to unravel that.
When I went to my mother’s the next day she accosted me before I had even removed my jacket. “I have a thought,” she bellowed.
“What’s up?” I asked as I plopped onto a kitchen chair, resigned to cold rigatoni and an unfailing exuberance that was hard to bear without Shelby beside me, smiling, encouraging my mother to share bodily emission updates, coupon-savings totals, the escapades of Mr. Bojangles, a flea-bitten, imperious cat that seemed intent on disfiguring my face.
“You remember Mrs. Candello?”
I searched my memory banks, knowing it was entirely possible that she did not exist there. Lately my mother has grown forgetful, repeating the same stories, misplacing her thyroid pills, believing that our shared history is so entwined that our list of acquaintances must be identical. “No,” I said, “can’t say that I do.”
“From the grocery store?”
I shook my head.
“Bingo?”
This went on for several minutes until I deduced that Mrs. Candello had a daughter near my age who was in dire need of a date.
“Mom, I don’t want to go on a date.”
“Well, of course you do!”
I shook my head. “Give me one good reason.”
“I can give you plenty!”
I stared at the chipped plate on the table before me, the paper napkin folded neatly under a child-sized fork, the paisley pattern in the plastic tablecloth. When our eyes met, her look carried the weight of her disappointment in my selfishness and the gross injustice to poor Alice Candello, a nice girl with a tiny overbite who daily underwent the strain of fielding telephone complaints from angry AT&T customers.
“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.
