The Shortest Way Home (34 page)

I’m forty-three and I have the dating skills of a twelve-year-old stamp collector.

* * *

P
aralyzed by indecision, he did nothing. Rebecca eventually called between clients and said she’d be off at nine, could they get a late dinner?

Yes. He was open.

By eight-thirty he was showered and ready. He had taken longer than his usual nanosecond to decide what to wear. He only owned six shirts, so that reduced the decision making somewhat. When he heard a car pull into the driveway he was out the door like a kid after an ice cream truck.

It was not Rebecca. It was Chrissy.

“Hi!” She strode toward him, and he knew she thought the look of anticipation on his face had been for her. She threw her arms around him and when he responded in kind—not knowing what else to do—she actually lifted her feet up so he was carrying her for a few moments. His back twanged indignantly.

“I was going to say I was in the neighborhood.” She grinned coyly after he’d nearly dropped her. “But I wasn’t. I came over specifically to see you. On purpose.”

“Oh, that’s so . . . great. I was thinking I should call.” In truth he’d been apprehensively avoiding it. In the past, he’d only ever had to remind the woman that he’d been clear it wasn’t a relationship. But he didn’t have that to fall back on this time.

Chrissy was looking up at him expectantly now, but her smile had dimmed, as if she were just getting the barest whiff of something about to spoil. “What’s up?” she said.

He stammered and stumbled through an overgrown forest of words: how great it was to spend time with her, old friends hanging out, so pretty, so smart, such a good mom . . .

At first she affected a slightly perplexed expression. Then she just looked annoyed. “You’re breaking it off.”

“Well . . . it’s not that I don’t . . .”

She gave the little head-wag/eye-roll. “Sean Doran is dumping me,” she muttered disgustedly to herself.

“No!” he said. “
Dumping 
. . . that’s . . . such a harsh word.”

Then she put her hands up, lacquered nails rising like parapets above her slim fingers. “Please,” she said. “Just. Stop. Talking.”

Sean stood there stupidly, watching her pull out of his driveway, feeling sick and exuberant all at once. He was still standing there a few minutes later when Rebecca pulled in. He got in the passenger side. “Hey,” he said breezily. He hoped it was breezily.

“Hey.” She smiled. He leaned over to kiss her, and got her cheek, the one that bulged out a little. She turned to peck him back, but he hadn’t actually withdrawn from his peck, letting his lips linger an extra second against the warm satin of her skin. His lips were positioned perfectly for hers. His hand came up to the back of her head and his fingers filtered into the downy hair at the nape of her neck. And then they were making out. Right there in the driveway.

After a few minutes she pulled back, and so he pulled back. Following her lead was so much easier than deciding a course of action for himself. She looked at him and a crooked little smile curled around the corners of her mouth. He smiled, too. She laughed, putting her fingers up to her lips. “This is so
weird
,” she said from behind them.

“Yeah?”

“No, I mean good weird. Unexpected. Right? Aren’t you surprised?”

“Well, after the other night—”

“No, the whole thing. Did you see it coming? I did not see it coming.”

“Not like a month ago . . . but maybe two weeks ago.”

“Two whole
weeks
?”

Sean felt like his brain was at warp speed, careening through hyperspace to locate the correct response to each of her questions. “I don’t know. Yeah. I mean . . . I’m attracted to you. I guess that’s pretty obvious.” He watched her face for clues as to whether his spaceship had landed on the right answer planet, or whether he was even in the right galaxy.

“But you didn’t used to be.” This was a question, too.

“Well, I wasn’t
un
-attracted to you, I just didn’t . . . I guess I thought of you as a friend . . . and then . . . that . . . changed.” It was exhausting, this intergalactic answer-locating business. “How about you?” he said, to take himself off the hot seat.

“Me?”

“Yeah, when did you realize that you were . . . um . . . interested?”

A blush crept out of the top of her peasant blouse and up her neck. The blush said,
always.

* * *

T
hey went to a funky storefront restaurant called Pizza My Heart that had mismatched chairs and Frank Sinatra music playing. Things got a little dicey when they were negotiating pizza toppings—he liked meat and spicy stuff, she was more into broccoli and mushrooms. They had to send the waitress away twice while they were deciding and in the end ordered something that was completely different on one half than it was on the other.

But then, like dance partners who had finally found their mutual tempo, they talked. Sean told her all about the meeting with Claire Lindquist, knowing she’d be interested even though it had nothing to do with her. She told him how her parents were considering leaving their Floridian trailer park paradise to come up and “help” her move the furniture.

“No,” Sean told her. “Absolutely not. That is such a bad idea.”

“I know, okay? But what do I say—‘I don’t want you here’? It sounds so ungrateful.”

“Listen, I heard you on the phone—you were playing them like violins, saying how considerate they were and everything. You know how to handle them, Rebecca, you just have to
remember
that you know.”

She smiled at him, half grateful, half amused. He wanted to crawl over the table and kiss that smile. “Hey,” she teased, “if the third-world nurse gig doesn’t work out, you’d be an excellent life coach.”

No I wouldn’t,
he almost said.
You have no idea how many answers I don’t have.

After dinner, he put an arm around her as they walked back to the car, and she slid hers around his waist. It felt so good to stroll down the sidewalk, hip to hip, and as they waited at a curb for traffic to pass, he turned and kissed her head. She gave him a little squeeze in response, and he thought,
This is what it would be like, having someone.

And it did not feel like handcuffs.

When they got in the car she started the motor but didn’t pull out. “Um . . .” She cut her eyes toward him. He worried for a moment that she was hesitating before crushing him with the news that he couldn’t come over. But then she raised her eyebrows.

He could feel himself grinning like an idiot as they drove to her house.

When they walked through the door she said, “Do you want something to drink?”

“No, thanks.” He pulled her up close and kissed her. Her hands slid up under his shirt back, fingernails skimming across the surface of his skin. He ran his hand down the back of her jeans and pulled one of her thighs up to his hip. She let out a soft little sound in the back of her throat, and the blood sluiced through him so that he felt he couldn’t press hard enough against her, and so he released her leg and walked her backward to the couch, letting her down onto it and himself down onto her. And for a moment, the relief of pressing against her was so great he was certain his brain would burst into flames, but then it was suddenly desperately unsatisfying to have anything between them, and he rose off her so they could remove their clothes in a flurry of tossed shirts and flung undergarments.

She reached up to stroke him, and he thought his heart would seize. He froze there kneeling over her until he almost lost control, and then he leaned down, stabilizing himself with a hand against the couch, the other reaching between her legs. He kissed her neck and her breasts until she pulled him down onto her, into her, and nothing in the world seemed to exist except her.

* * *

“H
ey,” he whispered into her hair just as her room was starting to become visible around them in the predawn light. “Where were you the other night when you said you had plans?”

He wasn’t even sure she was awake, half thinking this was a trial run before he asked for real. But then her finger began to run lightly across his knuckles, fingering them like worry beads. He felt her chest expand. “I had dinner with a guy that I used to be with. We broke up about a year ago, and lately he’s been calling because he wants to get back together.”

The sudden pounding of Sean’s heart was amplified by the fact that he was holding his breath. “Oh,” he said. “So . . .”

“So I told him I had reconnected with an old friend, and something was happening but I wasn’t sure what, and we could still hang out but I couldn’t consider being with him until . . . things resolved.”

Sean began to breathe again, because it was good that she’d told the guy no. Temporarily at least. Until things “resolved.”

“I’m trying to be honest,” she said.

“No, I appreciate it.”

“But you’re not saying anything.”

“I’m not really sure what to say. I guess I’m not clear what you mean by ‘resolved.’ ”

Slowly she rotated toward him so that they faced each other, though it was still too dark to see clearly. “Sean,” she murmured, and her voice was soothing, conciliatory. But also a little sad. He was always amazed by what he could hear in her voice when he couldn’t see her. “I know you’re leaving. Being here in Belham is a temporary detour for you, and I’m fine with that. I’d never ask you to stay because I know you’d just get all conflicted and start to resent me.” She kissed him lightly on the chin, as if to prove how fine with it she was. “Let’s just enjoy this,” she said. “Let’s just be together until you leave, and not worry about what happens after.”

It was so reasonable. He wanted very much to enjoy this, and not worry about anything. However, he couldn’t help but wonder if her enjoyment was made easier by knowing there was another guy waiting in the wings.

* * *

B
y three o’clock he’d shopped for groceries, vacuumed, paid bills, WD-40’d several squeaky door hinges, and blasted the tub grout with some hideous cleaning product that smelled like an atomic bleach bomb. Still three more hours until Rebecca was off work.

He took George for a long walk and ended up in the vicinity of Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted Church. It was almost four by then, and Mass was about to start. Sean sat down to rest on a bench near a statue of St. Mary.

He did not want to go to Mass. He hated Mass, he reminded himself. It was always a disaster for him these days. God was MIA.

And yet, it was sort of like sticking his tongue into the empty socket of a pulled tooth. For some reason he kept feeling for it to make sure it was still missing. Looping the dog’s leash through the arm of the bench, he went inside and sat in the last pew.

The first reading was from Genesis, the story of God evicting Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, after they’d eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Sean felt an immediate solidarity with poor Adam and Eve.
The Big Guy bailed on you guys, too,
he thought.

It was proclaimed by a teenage boy with a sprinkling of acne across his cheeks and a slight lisp. “By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it.”
Sweat
sounded more like
thweat
.

Sean was impressed by the boy’s bravery. How much courage must it take to stand up there in front of hundreds of people, knowing you were definitely going to botch it?

Distracted and bored, Sean glanced around, his gaze catching momentarily on the sun shining though a stained glass window of Jesus carrying a lamb, on the cantor flipping nervously through her songbook, on an old man with granite-gray hair sitting alone a few rows up. . . .

Da.

Anxiety rippled through Sean. The last thing he wanted was to see his father again after the fight they’d had the other night. And yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the older man. The thick neck and broad shoulders—they were the same as they’d ever been. And when he stood for the reading of the Gospel, he clasped his hands behind his back, the crippled one cradled by the strong one. Sean would know him anywhere.

The young-looking priest was on the altar again and launched into his homily. “The Garden of Eden is probably one of the best-known Bible stories in the world. It comes to us from the Jews, and is part of the Muslim canon as well.”

Exactly,
thought Sean.
Same old, same
old.

“What’s interesting about this story is that it has so many layers,” the priest went on. “On the surface, it’s the story of a punishment. Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and from then on, humankind has been paying for it. We have to work to eat, and childbirth is painful.

“But a story doesn’t last as long as this one without having a little more to think about, a little more depth. Consider this: we believe in an all-knowing God. If that’s true, how could God
not
have known that Adam and Eve would eventually goof up?

“Many of you are parents. Do you expect that because you tell your children not to play with matches, they absolutely won’t—or do you understand that all children misbehave from time to time? And do you expect that they’ll
never
touch matches—or do you know that once they’re old enough, they’ll need those matches and will be mature enough to use them wisely?

“Is it possible, then, that just as parents watch their children grow and mature, needing greater challenges, God knew it was time for Adam and Eve to leave the nest? Think about Eden for a moment. It sounds like a pretty great destination. You don’t have to work or feel pain. There’s no need for compassion or forgiveness because nothing bad ever happens. It’s perfect.

“As we all know, real life is
defined
by imperfection. But it is in facing and dealing with those things that are not perfect—with justice, compassion, and forgiveness—that we grow.

“Here’s the line that makes me think that God anticipated and even approved of Adam and Eve’s leaving the Garden of Eden: ‘God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them.’