One True Theory of Love

by Laura Fitzgerald

  “Hey, you.” As Meg stepped across the threshold, she patted Ahmed playfully on the cheek. Henry was already in the kitchen, checking on the pancakes. “I didn’t know you were a fan of the blues. It seems so uniquely American.”

  “I am uniquely American,” Ahmed said.

  “Indeed, you are,” Meg said. “Who is this?”

  “Marcia Ball,” Ahmed said. “From her Blue House CD.”

  It was a soulful, mournful ballad. In a lonely heart there’s a tiny spark that keeps the love alive. And if it’s just a dream no one else believes, why do I? Why do I?

  “Nice music to slow dance to.” She stopped mere inches from him, unabashedly undressing him with her eyes.

  “Mmmm.” The look he gave her was lustful. Nakedly so.

  “It’s got a nice saxophone,” she said.

  “It does.” Ahmed said it as if he knew what she meant by that.

  She stepped farther inside. His house was a small shotgun bungalow with wood floors and built-in bookshelves. His furniture was mission-style, and he had an old upright mahogany Baldwin piano against an inside wall, which Meg had yet to hear him play, although he’d mentioned he’d been taking lessons for the past year. A few pieces of original artwork by local artists adorned the walls.

  As they ate, she felt as if they were in a scene from some movie—a romance, of course, the part where some telling detail sparks the single mom’s realization about the rightness of her new relationship. The flourish with which Ahmed served the chocolate-chip pancakes, for instance. Or the cute way Ahmed and Henry clinked juice glasses. Or how sweetly Ahmed cleared their plates and how clearly happy he was to have them there. But she realized there wasn’t just one thing about him that made them such a good match. It was everything.

  As Meg drove to school, her heart was light and she cranked her radio when Melissa Etheridge’s “Message to Myself” came on and she sang at the top of her lungs. She didn’t even mind the empty backseat, because she knew Henry was with Ahmed and that, therefore, he was in a very good place.

  At that afternoon’s snack time, her students went a little crazy in the most beautiful of ways. Everything in her kindergarten classroom was part of a well thought-out routine, and the afternoon-snack routine consisted of all the students pushing their desks into groups of four. Chairs were to be silently slid and tucked under the new arrangement.

  The children sat two boys and two girls to a table, and Meg sat with the leftovers, one of whom always happened to be Marita. Three kids got to be the cracker kids, and they counted out five baskets of twenty lightly salted whole-wheat saltine crackers and distributed them to the tables. Three other kids got to be the carrot kids, and they counted out five paper plates of twenty baby carrots, along with a small bowl of ranch dressing for dipping, and distributed them to the tables.

  Usually, it was all very orderly and quiet, but in a kindergarten classroom, it takes only one kid to throw everything into utter chaos. And that kid, that day, was Lucas, lovely little Lucas.

  While Meg’s back was turned, he made race-car noises while sliding his chair across the floor. Still lost in a dreamy fog that involved Ahmed and blues music, Meg ignored his transgression. The other boys took it as permission to make their own race-car noises, and soon the whole classroom was buzzing with boys.

  “All right, everyone. This isn’t the Indy Five Hundred,” she said. “Take your chairs, and I’ll put the music on.”

  When Henry was a baby, Meg had played classical music to him each night as he’d fallen asleep, which had an unintended and unfortunate consequence: classical music now put Henry in a droopy, Pavlovian stupor. Meg sometimes pictured him as an adult, snoring through symphonies his wife dragged him to. But Meg felt classical music was important, and she wanted her kindergartners to appreciate it (without the resultant sleepiness), so another ritual of afternoon-snack time was the playing of classical music.

  When Lucas began to sway and bop his head to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13, Meg ignored him, which his tablemates took as permission to join him. Not only did they sway and bop their heads, too, but when the music swelled in the middle of the serenade and when Lucas waved his arms like a zealous-but-perhaps-drunk conductor, the others followed right along, sheer joy on their misbehaving faces.

  Soon, with the exception of Marita, who sat quietly next to Meg and watched with her big brown eyes as she nibbled her square cracker into a circle, the entire class joined in with sweet abandon and ineptness. Meg watched, tears in her eyes from the beauty of the moment. She felt Marita’s hand on her knee.

  “Please don’t cry, Miss Meg,” Marita said. “They don’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  “I’m not sad,” Meg whispered. “I’m crying because I’m happy.”

  Less happy was her father, whom Meg visited at his office after school, since she had some extra time before she was supposed to pick up Henry from Ahmed’s house. She’d called Phillip on a break at school and asked if he could squeeze her in that afternoon.

  Her father’s tax practice specialized in accounting for the medical profession. With an office located on Grant Road near Tucson Medical Center in a small complex, he was a sole practitioner, although in recent years, since he was nearing sixty, he’d talked about finding someone to buy into the business and eventually succeed him. For now, it was just him and Sandi, his longtime secretary and bookkeeper, whom Meg had never quite figured out.

  Or maybe she had—maybe there just wasn’t much to figure out. Meg had known Sandi, who was about her father’s age, for more than a decade and yet she knew little about her beyond that she was remarkably large-breasted, had a black beehive hairstyle and read romance novels at her desk during slow times. Her husband was a man named Bud, who liked to go fly-fishing.

  When Meg arrived, Sandi gave her a cheery greeting and announced she was heading out for the day. Must be nice, Meg thought, and then felt guilty for thinking so. From the first of January, both Sandi and her father burrowed into their tax work and emerged on April sixteenth blurry-eyed and pale-faced, having crammed a year’s worth of work into ten weeks. Sandi was well within her rights to leave early this time of year.

  Meg settled with her father in his office—his inner sanctum, as he called it—on his steel-and-black-leather Copenhagen couch. A few years back, he’d donated his old no-style furniture to charity and gone modern.

  It had been a surprising choice, because in every other way, he was, to put it kindly, somewhat . . . bland. His glasses were a decade out-of-date, and nearly without exception, he wore khaki pants that sagged in the behind and muted oxford shirts. Even his ideas about secretaries were old-fashioned—he honestly expected Sandi to make and bring him coffee each morning (which she gladly did).

  Today, he looked at Meg uneasily. “I think I know why you’re here.”

  “It’s your turn, Dad,” she said. “I want to know what’s going on in your life.”

  He looked at her for a long moment and then pushed against the bridge of his glasses with his middle finger. At the same time, he searched her eyes, looking, it seemed to Meg, for a way to ground himself, or maybe to find common ground.

  “I’ve been married for nearly thirty-five years,” he said.

  “That’s something,” Meg said. “Not many people can say that.”

  “It’s something, but it’s not enough,” Phillip said. “Just being married isn’t enough for me anymore. If I’m married, I want to be happily married. And I’m not.”

  On the way to Ahmed’s house to pick up Henry, Meg pulled into a parking lot to call Amy and fill her in on the conversation she’d just had with their father.

  “I totally get what he’s talking about,” Amy said. “I’m on his side completely.”

  “It’s not about sides,” Meg said.

  “When does the shit hit the fan?”

  “My sense is pretty soon.” Meg got an ugly feeling in her gut, because while a divorce between her parents might be for the best, it wasn�
��t going to be easy.

  After the call, Meg tried to figure out how she felt about her parents’ impending separation. It was like a heart attack waiting to happen, surprising only in that it hadn’t occurred sooner. Still, it left her feeling numb. Where would her father live? It would be so strange visiting him in a new place! And was she supposed to warn her mother?

  Her mother had to know or at least sense it was coming. Getting a job—a reason to get up in the mornings—was probably at least partly in preparation for Life After—a social network, a little extra spending cash, new clothes. Maybe she’d surprise them all and blossom.

  When Meg arrived at Ahmed’s house and approached the front door, she saw through the screen that Henry and Ahmed were leaning over his dining room table from opposite sides, engrossed in a game of chess. Dark and light, big and small. She stopped still and watched them.

  Since that first day at the coffee shop when she’d gotten all shaky after seeing the two of them huddled together over the chessboard, she’d given some thought as to what had so startled her about the moment, and what came to her was this: when she closed her eyes and let an image of her and Henry float forward, mother and son, the image was most often of them side by side, him knocking into her and her arm loosely around his shoulders, pulling him to her in a bumpy, hanging-out-together sort of way. But when she imagined Henry with a father figure in his life, the image was that of two guys, one big, one small, heads focused downward, working on airplane models or electronic thingamajigs—some guy thing, important only to the two of them. She always pictured herself watching from a distance, swelled with love for the guys in her life, the man and the man-to-be.

  And here was that image, working its way to the surface, from dream to reality. Nearly breathless, Meg watched for a long moment before interrupting them.

  “Knock, knock,” she finally said through the screen door.

  Both Henry and Ahmed looked up and smiled at her.

  “Who’s there?” Henry said.

  Meg grinned. “Carly.”

  “Carly who?”

  “Car leaves in five minutes, so hurry up and finish your game.”

  “Very funny, Mom. Not.”

  Ahmed approached to unlock the door. “How was your day, dear?”

  “Lovely, thank you.” She kissed him on the cheek, deciding she didn’t need to tell Ahmed about her parents right away. The door on her parents’ relationship might be closing, but the one on theirs was just opening. The newness in the pleasure of coming home to someone at the end of the workday should be relished and protected. “And yours?”

  “We had a great day, didn’t we, Henry?”

  “Yep, except that meeting with the mayor got really boring.”

  “You met the mayor?” Eyebrows raised, Meg walked over and gave Henry a kiss. His clip-on tie was gone, but he still looked adorably preppy. “How cool are you?”

  “Very cool,” Henry said. “Ahmed, it’s your turn.”

  Ahmed’s amused gaze was on Meg as he answered Henry. “Let’s take a break and catch up with your mother.”

  “Chopped liver,” Meg said. “That’s all I am to him.”

  When Ahmed asked if she wanted a glass of wine, she said yes and followed him into the kitchen. He first filled a wineglass with grape juice for Henry, then uncorked a bottle of merlot and poured them each a glass. She stepped close to accept hers. “Did you take good care of my boy?”

  “As if my life depended on it.” Ahmed’s eyes danced with hers and they fell into a dopey-smiling moment again. She was going to bed him soon—she knew it. How could she not, when he had eyes like that? How could she not, when she found him appealing in virtually every way?

  “I have a question for you,” she said.

  “Ask away.”

  “You said this morning that you’re uniquely American, which you are. But there’s so little in the house to suggest your Iranian background and I wonder why that is. I mean, you don’t even have a Persian rug.”

  “I’d say I’m only sort of just now tiptoeing my way back into my culture,” Ahmed said. “I spent a lot of time in my youth rejecting it.”

  “Did nine-eleven have anything to do with your change of heart?” Meg asked. “Awaken some new sort of pride or something?”

  “Sure.” He shrugged. “Overnight, all of us had to measure every word, gesture, e-mail, phone call, trip abroad.”

  “The land of the free suddenly became a lot less free,” Meg said.

  “That’s right,” he agreed.

  “Well, I’m sorry.” Meg quickly hugged him. “I’m sorry for every bad thing you’ve ever experienced.”

  Ahmed’s hold on her was tight. “You’re so sweet. You make me feel good about who I am.”

  “You should feel good about who you are,” Meg said. “You take care of people.”

  Ahmed pulled back. “But I don’t,” he said. “Not like I want to. Until you and Henry, I haven’t had anyone—I mean, I’ve wanted to in the abstract, but—”

  “You do on a community level,” Meg said. “You’re part of a group down there at city hall that works to make this town a good place to live. With the glaring exception of providing good sidewalks.”

  Ahmed laughed, but quickly turned serious again. “I want to take care of you two,” he said. “Not that you can’t take of yourselves perfectly well, because you can, obviously. You’ve been doing it for a long time, but—”

  “How about we’ll take care of each other?” Meg swallowed hard, barely believing this conversation was actually happening.

  Ahmed nodded. “I like that. And the RTA will take care of the sidewalks.”

  Meg slugged him playfully in the arm.

  “People,” Henry said from the dining room. He’d used the interruption to line up all the chess pieces he’d acquired from Ahmed, but apparently he’d then run out of things to do. “We’re in the middle of a game here.”

  Meg pulled back from the embrace to reprimand Henry. “Can’t you see we’re having a moment here?”

  “Have it some other time,” Henry said. “Can’t you see that I’m waiting to make my move?”

  Ahmed raised his eyebrows at Henry and then at Meg. “I do, as a matter of fact, have a Persian rug,” he said in a suggestive undertone. “It’s in my bedroom.”

  “You’re such a tease!” she said.

  He laughed. “I really do have one in my bedroom.”

  “Do you have a Persian cat?”

  “In my bedroom.” He made his voice low and husky.

  “Now that was a line,” Meg said.

  “You got me.”

  “Excuse me, peoples,” Henry said. “It’s my turn.”

  No, Meg thought. It’s my turn.

  She took the wineglass of juice to her son and ruffled his hair. “Give us a minute, Henry. I want to see the rug in Ahmed’s bedroom.”

  As Ahmed grinned at her, Henry crossed his arms in a pout.

  “Hey, Henry, if you want, you can check in my freezer and see if I have any ice cream. You can get yourself a bowl if I do.” Ahmed turned to Meg. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “Sounds like a very healthy dinner to me,” she said as she took Ahmed’s hand and began to pull him down the hall.

  Cheered, Henry bolted from the table and disappeared into Ahmed’s kitchen. “Mint chocolate chip! My favorite!”

  “He’s such a sucker,” Meg whispered. “Now show me that rug.”

  Once in his room, Ahmed gestured toward the floor. “My token Persian rug.”

  Meg looked oh so meaningfully into Ahmed’s eyes. “I don’t care about the rug.”

  “What is it you care about?” He said it in that low, sexy way he had as he put his hands around her waist, making her feel all skinny.

  “You,” Meg said. “Us. Me getting it right this time around.”

  “Kiss me cordially,” he said. “And with passion, too.”

  “I don’t think so,” Meg teased, backing him toward the bed
. Ahmed’s house was at most a thousand square feet, so Henry was definitely not far out of earshot, but this was Ahmed’s bedroom and on the stereo Etta James was wailing out “Cry Like a Rainy Day” and how sexy was that?

  Gamely, Ahmed half fell onto his mattress, leaving his legs dangling over the edge. “You lured me to the bedroom under false pretenses,” he protested happily.

  Meg stepped into the space between his legs. She leaned over him and put her hands on either side of his shoulders so he was fake trapped. Also, so he had a decent view of her cleavage. “Do you mind?”

  “Can’t say that I do.” He ran his fingertips up the back of her thighs, giving her the chills.

  She traced a finger over each of his eyebrows in turn, then kissed his cheek. She kissed his forehead, then several points along his jawbone, and when she finally kissed his lips, he tasted of the merlot and of a spice she couldn’t place.

  “What did you have for lunch today?” she asked.

  “I took Henry to Ali Baba for Persian food,” he said.

  Meg couldn’t recall Henry ever having eaten Middle Eastern food before. “Did he like it?”

  “He loved it.”

  “Will you cook Persian food for me sometime?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “But for you, I’d be willing to learn.”

  “Let’s learn together.” Meg kissed him again, a deep and persistent and satisfying kiss.

  “I have a question for you,” he said when they came up for air. “Henry spent a good chunk of time today complaining about his soccer coach, and she really doesn’t sound competent.”

  “She’s not,” Meg said. “And she never wanted to coach in the first place. It was just that no one else volunteered. And she’s been horrible to Henry. I almost feel I should let him quit and start fresh next year with another team.”