“I thought you were humming something.”
Olivia cleared her throat and busied herself wrapping the hat, writing up the sale.
“Check okay?” he asked.
She pointed to the sign taped to the counter. “Make it out to me. Here’s how you spell it.”
He let out a low whistle. “Bertolucci,” he said. “That’s a mouthful.”
“We’re Americanized, though. TV dinners. Lots of lime green and raspberry clothing. The works.”
“Well,” he said, handing her his check, “I’m from California. No ethnicity at all. Just Californian. Third generation, which is really something.”
“Pioneers,” she said. She held out the hat in its hat box to him.
His name was David Henderson and he lived across town, in the West Village.
She didn’t expect him to walk out the door just like that, but he did. He turned and said, “Thanks for the dance.” But before she could answer, he was gone.
At home, there was a bouquet of roses from Josh, sitting on the landing in front of her door. She supposed they should make her miss him, but they didn’t. That was how ready she had been to move on. For the occasion, she’d strung lights shaped like red hearts around her rubber tree, and she turned them on now, refusing to think about David Henderson, the wannabe writer who used words like tomato-colored and was one hell of a good dancer. Her best friend, Winnie, had a date, or else Olivia would have called her to ask why, just when a person got her life the way she wanted it, another person popped in and turned everything upside down. Not that David Henderson had done that exactly. But Olivia recognized that he easily could. He with the brown curls and smooth steps. He with the wife, she reminded herself. A wife who looked good in yellow.
Olivia ate her tandoori chicken, her saag paneer, her samosas. She let Arthur lick her plate clean and then kiss her on the lips with his curry breath.
“Arthur,” she said, digging her fingers into the cat’s fur, just the way he liked it, “we’re headed for something.”
She didn’t know what that something was, but she felt it coming, as strong and reckless as a hurricane running its unpredictable course.
Olivia wasn’t exactly surprised to see him the next day. In fact, when he walked in the door of her shop ten minutes after she opened, she felt her bones and muscles and organs shift and settle. And, even deeper, her cells. Her goddamn DNA. It was what she had kept waiting for all the years with Josh and his bass. She had waited and waited and it had never happened.
“She didn’t like it?” Olivia said.
In his hands, David held the hat. He twirled it around and Olivia thought that if she stared at it long enough, it might turn into butter. There was, she noticed, a dent in the crown.
“You should never break up with someone on Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Especially someone you’ve been with almost forever, who knew you when it was cool to have an Afro and wear bell-bottoms.”
Olivia was listening and frowning, but she couldn’t stop watching his hands twirling that dented hat.
“She threw it at me,” he said.
“‘Break up’ means you’re not married,” Olivia said.
“Right. If I was married, I’d have to divorce her.”
Olivia nodded.
“Your hair,” he said, and this time he didn’t trace the air in front of her. Instead, he put down the hat and touched her face, and then her hair. “It’s even curlier.”
“I was blocking the wool for some hats.” She pointed behind her to the spot where a big pot of water boiled on a hot plate. “It makes my hair do this.”
“Do you want to dance?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
Months later, after she had moved in with him and married him and lost him to Amanda driving her blue Honda Civic around a curve one bright sunny September morning, Olivia thought, Dear Amanda, I am not the kind of person who does something like move to the West Village to live with a guy I’ve known for something like six weeks. I mean, Amanda, it took me almost four years to move in with my last boyfriend, Josh, and even when I did, I kept my real apartment, subletting it to one of the witches from the occult store next to my hat shop. I am not the kind of person to marry someone I’ve known for four months. What I’m telling you, Amanda, you stupid, careless little shit, is this was love. The big one. And you took it away from me. “Dear Amanda,” Olivia wrote. “I hate you.”
They had moved in together and fought.
“Who are you?” she’d scream at him.
She threw things, too: Arthur’s dish, old hats, the flowers he brought her to make up for their last fight.
The witch who sublet her apartment told Olivia that fire signs and air signs were good for each other. “Trust me,” she said. “Your Libra and his Leo are perfect. And both of your moons are in Cancer. Perfect.”