“Do you know how difficult that is, dealing with irritated people? The woman’s a saint. You’re too good to have a cup of coffee with a saint?”
“I’m sure she’s great,” I said, exhausted before I put the first bite of cold, wet noodle into my mouth. “But I don’t want to start anything–”
“She’s not asking for a marriage proposal. Just a cup of coffee. Maybe she won’t even like you,” she said almost hopefully before placing a warm glass of RC Cola beside my hand and lowering herself onto the chair next to me.
“I’m sure she won’t.”
“Oh, Johnny, you’ve been so negative since …”
“Since what?”
She ignored my question, serving herself a congealed mass of pasta with exaggerated concentration while patting Mr. Bojangles, who seemed to have materialized from her outstretched hand before regarding me with steely eyes.
“Since what?” I persisted.
“Since what what?”
“I’ve been so negative since what?”
She shook her head as if having a silent argument with an invisible antagonist. “Since you and Shelby broke up,” she blurted. “She was such a nice girl.”
“She was—is—a nice girl. I just wasn’t ready for, you know.” I swirled my fork in the air. “Anything.”
Her eyebrows and nose seemed to reach for one another and I imagined the rusted cogs in the wheels of her mind working to produce meaning. I placed my hand over hers. “I appreciate that you’re doing something nice for me. I appreciate that you want me to be happy.”
“I don’t know why Shelby didn’t make you happy. She made me happy.”
After cleaning up the kitchen I drove home through the snowbound streets and thought about Shelby, whose mother probably did not need to engage the heroic extremes mine did to launch her child on a date. I stared at the passenger seat from where Shelby had once snorted iced tea onto the windshield after I told a moderately funny joke, where she once winked so hard her contact lens sprung from her eye, where for weeks after our breakup the indents of her butt cheeks remained outlined in the leather cushion.
It had been a year since I told Shelby that moving clothes into my closet without permission, choosing engagement rings without my knowledge, and leaving copies of Brides magazine on my coffee table were undermining her desired outcome. I should have known what I was up against when she started sleeping at my place more often than her own, cooking my favorite meals, and asking how many kids I wanted. We were in our late twenties and had only been dating for six months. Six months! She told me, ironically, that time didn’t matter when you were in love but that she was ready now.
PAINFUL THOUGH IT MAY BE, human nature drives us to tongue the crater left by a pulled tooth, save the collars of deceased pets, troll the websites of former lovers. I was curious to know if Shelby was in a relationship or if she was so devastated by our breakup that she’d sworn off men entirely. When I clicked on her site, the screen exploded in green and red, the cover of a holiday-themed book called He Was Naughty, She Was Nice featuring a teary-eyed, Christmas sweater-clad blond clinched in the embrace of a shirtless torso—apparently the reader could crown the body with the face of her own personal villain. They are outside in the snow. At night. Under a mistletoe-laden pine tree. Maybe this is brilliant. What do I know? But a Christmas sweater? Shirtless in freezing temps? Why so many mistletoes? The tagline: “This Christmas, Holly would not be the gift that kept on giving.” I tooled around the site until I located the Author Bio, which was a strange blend of personal and professional information: Originally from Bad Axe, Michigan, Ms. Duchene now lives in Boise, Idaho, with her one-eyed dog, Mabel. She has written six romance novels by night. By day she is a hair stylist. “Be careful,” she warns her customers, “or you’ll end up in my book!” Would her bio even mention a significant other? I clicked on the Contact Author link and stared at the online form, which of course required I leave an email address for her response. I left the site and then did what any normal, red-blooded American man would do: I paid $12.95 on Amazon for a paperback romance written by a former girlfriend now living with a one-eyed dog.
Exhausted, I slapped down the lid of the laptop and searched the refrigerator for anything edible. As the lump of leftover rigatoni rotated in the microwave I stared through the kitchen window. The snow was falling softly outside, my mother was on a weekend trip with her neighbor to Amish country, and I did not have to work for the next two days. Life’s small gifts should not be minimized. As I watched Rear Window on TMC I developed a new appreciation for the characters and the storyline, all this voyeurism and obsession and eroticism delivered without one awkward line.
The next day I selected a small fir from the church parking lot where Ned Pearson had set up a miniature forest from his tree farm. Last year Shelby insisted we buy the biggest pine on the lot only to come home and cut it in half to get it through the front door. Once it was vertical she shook out a tree skirt—where had that come from?—and hummed “Let It Snow” as she worked the quilted material around the metal stand. Under the tree the next morning were seven packages of various shapes and sizes, wrapped in shimmering paper and adorned with handmade paper bows, all addressed to me. Were they hidden in a closet? Had she snuck them from her car while I slept? I was simultaneously thrilled and annoyed, and I considered secretly opening them to determine her investment so that I could reciprocate, but I knew I would never be able to restore the presents to their pristine condition. Instead, I asked what she would like for Christmas, and she cocked her head, smiled and said, “Oh, Johnny, you know what I want!”
I didn’t. I bought her seven gifts: a crock pot, a pair of Magic Scissors, a battery-operated candle, a bottle of White Diamonds, a digital pedometer, a Target gift card, and a fiber optic holiday sweater. She looked less than pleased with all of the gifts but the sweater, which she wore later that day to dinner at my mother’s. My presents included a pair of Hugo Boss leather gloves, a digital camera, an iPod docking station, a fist-sized chocolate heart, custom car mats, a hand-knit scarf, and a ring.
I SAT ACROSS THE TABLE from Alice Candello at Fin–dark wood, musty smell, overpriced seafood–and learned that she is, indeed, stressed, as evidenced by the crescent-shaped stains under the arms of her satin blouse and the speed with which she downed a $42 bottle of merlot. She did not stop talking—about implacable customers, her obstinate cockatiel, traffic on I-84 where, I could not prevent the thought, Shelby had once spun her car like a carnival ride. The handcuff-sized bangles on her wrist clanked each time she lifted her glass or waved to the waiter to ask for more bread, to request a less tart salad dressing, to demand he open a window as she fanned herself with the cocktail menu. After her fourth glass of wine she’d thrown off any pretense of being on a first date, openly flirting while grinding what felt like a size 18 gumboot up and down my left shin and engaging in a strange dialect of drunken baby talk. I am not an easily embarrassed man, but she was making a Herculean effort, even if unconsciously. By the time the main course arrived, I was mentally rehearsing what I would say to my crestfallen mother: I’m being transferred to Parma, I’m allergic to birds, I’m gay.
But the utter failure of my date with Alice Candello did not deter my perpetually upbeat mother, who apparently had a slew of friends with desperate, defective daughters: recently divorced LuAnn Plug spent the evening chatting about the myriad ways she’d like her ex to suffer (stoning, overpass collapse, shark attack), Stacy Kaminski barely spoke, instead giggling like a mental patient, and Renee Dubois anxiously glanced around the restaurant like a witness protection inductee on her first outing before admitting that her former boyfriend was a stalker but, really, she said, that didn’t stop