WE ATE PIZZA on the roof, cross-legged, watching the city skyline.
I don’t know if it was the breeze playing with my hair, or the receding adrenaline from the panic attack, or the layer upon layer of compassion Joe had offered to me, but I found myself bizarrely relaxed. Scarfing down that pizza with gusto, talking with my mouth full, saying things I would never— ever—normally say.
Like, for example: I told him it was my mother’s birthday. Did he need to know that information?
Absolutely not.
But I wanted to tell him. I wasn’t going to be able to do my usual thing
—it was far too late to go get cake-baking ingredients now, and I was much too exhausted, anyway—but I guess I just wanted to mark the moment of it, even in a tiny way.
“It’s my mother’s birthday today,” I said.
“We should call her,” Joe said, checking his phone for the time. “Can’t,” I said. “She died.”
Joe’s shoulders fell a little at that, and his pizza slice went askew in his hand.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It was a long time ago.”
“But you still miss her,” he said, reading my expression. “I do,” I said.
Joe waited to see if I’d say more. But what was there to say, really? Finally I went with, “Every year, on her birthday, I bake her a cake.
And light candles. And watch Cary Grant movies. I tell myself that’s the one day when she can hear me from heaven—and I don’t even care if it’s
true. I talk to her, out loud, like she’s there. I just let myself have that. And I try really hard to be happy that I had her in my life at all.”
He was good at listening, it turned out. It prompted me to keep going. Or maybe this was just something I really needed to say.
“She died very suddenly,” I said. “And when it was all over—weeks later—I found a voicemail from her that she’d left me the day before she died. It was the most ordinary voicemail in the world. But I listened to it and relistened to it so many times that I memorized it. I memorized the words, but also the pauses and the tempo and the musical notes in her voice. I can still do it to this day. When I was really, really lonely at boarding school, I used to go on long walks and recite it over and over, like a poem.”
“Recite it,” Joe said then.
“What? No.” I shook my head. “It’s boring.” But Joe said, “It’s the opposite of boring.”
I hesitated.
“Just recite it for me. I’d love to hear it.”
He would? Was he being sincere? I suddenly felt shy. “It’s very ordinary,” I said. “She’s just, like, talking about what to have for dinner and stuff like that. And she calls herself Mama, even though by then I’d been calling her Mom for years.”
Joe leaned a little closer, waiting.
I’d never recited it for anyone before. My dad didn’t even know the recording existed. I took a deep breath. Then I fixed my eyes on a random spot in front of me.
Then I just went for it: “Hey, cutie. It’s Mama. I’m at the store. I’m thinking spaghetti for dinner. Good? With garlic bread and salad? Call me if you’d rather do French toast—but I’m about to check out, so be fast. Also, they’re out of that shampoo that smells like coconuts, so I’m grabbing the lemon one instead. Dad has to work late tonight. Not sure what your homework situation is, but I’m free to watch a movie if you are. Okay, that’s it. Home in twenty. Love ya.”
Joe was quiet after I finished. “You really know it all. Even down to the pauses.”
“I’ve listened to it a thousand times. At least.”
“It’s so heartbreaking,” Joe said. “But she’s just talking about spaghetti.”
“Because she died the next day,” I said. “That’s why.” “So you know the day she died.”
“I don’t, actually. I can’t remember what day it was. It was sometime around now. Sometime in the spring. Sometime before her birthday. But as for the actual day? No idea. So funny. That day changed my life more than any other ever has. But it’s just one day. You know? And it’s not exactly a day you want to remember.”
Joe nodded. I could feel his reaction. I’d worried the mundanity of it might be underwhelming. But he wasn’t underwhelmed.
He seemed to get it.
“Anyway, that’s what I do every year, but this year got a little wonky.
But I guess it’s okay to miss it once in a while.”
“There’s still time,” Joe said then. He checked his watch. “It’s only ten.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’m too tired to bake a cake now.” “What if we go get a cake?”
I frowned.
“There’s a dessert place not too far from here. I’ll take you.”
 |
IT WASN’T UNTIL we’d made it all the way downstairs that I realized he meant to take me on a Vespa. Which was probably medically ill advised.
“My dad’s a doctor,” I said, as Joe worked the lock. “Yeah?” he said, like I was just making chitchat.
“He always called motorcycles ‘donor-cycles,’” I said.
Joe lifted his eyebrow like he’d caught me on a technicality. “This isn’t a motorcycle. It’s a Vespa.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.
“At ten o’clock at night when downtown is deserted?” he said. “No more than anything else.”
Good news: The helmet fit in a way that didn’t touch my surgical scar, which I was still tender about—emotionally, if nothing else.
With that, Joe sat on the front part of the seat and motioned for me to climb on behind him. Then he wrapped my arms tight around his torso and said, “Just lean however I lean.” Then he clicked the motor on, cranked the
handle, and shifted us into motion. Confidently. Easily. Like a person who knew exactly what he was doing.
And we were off.
Next thing I knew, we were motoring through the deserted nighttime downtown streets, my arms snug around him. If you go exactly 20 miles per hour in downtown, you can time it so you never hit a red light. And so we just cruised along, slaloming a bit in our lane, the wind caressing us and the motor vibrating beneath, never having to stop or wait, just swept up in a current of motion.
It was highly relaxing—for such a dangerous thing.
It didn’t take me long at all to melt into the moment. Joe clearly knew this scooter back and forth, and everything he did had the ease of muscle memory.
We didn’t talk.
We just flowed along. Summer in Texas is deathly hot, but spring is cool and lovely. The March air felt like rippling water over my skin. We took a road that curved along the bayou, and we positively floated along it. We passed street art, the Dandelion Fountain, and the Downtown Aquarium, with its light-up Ferris wheel. It was a little like drifting through a dream.
How long had it been since I’d had someone to hold on to?
The dessert place was open—packed, in fact, with folks gathering for sweet treats and coffee after their evening’s activities, crowded at tables both inside and out on the sidewalk. I’d passed this place a million times. I’d just never had a reason to come in.
A bright, bustling, cheery place. It felt like a party.
Now, we ordered slices of cake—mine, a yellow diner slice with chocolate icing; his, death by chocolate—and then we wedged ourselves into a small table in the middle of it all. Joe had insisted on paying, and he must have told them we were celebrating a birthday, because when the slices arrived at the table, the waiter lit two giant sparkler candles, stuck them in the slices, and shouted, “Everybody! Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to
—”
And then he looked at me.
“Nora!” I shouted—and it felt so great to just shout my mom’s name.
And so the whole room began to sing. And I swear I had never thought of the “Happy Birthday” song as anything particularly special until that moment—but sitting in front of that sparkler candle as the entire room launched into a rich rendition of it, I suddenly wondered why that song didn’t bring me to tears every time. Maybe it was how crowded the room was, or the acoustics, or the sound of all those people singing warm wishes to my long-lost mother: Happy Birthday, Dear Nora …
But my voice got too wobbly to sing.
I spent the second half of the song just taking it all in. Savoring it, the way I know she would have.
It was nothing like what I usually did to celebrate my mom’s birthday. But maybe different wasn’t so bad.
|
THERE WERE LOTS of upsides to that night.
It had felt surprisingly good to help out the girl in the coffee shop, and it had been surprisingly satisfying to tell off Parker. Sue, while woefully off target, had at least been sweetly trying to cheer me up. Joe had turned out to be great at anti-panic back rubs. And creating power outages. And I had celebrated my mom’s birthday not alone for the first time since she died.
But what, in the end, was my takeaway?
None of the upsides. Just the one crushingly disappointing downside: I got stood up.
That was the sentence that ticker-taped through my head all the next day.
I got stood up. By my future husband. On our very first date. How would we spin that to the grandkids?
I mean, fine. He’d had a work emergency. I got it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to have left some Saint Bernard dying alone in the clinic.
He’d been busy doing something noble. It was a fair excuse.
But here was the problem. It was now the next day, and the admirable, flawless, and perfect Dr. Oliver Addison, DVM, had not called to apologize.
I mean, if you leave a lady sitting in a coffee shop, even for a good reason, you should call the next day and grovel a little bit. Right? Make
some voice contact? Stress in real time how sorry you are? Maybe demonstrate enthusiasm by setting a new date to try again?
Nothing from this guy. Crickets.
Which forced me to wonder something horrible: Maybe this perfect man wasn’t so perfect after all.
Not fair. Hadn’t I already decided he was supposed to solve all my problems?
He was supposed to make things better, not worse. He was supposed to ease my worries, not create more of them. He was supposed to make me feel good—not frigging terrible.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten the memo?
I knew of course that people weren’t perfect. Life was messy. He didn’t even know how much I was counting on him to be the fantasy-man mirage that kept me moving through my personal emotional desert.
I couldn’t legitimately resent him.
But I resented him, anyway. Illegitimately. He was just so disappointing.
All day long, as he continued to disappoint me, I made excuses for him
—maybe he’d been up all night and fallen asleep exhausted?—while resenting the fact that I had to make excuses for him.
And while I waited, my mind drifted more and more to Joe.
Because if Dr. Oliver Addison had been disappointing … Joe, if I’m honest, had been the opposite.
Joe had been surprising. Surprisingly nice. Surprisingly attentive. Surprisingly not at all like what I would have expected a person I’d nicknamed the Weasel to be.
