I’m at Best Buds the next day, and I look up from deadheading the chrysanthemums, hearing a familiar voice. Sure enough, William Sullivan is standing there smiling and jingling the change in his pocket.
“If we struck out, then what are you doing here?” I ask him. Which isn’t the most polite way I’ve ever spoken to a customer, I admit. But really—he drives up from New Jersey to tell me how Lola turned him down? Has the world gone barking mad?
“Well, I’m here because we’ve got to try again,” he says, his eyes lit up. “I thought I’d visit her this weekend, our usual Saturday outing, and I thought you and I could think up something new. For me to say to her.”
“Wait a second. She turned you down, and she was furious at both of us, and yet you still think she’s going to be open to your usual Saturday?”
“Yep.” He smiles at me. “Well, I hope so, at least. I’m going to give it the old college try.”
I want to say, What is wrong with you, William Sullivan? What is it about a woman turning down your proposal of marriage that makes you think she’ll be willing to go on an outing with you forty-eight hours later? Instead I say, wearily but with a fascination at the obtuseness of the human spirit, “So you see this plan involving flowers, do you?”
“Well, sure, involving flowers. You’re a flower shop, aren’t you?”
“All right,” I say. “I have to say, though, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to change her mind. She’s pretty convinced she doesn’t want anything interesting to happen for the rest of her life.”
“Ah, I know. That’s how she feels now. She’s pretty fierce.” He chuckles. “She was something else on Thanksgiving, wasn’t she?”
“Well, yeah. She was pretty upset.”
He wanders around the shop, whistling something. And then he comes over to me at the counter. “What did you say your favorite flowers were?”
What had I said? “Gerbera daisies?”
“Oh, yes. Okay, I’d like a bouquet of those. And while you’re fixing them up, I want to tell you my plan. Because I have cooked up a great one. And I am very optimistic that this is really going to work.”
I shake my head. “William, I’d sort of forgotten that people can even be optimistic sometimes.”
“Oh, I’m frightfully optimistic,” he says. “Frightfully. Okay, let me tell you what I’ve realized. I was a basketball coach in my old life, and what happened here is that I misjudged the layup. Simple problem. I thought this was going to be a slam dunk because Lola and I were such good friends from before, and we were both lonely, and we had all this history—good, good history—but no! I hadn’t prepared for no. I hadn’t thought it all through.” He grins.
“Well, that can happen.”
“So you were right—I sprung it on her. So I’m going to baaaack up and take it sloooow, approach her another way. Today, if she’ll have me, I’m going to take her somewhere neutral. No big talks, no heavy scenes. Not even going to hold her hand. And that’s my plan. Just keep seeing her. Do what she wants. Never ask for more. No pushing. I’m going to wait it out. Woo her until she’s not scared anymore. Not make any big moves. No proposals.”
“Well, good luck to you. I wish you the best.”
“Yep. That’s the right thing. I’m launching a plan—I call it A Year of One Hundred Dates with Lola. We’ll go slow, drink a lot of coffee, see some shows, then maybe visit my house, to see my friends. Maybe we’ll take a little jaunt up to New Hampshire. Stay in separate hotel rooms, drinks by the fire, go dancing. That sort of thing. Whatever she wants, and at a pace she’s comfortable with. My goal is to give her something she can’t have in her house all by herself. Laughter. Companionship. Admiration.”
“What she says, though, is that she doesn’t want to be disloyal to Walter’s memory. That’s what you’re up against.” Uh-oh—here I go, being disloyal again. Working behind the scenes. Only somehow I can’t help myself. I love this old guy with his optimism!
He smiles widely. “But you know? I knew Walter, too, and I think he would have been glad for us. He’d like that she’s got someone to love her and look after her. We don’t have to shut down his memory.”
“Well,” I say. “Wow. This is amazing. I wish you the best of luck. I’m rooting for you hard. So you want the flowers to take to her, or do you want them delivered?”
He smiles. “The flowers are for you. Because of the first-rate magic you did.”
I stare at him. “The magic? You knew about the magic?”
“Lola told me that you and Blix are matchmakers, and that you work with magic to bring people together.”
“But the magic didn’t work. It was an epic fail.” So much so that I’m giving up on magic altogether.
“What? That’s what you think? Marnie. It’s still working. Don’t you see? It’s taking a new route, that’s all. When you’re as old as I am, you learn a couple of things about love. And one of the main things is that you can’t give up on people you love. When you really believe.”
I look into his rheumy old blue eyes, so lit up that they’re practically shooting sparks. “But what can you do if the other person has given up?” I say. It’s hard to talk through the lump in my throat.
He says, “Well, you just gotta keep trying. That’s what you do.”
“But what if you’re running out of time?”
“Honey, we’re all running out of time. And”—he lowers his voice like this is going to be momentous—“we also have all the time in the world.”
“Um, that doesn’t really make any sense.”
He laughs. “I know; it doesn’t. I thought I could make some wise pronouncement here, but I got nothing. Well, okay, except this. Here’s my bit of old-man wisdom for you: You gotta have faith in something, don’t you? And when you pick what that thing is going to be, you don’t give up on it. Just don’t. It fails, you try another way and then another.”
And he takes my hand and kisses it, like a courtly gentleman, and heads out of the store. Then he remembers something and comes back in and pays for the flowers. Once more I think if I ran over to the window, I’d see William Sullivan doing himself a little dance down the street, laughing and snapping his fingers, although nine people out of ten would know that he’s got no shot at his plan.
But what do nine out of ten people know?
You know what I miss?
I miss seeing those little sparkles, the ones that meant something good was about to happen. That there was love around. I don’t know why, but they’ve somehow vanished.
That’s all. I just miss that.
Natalie texts me the next day while I’m in the kitchen, washing down the turquoise refrigerator in preparation for painting it. The Internet says that a person can actually buy special appliance paint that makes old fridges look like they just came from the showroom. This one could look new again, according to some of the more gung-ho commenters.
And then this text sails in. Which I’ve been expecting. The big sister weighing in on the disaster that is my life. She Who Knows Best.
I dont trust myself 2 speak w/you. Trying 2 B on ur side, but WTF? U BROKE HIS HEART AGAIN?
I broke his heart again. Yes.
AND U R LIVING WITH YOUR EX-FREAKING-HUSBAND?
No, and stop yelling.
I AM NOT GOING TO STOP YELLING UNTIL U EXPLAIN WHAT U R DOING.
Here’s what I am doing: I am right now painting a fridge. Bye.
I CAN’T EVEN.
Then please don’t.
You know what I can’t even?
I can’t paint the refrigerator some cool, professional white. I walk to the hardware store and look at the special white paint, and I even go stand in the checkout line with a can of it, but then something happens in my brain. I try to picture Blix’s kitchen with a refrigerator trying to pass itself off as a normal fridge, and I can’t.
Anybody who wouldn’t buy Blix’s house because they have no feeling for her refrigerator—well, they simply shouldn’t be allowed to have it, that’s all.
I put it back on the shelf and leave.
Things that can’t be ordinary:
Me.
Patrick.
The refrigerator.
William Sullivan.
Sorry, that’s just how it is.
Sorry/not sorry.
And where are the sparkles?
FORTY-THREE
MARNIE