“I don’t know, babe,” Amy said. “Maybe reality set in when you had Henry and saw how much work one kid was. Plus, you know . . . no husband, no babies, unless you’re turning all Angelina Jolie on me.”
Meg laughed. As much as she wished she could be a fearless collector of kids à la Angelina Jolie, the truth was she was a conservative girl at heart—a single, unmarried mom by circumstance, not by choice.
As soon as Meg clicked off her cell phone, the Guatemalan man was in front of her.
“Flowers, pretty lady?” His teeth were remarkably crooked, but very white. And his smile was so hopeful that it almost broke Meg’s heart.
“No, thank you.” She sneezed.
“Bless you.” The man was just a few inches taller than Henry and had one of those thick-skinned, ageless faces. “Do you know why people say bless you when somebody sneezes?”
Cringing at having to engage, Meg forced a smile and shook her head. She had no idea.
“It’s because your heart stops when you sneeze,” the man said.
“Oh right,” Meg said. “I did hear that somewhere.”
“I’ve always thought people should say welcome back instead. So welcome back, pretty lady.” He bowed at her and moved on, and Meg chastised herself for being so negative.
People were good and decent and more often than not they had innocent hearts. And if she couldn’t accept that there was an opportunity cost to her fear, then the plain fact was she might very well miss out on something beautiful with Ahmed.
After Meg got home, she settled on the patio with a hot apple cider. As she watched Henry and Violet play two-square on the sidewalk, she phoned her father for advice.
“Hey, Dad! You busy?” She’d called him at his office so Clarabelle wouldn’t nose her way into the conversation.
“I’m never too busy for you,” he said.
“So I’ve got a question for you—how do I know if a man’s intentions are sincere?”
“Have I met the man in question?” Phillip said.
“No,” Meg said. “This is a new man, one I’m thinking of potentially dating.”
“Good for you, Magpie!” Phillip said. “I’d say you’re definitely ready to start dating. And Henry’s at a good age.”
“I don’t know about that,” Meg said. “He’s at an age when I think pretty soon he’s going to acutely sense the absence of a father figure. He’s already all tangled up liking this guy, which, of course, will only make things that much more difficult when it ends.”
“Maybe it won’t end,” her father said. “Does this guy have a name?”
“His name’s Ahmed,” she said.
“Ack-med?”
“No, Dad. Ahmed. Ah. Med. The emphasis is on the -Med.”
“Ag-med,” her father said. “Where’s he from?”
Meg sighed. She could only imagine how tiring it must be for Ahmed all the time—already she was sick of explaining his background and she had yet to go on a date with him! “His father’s Iranian,” she said. “He’s been in the U.S. since he was Henry’s age.”
“So he’s Iranian, too.”
“Well, he’s a halfsie,” Meg said. “Half American, half Iranian. His mother was American.”
“You mean he’s fractured,” Phillip said. “One foot in both countries, both cultures. Never really feels that he belongs to either one. I have several clients like that. African, Latino. It’s the immigrant experience, after all.”
“Then shouldn’t we all feel that way?” Meg asked. “Since we’re a nation of immigrants?”
“People like us just feel vaguely unsettled all the time,” Phillip said. “I’m sure our ancestors felt it more acutely.”
“Well, I don’t get the sense that Ahmed’s fractured,” Meg said. “He seems very well adjusted and definitely more American than Iranian. Not that there’s anything wrong with being Iranian.”
“Of course not,” Phillip said. “And I have friends who are black, so I can’t possibly be racist.”
“I beg your pardon?” Meg said. “Are you trying to make me get mad at you?”
“You never get mad at me,” he said evenly. “What would it look like if you did?”
“I feel like you’re trying to pick a fight with me, Dad,” she said. “You want to just come on over and duke it out?”
“I just find it curious you felt the need to say there’s nothing wrong with being Iranian,” he said. “The old me thinks you doth protest too much. Tell me more about this Ack-med guy.”
“Ahmed, Dad.” Meg laughed. “I’m going to have to insist you practice that.”
“You asked how to know if a man’s intentions are sincere, and my advice is—if you want to know how a man feels about you, don’t listen to a word he says. Instead, watch what he does. What does Ahmed do for you?”
“You got his name right!” Meg said.
“I was teasing you a little bit,” he said, chuckling. “His name’s not all that hard to pronounce.”
“Do you mean, does he open doors and that sort of thing?”
“Not just that. Not that at all, actually,” Phillip said. “Although he’d better open doors for you.”
“I don’t think we’ve actually walked through a door together yet,” Meg said. “He asked me on a date earlier today, and I’m trying to decide if I should go. You know how for the longest time I haven’t wanted to date, right?”
“You’ve pretty much screamed that from the rooftops, yes,” Phillip said.
Henry and Violet had abandoned their two-square game and were now playing hangman with sidewalk chalk. L-O-V-E, Meg thought.
“He fits in with me and Henry,” she said. “We make a good threesome. He was so sweet to Henry the other day after he’d gotten kicked out of the soccer game.” She briefly updated her dad on what had happened. “I swear, Dad, there was a moment when I was watching them that I saw the future, and he was in it. I’m freaking out a bit, because I didn’t want to feel this way about anyone. Not at this point in my life, anyway.”
“You’re not getting any younger,” Phillip pointed out.
Meg’s mouth dropped open. “You are trying to pick a fight with me!”
“Just think how nice it would be to have someone looking out for you,” he said. “Someone to come home to at night who actually gives a shit how your day went.”
Ouch. That was a crack against Clarabelle.
“It would be nice,” Meg admitted. “I bet you’d like that, too.”
“Someone you could enjoy the gran—enjoy Henry with,” he said. “You’re still young enough to have another baby or two. How nice would it be to have a partner in that process?”
A baby, my God.
Or two! Two babies! A boy and a girl, Meg decided.
“You’re putting dangerous thoughts in my head, Dad,” she warned. “I don’t even know if Ahmed wants kids.” She shook the notion out of her head. “I’m just talking about a date. One date.”
“I don’t think you are, Magpie. I know you pretty well. If you didn’t see a potential future with this guy, you wouldn’t bother.”
He thought he knew her pretty well.
“Maybe I just want to jump his bones,” she said mischievously. “Have some great sex.”
Phillip cleared his throat. “That has its place, too, I suppose.”
Meg imagined him alone in his office, blushing. “I’m just kidding, Dad. You do know me, better than anyone. So you think I should just plunge on in, huh?”
“Has he been married before?”
“I didn’t ask, and he didn’t mention it,” Meg said. “Do I need to know that before I go on a date with him?”
“I suppose that’s what a date’s for,” her father said. “To find out things like that.”
“I think I’m going to do this,” Meg said. “I mean, not all men completely suck. There are a few good ones left, right? Besides you, I mean.”
Her father sighed. “The world’s not black-and-white,” he said.
“There’s a complexity to things. There’s a complexity to you, too, Meg, that I’m not sure you always honor.”
Meg sat back in her patio chair, warmed by the idea that he recognized her as more than just a simple, happy-go-lucky kindergarten teacher doing the single-mom thing with aplomb, which was truly all she ever showed the outside world. But her heart sure had its disturbing secrets. For instance, there was the fact that she still sometimes missed Jonathan so much, she could hardly stand it. And that she sometimes pretended he was doing this all with her, this raising Henry, and that he was going to walk through the door and say, Hi, honey. I’m home, and it would be normal. It would be the Hi, honey of her dreams, with no layer of lies beneath it. She’d have nothing to forgive, because he wouldn’t have betrayed her in the first place.
To Meg, this was the fantasy of someone who was weak. “There’s a stupid side to me, too,” she said. “And I don’t want to give it any encouragement.”
“There’s no part of you that’s stupid,” Phillip said. “There are just parts of yourself you don’t understand, and maybe you’re not meant to. But you still have to honor them, even as you don’t understand them.”
“When did you sneak off and get all philosophical on me?” Meg asked.
There was ruefulness in his chuckle. “I’ve been reading a lot of self-help books lately. Thomas Moore’s got some good ones.”
My daddy, Meg thought. He sounds sad.
Now it was Meg who cleared her throat. Some questions were so hard to ask. “Are you okay?” she questioned him. “It’s fairly obvious something’s going on with you, and I want you to know I’m here if you ever need to talk. Okay?”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “Although I hate the idea of you seeing chinks in the old armor—weakness in me. I like that you still have that little-girl belief that I can do no wrong. I’m not sure I’m ready to lose that.”
Touched, Meg watched Henry being chased across the grass by Violet. He ran past the patio, beaming a smile at her. She knew exactly what her father meant. It was nice to be idolized, and there sure weren’t that many people in the world willing to do it.
“You’re my hero,” she said. “Now and forever.”
“Everything ends,” Phillip said. “The only unknowns are how and when.”
“And sometimes why,” Meg said, thinking of her marriage. “I hate the unknown. I’m terrified of it, actually.”
“There are no guarantees in life,” he said. “The best you can hope for is to have someone by your side who loves you for you and who can provide the kind of solace you need as you struggle through your hard times. To not be alone in your hour of need.”
Meg exhaled heavily. “I don’t want any hard times. I’ve already had my share.”
“No one wants hard times,” Phillip said. “And yet the hits, they keep on coming.”
That Sunday when Meg and Henry arrived at Amy’s house, Henry immediately slipped past Amy and went in search of his uncle and cousins.
“Hello to you, too, Henry,” Amy called after him.
“Hi, Aunt Amy!” He didn’t look back.
Meg stepped inside somewhat warily. Amy wore a baggy T-shirt, her hair was stuck in a careless ponytail and the scowl on her face looked like it had been there awhile. Meg held up the plate of chocolate-chip cookies she’d baked. “Want a cookie?”
“Hell, no,” Amy said. “They’ll go straight to my ass.”
“You’re chipper today,” Meg said, thinking, Damn. Now she couldn’t eat a cookie, either, without Amy resenting her. She should have left a few at home for later. “Bad morning?”
As Meg walked behind Amy to the kitchen, she grimaced at the back of her sister’s head. Amy simply had to stop letting her hair go so long between highlights. Meg took her usual place at the counter as Amy yanked open the refrigerator door, aggressively pulled out ingredients for a fruit salad and plunked them on the counter.
“My life sucks,” she said.
Meg withheld a sigh. It had been such a pleasant few days, as she meandered through life in a fog of idle wonder about Ahmed. There was so much she didn’t know, so much to imagine. His hobbies. Friends. Reading habits. Movie choices. Boxers . . . or briefs? She’d fallen asleep considering that last question, ultimately deciding that since Jonathan had been a boxers guy, Ahmed would be a briefs guy. Picturing this was not a bad way to fall asleep, if one had to fall asleep alone.
Then this morning, Henry’s Tootsie Roll breath was in her face, asking if they could bike to University Boulevard for breakfast, so they’d had a lovely ride through campus, their world painted in an autumnal hue, as a few campus trees managed to change colors this time of year, and then shared an egg burrito on the patio of Café Paraiso. Around them, bicyclists whizzed by on their Sunday-morning group rides. People parked their dogs at patio tables at the Starbucks across the plaza, and the fountain from which Henry often stole quarters burbled a pleasing background melody. After such a mellow morning, Amy’s mood was fingernails against a chalkboard—screechy and unwarranted.
“Please don’t say your life sucks, Amy,” Meg said. “You’re living the dream.”
“Not everybody has the same dream as you, you know!” Amy snapped. “Maybe your dream is other people’s hell!”
“I just aspire to have a congenial brunch at my favorite sister’s house, and she’s not being very congenial at the moment,” Meg said. “Let me help you. Why don’t you go take a bath, relax yourself out of this mood, and let me make the fruit salad?”
Amy was territorial in regard to her kitchen, often waving a knife in the direction of anyone who dared to encroach, so Meg was not surprised when she refused. “The only person I want help from around here is David.” She said his name like it was a swear word.
“What’d he do now?” Meg said it dispiritedly, hoping Amy would realize that she didn’t really want to hear about it.
She didn’t. “It’s more like what he doesn’t do.” Amy positioned a cantaloupe on the cutting board and hacked into it. “I was up all night with Maggie—she’s got this horrible cough—and I’m sick of it. He never gets up. I’m punished for being a light sleeper. And then he slept in this morning! I swear, sometimes I think being a single mom’s the way to go.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Amy,” Meg said, “except that I feel for you. And that they grow up so fast that soon you’ll be wishing you could get these days back.”
“They’re ingrates,” Amy said. “All of them. Ingrates.”
When Meg laughed, Amy glared at her. “It’s not funny. Sometimes it seems all I am is their maid.”
“Let me take the girls back home with me after brunch,” Meg said. “You and David can go catch a movie. Or stay home and have s-e-x in an empty house.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” Amy said. “Having sex with David is exactly how I’d spend my precious free time—not! That would be rewarding him for his bad behavior.”
Meg shook her head in disapproval. The longer Amy withheld sex because David didn’t help around the house, the crankier he became, and the crankier he became, the less Amy was willing to have sex, and so on and so on.
Amy looked at her accusingly. “You think I should just sleep with the guy, don’t you?”
“With your husband?” Meg said. “Yes, I do.”
Amy slammed her hand on the counter. “He needs to woo me!”
“Fine!” Meg said. “Geez. Just so you know—I wouldn’t woo you, either, when you’re acting like this. He’s probably afraid you’re going to bite his head off if he tries to say anything nice to you.”
“Maybe I will,” Amy said.
Just then, David came around the corner from the great room into the kitchen. From the imitation cheer on his face, Meg knew he was well aware of his wife’s mood, whether or not he’d overheard their conversation.
“Hi, David.” Meg didn’t want him to think she held Amy’s frame of mind against him.
“Hi, Meg.” There was no hint
in his voice that anything was amiss. “How’s your school year going?”
As Meg was in the middle of assuring David she was fine, the doorbell rang and the muscles in his face involuntarily tensed. In addition to his cranky wife, the poor guy now had to deal with Clarabelle, too.
“I’ll get it.” Meg slid off her stool. “David, I know Henry was hoping you’d teach him to play cribbage today.”
“Love to.” David smiled at her, thankful for this escape hatch. He followed behind her to greet her parents and stood back as she opened the front door wide enough to allow them both entry. Her father stood behind her mother, as usual.
“Your father tells me you have a new suitor,” Clarabelle said to Meg by way of greeting, as Phillip smiled apologetically at her.
“Hello to you, too,” Meg said. “Is that my favorite green Jell-O with maraschino cherries in it?”
“No,” Clarabelle snapped. “It’s red, with mandarin oranges.”
When Meg was small, she’d thrown up oodles of red Jell-O with mandarin oranges and had since been unable to eat it. Clarabelle’s making it was payback for Meg confiding in her father and not in her, plain and simple.
“I’ll help with that.” David took the dish from Clarabelle and escaped to the kitchen.
“What kind of name is Ahmed, anyway?” Clarabelle asked as she brushed aggressively past Meg.
“It’s a first name,” Meg said. “And I don’t want to talk about him with you.”
Clarabelle harrumphed. “Does he speak English?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Meg said. “He’s the assistant city manager. Of course he speaks English!”
Clarabelle narrowed her eyes. “Does he have an accent, I mean.”
He didn’t have an accent, but Meg wasn’t about to tell her mother that. She crossed her arms and responded with a defiant look.
“He’s been here since he was a kid, right, Meg?” her father said. “Came from Iran when he was ten, didn’t you say? His mother was American?”
“Don’t bother, Dad,” Meg said. “I’m not looking for her approval or permission.”
“Of course you aren’t,” Clarabelle said. “When have you ever?” She stomped off to the kitchen, now about the last place Meg wanted to be. She looked at her father.
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