One True Theory of Love

by Laura Fitzgerald

  “Fair enough,” Ahmed said. “I’m thinking of my last girlfriend, Caroline. We dated for probably two years when she got a transfer to the Bay Area—this was last fall; she was in marketing—and it just made no sense for me to go, professionally.”

  “Don’t you think if she was the one, you would have taken the hit professionally to be with her personally?”

  “I do,” Ahmed said. “Absolutely. And she wasn’t the one. But if that transfer opportunity hadn’t come up, I’m sure we’d still be together. We got along really well and we had momentum in our favor. Nothing was wrong with the relationship.”

  “That sounds horrible,” Meg said.

  Ahmed laughed. “It wasn’t horrible. It was just . . .”

  “Cordial,” Meg said.

  Ahmed laughed again. “It was very cordial. But it wasn’t . . .” He gestured back and forth in the space between them. “It wasn’t like this.”

  Meg felt herself redden. “What is this? If you have any idea, I’d sure like to hear it, because I’ll admit I’m confused.”

  “I’m not sure what this is, either.” Ahmed took a long moment to find his words. “I know that you somehow draw me out,” he said. “I consistently find myself wanting to . . . I don’t know . . . let you see who I really am. You always say what’s on your mind and you don’t hide your feelings, good or bad, and you’re just . . . healthy. I don’t know. I almost never share personal information about myself. Part of that’s being Persian, I think. Culturally, we’re guarded. But I find myself wanting to let you get to know me. You’re . . . you give people what they need to feel safe.”

  Meg was flattered by his words, impressed by his openness and scared by the depth of his feelings. Her heart beat insanely fast. “So it’s more than cordial?”

  “It’s more than cordial.” Ahmed’s smile was serious. “And, Meg, I don’t cheat in any aspect of my life. I’d never cheat on you.”

  Meg leaned forward to study his eyes. They had the calm confidence of a lake at sunrise, and Meg loved lakes at sunrise.

  She loved diving into them and causing ripples, but she especially loved it once the ripples faded and the lake turned placid again and she, having dived in, became part of the calmness, part of the confidence, part of the whole. She realized as she looked in his eyes that she wanted to be part of the whole. That she was ready, finally.

  “Kiss me,” she said. “Kiss me cordially and with passion, too.”

  He leaned forward and obliged, and as they kissed, Meg thought how she’d been right. Kissing him was like having an interesting conversation—a gentle, searching, questioning-and-answering kind of conversation.

  It was the kind of conversation she wished could go on forever.

  In the afterglow of their first date, they went on several more. There was a miniature golf outing with Henry, a sunset hike in the Rincon Mountains without him. Horseback riding with, intimate dinners without. They often met at Rincon Market for iced tea and something from the bakery. He met her father. She met his friends. Meg and Henry made room for Ahmed on their Saturday coffee-shop dates at LuLu’s, although Meg adamantly maintained Friday Night Movie Night as a mom-and-son-only ritual. Ahmed didn’t mind, as he had his own Friday-night ritual to close out the workweek and usher in the weekend—hitting balls on the driving range, either alone or with the guys.

  Over time, Ahmed filled in the puzzle pieces of his past. He’d stumbled socially through middle school in small-town Wisconsin until he’d stripped himself of his accent and foreign mannerisms, and by high school, he hung around with the popular crowd. It helped that his high school was so small that any kid could play on any sports team. He played soccer and football and ran track. His grandparents hated his father at a time when Ahmed still idolized and missed him, so his relationship with his grandparents was strained. He’d married while in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and moved to Tucson for a fresh start after the relationship fell apart (she’d moved back to Iran), working full-time while attending graduate school at the U of A, eventually earning a master’s in public administration.

  Meg, too, shared her past with Ahmed piece by piece. Her story felt less interesting in comparison. They hugged spontaneously, and often. They stole and gifted kisses. Holding hands became habitual, and if Henry was around, he always managed to end up in the middle. Now that Ahmed was part of their life, Meg couldn’t imagine being without him.

  “Mom?” Henry said one Sunday morning. “Who would I live with if you died?”

  He asked this when it was just the two of them, eating their early bowls of apples-and-cinnamon oatmeal, which would hold them over until brunch at Amy’s.

  Meg hated moments like these. The idea of her not being there for him was such an ugly one that she’d never been able to think about it. She’d never made a will, never had any difficult would-you-take-my-kid conversations with friends or relatives. Even though she knew it was ridiculous, she sort of believed that if she planned for her death, then it would happen. As a result, she had no idea what actually would happen to Henry if she died.

  “I take very good care of my health,” she said. “I’m not going to die.”

  “But if you did,” Henry said. “Like, if you got ran over by a car.”

  She knew the important thing was to be decisive in her response. The actual person who’d care for him wasn’t as important as was conveying with confidence that everything would be under control. “You’d live with Amy and David,” she said.

  “What if they died, too?” He wasn’t angsty, just matter-of-factly curious.

  “Then you’d live with your grandparents,” Meg said.

  “What if they don’t stay married?” Henry said. “Or what would happen if you and Ahmed got married and then you died? Would I keep living with Ahmed?”

  Meg set her spoon back in her oatmeal bowl, folded her hands in front of her on the table (even though what she really wanted to do was pull her hair out) and looked evenly at Henry. “We’ve only known him for a month,” she said.

  “Six weeks,” Henry said. “Six and a half, actually.”

  Meg took a deep breath. “You like him, don’t you?”

  With his burning blue eyes, Henry looked straight at her. “I think we should marry him.”

  “Henry . . .” Meg felt helpless, waylaid and vastly unprepared for this discussion. “Buddy, my dear. Love of my life. Please be happy with how things are. Please don’t get your hopes up. The fact is, I don’t do marriage very well. I’m not very good at it.”

  “Why not?” He looked at her pointedly. “It can’t be that hard. Whatever you did wrong before, just don’t do it anymore.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Meg said. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “Then you need to find out, because this is important,” he said. “What we have with Ahmed’s important.”

  Meg sighed. “You know what they say—yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s a mystery but today is a gift and that’s why it’s called the present. We need to be happy with things just like they are now. Six weeks isn’t long enough to know whether we have a future with Ahmed.”

  “Six-and-a-half weeks, Mom.” Henry glared at her. “And yes, it is long enough.”

  Henry pushed back from his chair and left the table without waiting to be excused. Meg thought about calling him back and making him take his bowl and juice glass to the kitchen sink but decided against it. Instead, she stirred her oatmeal in hopes of smoothing it out, but it had turned hopelessly clumpy.

  It didn’t matter, though, because Meg had completely lost her appetite.

  The following day, when Meg was called to Mrs. Anderson’s office, she left her three-afternoons-a-week aide with her kindergartners and arrived to find Henry pouting in the naughty-kid chair with his arms crossed. Mrs. Anderson sat behind her desk, calmly reading her Journal of Educational Administration while she waited for Meg.

  “Sorry to pull you out of class,” she said when M
eg arrived, “but your son’s earned himself a two-day suspension.”

  Meg’s stomach plunged as Henry gave her a defiant look and straightened from his slumped position. “What for?” she asked.

  “He got into a shouting match on the playground with Enrique and grabbed him by his jacket collar and pulled him to the ground,” Mrs. Anderson said. “The playground monitor witnessed the whole incident.”

  “What part of zero tolerance do you not understand?” Meg asked Henry.

  “He called me a bastard.”

  “I work for a living, Henry. You know this, right?” Meg said. “I need to be here every day, because it provides me with the money to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. I can’t take two days off from work because some kid called you a name and you didn’t like it. You know better than to fight. I’m very disappointed in you.”

  “I hate this school,” Henry said. “I want to go to Sam Hughes.”

  “This has nothing to do with that,” Meg said.

  “The kids here are rude,” Henry said.

  “Kids at Sam Hughes do plenty of name-calling, too,” Meg said.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “That’s where I want to go.”

  Meg exchanged a look with Mrs. Anderson.

  “Did you fight with Enrique on purpose because you thought you’d get to change schools?” Meg said.

  Henry slumped again. “No.”

  Meg felt her left eye twitch. Something about his denial was insincere.

  Because the school day was almost over, Mrs. Anderson permitted Meg to bring Henry to her class until the dismissal bell rang. Meg made him spray the tables clean and cut out the twenty-five capital letter Gs she needed for tomorrow’s lesson. He refused to join the kindergartners for closing-circle time, refused to put any or all of his pouting self in.

  On the way home, Meg called her mother to see if she could watch Henry. Clarabelle agreed to watch him the next day but informed Meg she was unavailable the following one because she was scheduled to work.

  “But you don’t have a job,” Meg said.

  “I do now,” Clarabelle said. “As of this afternoon, I’m a seasonal associate at Ann Taylor at the Tucson Mall.”

  “Hey, hey! That’s great!” Meg said. “Discounts all around! Good for you—what made you decide to do this?”

  “My daughter told me I needed to get a life,” Clarabelle said.

  “Since when have you ever taken your daughter’s advice?” Meg asked and then quickly added, “Just kidding. I think it’s a perfect job for you.”

  Clarabelle would be forced to be friendly, which might spill over into her private life. It would get her out of the house. Maybe she’d even venture beyond her standard black, brown, and gray clothing choices.

  “Why does he need someone to watch him?” Clarabelle said. “Don’t you have off from school, too?”

  “It’s not a free day,” she said. “He got suspended for shoving a kid down on the playground.” Meg cringed, waiting for her mother to pronounce Henry a deviant and herself a bad mother and was pleasantly surprised when Clarabelle didn’t.

  “Do you remember when I had to come get you from school?” Clarabelle asked. “You took on both the Thompson girls.”

  “Oh my God—those horrible girls!” Meg remembered them. Their whole family was big, loud and the very definition of uncouth. “But no, I don’t remember.”

  Clarabelle tsked. “They took your sister’s little poetry journal or some such thing and ripped all the pages out.”

  Poor Amy. She’d been such a dreamy girl. Utterly defense-less. Which meant . . . she—Meg—had been the strong one? How did she not remember this about herself?

  “Were you mad at me when I got sent home?” Meg asked.

  “I wasn’t, actually,” Clarabelle said. “I was usually pretty good about big things like that. It was the day-to-day things that drove me crazy.”

  Meg laughed. “Well, I’m glad you’re doing this job at the mall. It sounds fun. And don’t worry. I’ll figure out a solution to my Henry problem.”

  “Try Amy,” Clarabelle suggested. “She’s always home.” Meg wrapped up the call and looked at Henry in the rearview mirror. She was the opposite of her mother—good with the small things and maybe not so good with the big things. She wanted to be good with everything. “Okay, guy,” she said. “One day down, one to go. I’ll call Amy when we get home.”

  “Can I see your phone for a minute?” Henry said.

  Against her better judgment, Meg handed it to him in the backseat. Ten seconds later, she heard, “Hi, Ahmed? It’s Henry. Can I go to work with you the day after tomorrow?”

  Dead meat this kid was.

  “Henry!” Meg said. “Give me the phone!”

  “Cool,” Henry said. “Hang on. My mom wants to talk to you.”

  “Sorry about that,” she said to Ahmed when Henry gave back her phone. “Ignore his question.”

  “No school?” Ahmed said. “And hi, by the way.”

  Meg smiled. “Hi, yourself. He got suspended. For fighting.”

  “What’s that all about?” Ahmed asked. “I thought he was calming down.”

  “I thought so, too,” she said. “But apparently not.”

  “He’s impetuous.” The tease in Ahmed’s voice came through loud and clear. “Like someone else I know.”

  “Hey,” Meg said, grinning.

  “He can come to work with me,” Ahmed said. “I think it’d be fun.”

  “He’s not supposed to have fun,” Meg said. “It’s a punishment. Make him shred paper all day or something.”

  “I like shredding paper,” Henry said.

  Meg ignored him as she and Ahmed said their goodbyes, and then she narrowed her eyes at Henry in the rearview mirror. “Are you even sorry for what you did?”

  “Enrique called me a bastard.”

  Broken record. “So what, Henry?”

  Henry kicked the back of her seat twice, hard. “So I don’t want to be one anymore!”

  In that moment, Meg finally got it. They drove the rest of the way home in silence. Once inside, she pulled out the dictionary and had him look up the word bastard. A person born of unmarried parents. An illegitimate child.

  “See?” she said. “You don’t even qualify. I was still married when you were born.”

  “Enrique said it means I don’t have a dad.”

  “He’s wrong,” Meg said. “The dictionary doesn’t lie. And besides, if memory serves, Enrique’s dad’s in prison.”

  “At least he has a dad.”

  Meg made Henry sit at the dining room table and look her in the eye. “What’s this about?”

  Henry shrugged and wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Can you tell me, Henry? Since when is the two of us not enough?”

  Henry didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. Meg knew the answer. Life had been good before Ahmed came along, but as they got to know him, Henry, like Meg, wanted more, more, more.

  They both wanted a never-ending supply of more.

  When I was married to Jonathan, I honestly thought nothing bad would ever happen to me.

  Because I’d led a charmed life, I had no idea how much I was defined by my naive belief that tragedy wouldn’t touch me. But in an instant, I went from being that—a la-la land girl who lived in a little fake snow globe bubble of happiness—to being the sort of person bad things happened to.

  After Jonathan cheated on me, I didn’t know what to believe about myself anymore. Take the husband, you know? Take the husband and the house and the car and the money and all the things I thought my future would hold. I could live without any of that. But did he have to take away everything I thought I knew about myself as well?

  My father once shared with me an expression: only a broken heart can be whole. He said we find ourselves in the broken pieces, and we build ourselves back up.

  After Jonathan cheated on me, I cracked. Humpty Dumpty all the way, only the king’s horses and
the king’s men were nowhere to be found. I alone had to put myself back together again, to make myself whole, and my dad was right: I did find myself in the broken pieces.

  On the day Henry went to work with Ahmed, he emerged from his bedroom dressed not in his usual T-shirt and shorts but in khaki pants (the pair that did not have a hole in the knee), a button-down shirt and a clip-on tie. He was handover-heart adorable.

  “You look precious,” she said. “You are precious.”

  “He’s making us pancakes,” Henry said. “We need to be there in, like, ten minutes. He can’t be late to work because of us.”

  Precious.

  The smell of pancakes and the sound of blues music greeted them from the sidewalk after they’d parked the car in front of Ahmed’s house. Blues music? At seven in the morning? Meg felt a lusty thrill tickle her skin. It was so unexpected. She would never have suspected that Ahmed was a fan of the blues. She would have thought he’d be more of a Kenny G kind of guy. Not that there was anything wrong with soothing light jazz, but there was no denying the fact that when you imagined how someone might be in bed, the difference between a light-jazz guy and a blues guy was huge. Blues was plaintive. Insistent. Focused on the heart of the act. Jazz seemed so much more . . . obsessed with the foreplay. And not that foreplay was bad, but too much of it was . . . well, Meg listened to jazz sometimes and thought, Will that saxophone never shut up?

  Henry ran up the steps ahead of her and rang the doorbell three times right in a row. Through the screen door, Meg saw that Ahmed, in khaki pants like Henry and with his shirt collar open, holding off on his tie for as long as possible, was beaming in a way she’d not seen before.

  “Good morning, you two!” he said. “I’ve got pancakes all ready.”

  Someone was cooking for them—for her—how amazing was that? And then there was his porch, with two Adirondack chairs just waiting for a couple to grow old in together.

  His view across the street was of Sam Hughes Elementary, one of the best schools in the district and the one Violet went to and the one Henry could go to if only it wasn’t so inconvenient. If they lived here, she and Ahmed could sit on the front porch together and watch Henry cross the street to school. And then they could go inside, turn on some blues music and have themselves a blues-inspired quickie before they went their separate ways for the day.