonsense!
Honestly, these kids have too much time on their hands.
Still, I am getting quite the education and do have a soft spot for Zephyr.
I hope she finds her place in the world, because I sense she’s a little rudderless, just like I was.
Maybe that’s the beauty of what Viviane has created with book club, giving us introverts a soft place to land.