In Broken Places

3




I’D JUST WANTED to make my dad a drawing. That’s all. But my old eraser made red marks on my paper and smeared my pencil lines, so I went hunting for another one. I knew Dad had one somewhere in his desk, a white one that used to be square but looked rounder now that all the corners had been rubbed off. It was a good eraser. And it smelled—I don’t know—helpful, somehow.

So I went to his desk and looked in the drawers and behind the stacks of papers, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to get into his things. I figured just this once would be okay because it was for him. Dad always watched John Wayne Westerns on TV, so I was drawing him a cowboy on a big black horse, with hills in the background and some Indians’ feathers poking out from behind them in red and green and yellow. It was everything he liked right there on one piece of paper, and I was pretty sure it would make him happy—like Tootsie Rolls made my brain grow a smiley face. On days when Trey stayed after school for soccer, I really needed my dad to be less mad.

I didn’t find the eraser, not even in the tin at the back of the top drawer where he kept old batteries and rubber bands and twisty ties and paper clips.

I finished the drawing anyway and put it up on the fridge with a basket-of-fruit magnet. Then I waited for him to come home. I could always tell by the way he closed the back door if he was happy or mad. Today he’d slammed it so hard that the glasses in the cupboard rattled and I was glad I’d done something that would—maybe—make him just a bit less angry. Actually, it was more about making me less scared than making him less angry.

Dad went straight to his office before I could tell him about John Wayne, and I could hear him fiddling around for a while. I was trying to get up the courage to interrupt him when he said, “Who’s been in my desk?” He kind of growled it more than just saying it.

I could tell Mom was trying to be soothing when she said from the kitchen, “Just Shelby. She was looking for an eraser, I think. Where is that white one, by the way? We looked through every drawer in the house for it this afternoon!” Her voice sounded jittery.

My father stepped out of his museum-clean office and saw me leaning against the arm of the couch. I’d bumped into it backing away from his door.

“You’ve been going through my things?” he asked.

His voice was quiet. But it was that thunder-behind-the-clouds kind of quiet that made me want to cover my ears and sing “La-la-la” as loud as I could. I figured if I made enough noise, I wouldn’t be able to hear it when the thunder really got close. The other option was running really fast and really far. But the rule was no screaming and no running in the house. So I had to just kind of stand there and be scared and hope he wouldn’t notice and call me a coward. There was usually another word right before coward, but it made me feel cringy to even think it in my mind.

“Answer me,” Dad demanded. His voice sounded like barbed wire. The backs of my legs were up against the couch. I couldn’t have run even if I’d tried. “Have you been in my stuff?”

I fought the tears. I fought them and fought them. I tried to sing happy songs in my mind, but the stupid tears came anyway and I knew they’d make Dad go from angry bull to exploding bomb—like in the Road Runner cartoons. “I . . . I was making you a present. . . .”

And that’s as far as I got. His fingers closed around my arm so hard that my legs gave out. I tried to pry his hand away, but he just held on tighter. I could see Mom peeking around the doorway, but she didn’t say anything. She never did. “You will not touch my things again,” my dad hissed at me. I could feel his spit hitting my face and smell old coffee on his breath. “If you touch them again, I’ll give you a real reason to cry.” His fingers tightened some more around my arm as his eyes squinted and slashed.

“Jim?” My mom had found her voice. A squeaky voice, but a voice.

Dad let me go so suddenly that I fell into the arm of the couch and slid to the floor in a humiliated tangle of limbs and loss and misery. It was my fault. I had made him mad with my dumb picture. I knew that he worked really hard and needed everything to be tidy and quiet when he got home. I was stupid, stupid, stupid.

“Keep her out of my office, Gail,” my father barked. He turned like a soldier in a parade and marched out of the living room.



It was well before dawn when I heard the door of my bedroom open.

“Shelby?” The clear, high voice close to my ear sounded like it meant business. “Shelby, you awake?”

I tried not to groan and pried an eyelid up just long enough to ascertain three facts: I was in a German apartment, it was just after four, and Shayla was looking way too wide-awake for this ungodly hour. By my calculations, she’d gotten just seven hours of sleep, which was roughly ten hours less than I’d hoped for. Her long afternoon nap the day before was coming back to bite us both in the you-know-what. Jet lag was nasty business.

“You wanna crawl into bed with me?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m hungwy.”

“Well, sure, but how ’bout we snuggle for a little while before we eat?”

“I’m hungwy.” There was a telltale threadiness to her voice this time around. I’d heard it before, usually right about the time this child I’d thought was perfect had launched into an unprovoked crying jag. I pushed back Bev’s lavender-scented sheets and swung my feet onto the chilly tile floor.

“You want a piece of bread?” I asked as Shayla and I padded down the hallway from my bedroom to the kitchen.

“Toast,” she said.

The apartment looked no better after a night of sleep than it had the day before. There wasn’t anything overtly wrong with it. It was just that the walls were all painted chalky white and everything was square and sterile. The off-white tile floors were cold and the furniture was hard and angular. I knew it would begin to feel familiar eventually, but for now, to my sleep-deprived mind, it felt more like a furnished science lab than a home.

I looked through the cupboards without finding a toaster. “There’s no toaster, sweetie,” I told the expectant child who stood no taller than my hip. “Can we just have bread this morning and we’ll buy a toaster later?”

Her mouth twisted a little and her chin began to wobble. “But I like toast,” she said.

“Shayla, there’s no toaster. And I can’t make you toast without a toaster.”

“But . . .” A house without a toaster was an aberration to her mind. “But I want toast.”

Toast was a big deal to my jet-lagged four-year-old. The wobble became a wail that started soft and crescendoed from there. Stream to torrent. Spark to blaze. Zero to sixty before I’d had time to quell it. I tried to reason with her.

“Shay, this isn’t our old place. . . . We don’t have everything we need here yet.”

The crescendo grew to new proportions. So I got defensive.

“There’s nothing I can do about it, Shayla. It’s practically the middle of the night and . . .”

The wail rose to greater heights. So I decided to get firm.

“Stop that right now, Shayla!”

And off we went into a stratosphere of weeping I’d only visited on a couple of previous occasions. How Shayla managed to stay upright with her head thrown back and her body gone limp was beyond my understanding, but there she stood, tears sliding down her cheeks and neck and under the collar of her Cinderella pj’s. While I pondered my options and feared another failure, Shayla gasped and sputtered and gathered another breath, then tore into the second chapter of her wail.

I sighed and lowered myself to the floor, pulling Shayla into my lap and holding her sideways against me. She resisted at first, leaning her body weight outward and down, her hands pushing weakly at mine. But I lifted her closer and kissed her hot, damp temple and shushed quietly against her ear and began to rock, side to side, like a metronome measuring her forlornness. She hiccuped once, twice, swallowed hard, let out another mini-wail, then ran completely out of steam. She burrowed a little deeper and rubbed her cheek against my chest, her lungs spasming in the wake of so much strain.

“Things feel really different this morning, don’t they, Shayla.” She took a tremulous breath, nodded, and wrapped an arm loosely around my waist. “Do you miss home?”

A tiny bubble of air sighed out of her. “I miss my daddy,” she said, and I felt a familiar sinking in my gut. I knew this wasn’t completely about her dad. I knew, on a rational level, that this was about a new place and new people and a new bed and a window that hadn’t been where it was supposed to be when she’d opened her eyes this morning, but on the level of my own inner six-year-old, her words punched the confidence out of my courage. She missed her dad. She missed her dad. There was nothing I could do for that other than hold her a little closer and stifle my denials of her dad’s wonderfulness. It was good that she loved him. A little girl needed that. It just made my own loss feel more empty.

We sat on the tile for a few minutes more, which gave me time to assess my response to this latest crisis and give myself a failing grade. I sang Barney’s theme song for her, and then she joined in a faltering rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” which never failed to bring back memories of the bright-yellow sun she’d drawn during our very first encounter. “What do you want on your bread?” I asked when we’d sung ourselves dry.

“Stwawberry jam.”

Of course. “Have you used the bathroom yet?” She padded off toward the insanely small bathroom while I opened the fridge and prayed for strawberry jam. Bless Bev’s saintly heart, there was one jar of jam in the fridge and it had strawberries on the label.

There were three more teary episodes in the hour that followed, which may have set a new record. The first was when she discovered that German bread was harder than the Wonder Bread she was used to; the second was when I suggested she go back to bed and lie quietly for a few minutes as the rest of the world wasn’t awake yet; and the third was when we discovered that shower hoses apparently didn’t hang from the wall in German bathrooms but had to be held by hand. I knew this would be a bit of a sticking point for me, too. If there was one thing I loved in life, it was a long, hot shower. But I was trying to look on the bright side that morning, so I remembered what I’d been told about the exorbitant price of water in Germany and tried to be grateful that my contortionist showers would probably save me money.

“I want to go home,” Shayla wailed as I aimed the water at her hair and rinsed off the shampoo suds she had been shaping into horns and halos minutes before. They coursed down her back between her chicken-wing shoulder blades.

“This all feels pretty weird, doesn’t it.”

“Wee-ohd,” she repeated with passion, tears in her voice.

“We’ll take a walk around town later, okay? Get to know it a little better. It looked really pretty when we drove in yesterday, don’t you think?”

“It’s wee-ohd.”

“You’re right. It is. But you do like Bev, right? She’s not weird at all.”

“Gus, too.”

“They’re good people,” I agreed as I wrapped her in a thin blue towel Bev had left for us. “And Bev’s going to be taking care of you while I’m at work, so you’ll get to spend lots of time with her.”

“She makes good cookies.”

I laughed and wondered if all women were plagued, from such a young age, by an obsession with food. “We’ll get you cookies today too,” I said, and the news seemed to comfort Shayla immensely. So at five o’clock in the morning of my first full day in Germany, I sat on the edge of the tub with a sopping-wet child wrapped in my arms and had a long conversation about cookies and cake.



The air felt taut. It was streaked with Daddy’s spittle and tinted gray-green by his wrath. “You will finish your meal!” he screamed into Trey’s stricken face, his bullhorn words a blistering burn, a stab, a hammer strike. “And you will finish it now. So pick up your fork and get shoveling, boy!” He punctuated his tirade with a string of expletives that made my brother shrivel and slump.

Trey looked across the table at me and I tried to wing some courage to him with my eyes, but I knew he couldn’t really see me. It was a weird side effect of my dad’s temper tantrums, as if the loudness of his voice took so much out of us that there was nothing left for seeing or smelling. I’d felt it often enough that I recognized it in my brother—my gentle, tough brother whose eyes looked stubborn and scared.

“Eat!” my dad yelled again, and when Trey, frozen by fear, didn’t budge, he grabbed a fistful of zucchini and mashed it against his son’s mouth. I saw tears spring out and balance on Trey’s lower eyelids as he clamped his jaw shut and furrowed his eyebrows in a superhuman effort to keep emotions at bay. He had never liked zucchini, had always gagged on it like I gagged on mushrooms, and I knew he’d rather have eaten worms at that moment than chewed on the green triangles he’d so meticulously separated from the rest of his stir-fry. I looked at his plate where the vegetables had been stacked in neat little piles until moments ago. We’d both learned early on that tall stacks made quantities look smaller, and I’d often felt a little jealous that Trey’s most detested food was so much more stackable than my despised fried mushrooms.

But the ploy hadn’t fooled our dad today. He’d come home from work with so much tension ricocheting around inside him that I thought he should have sounded like a beehive. Instead, he sounded like one of those bad guys on TV that hold up banks with masks on their faces—and as a result, my brother looked like one of those dogs that live at rest stops on the highway. I wouldn’t forgive my dad for reducing him to that. Not ever. Trey seemed to have shrunk—so much so that I thought I might be taller than him at last. But I knew that was only a for-now kind of thing. He’d grow back to his normal size once my dad slammed out of the house and took off, tires squealing, in his fancy black car.

Right now, though, there was only razor-sharp anger and ugly bullet-words that seemed to be striking my brother from the inside out. I wanted to run around the table and hit my dad’s chest until he turned his wrath on me. It was okay for me to cry—I could take it—but I was afraid of what would happen to Trey if those shimmering tears ever fell from their perch onto his flushed cheeks. They would hurt him much more than any of my father’s words.

We’d been well trained by now, though. We knew to sit still as statues while my dad ranted and raved. Still as the green soldier on the pedestal in the park. Still as the air when my dad’s anger ran out and all we could hear was pieces of our souls drifting to the gouged linoleum like shards of shattered shell.

“You did this,” my dad screamed, turning his bile on my mother, who stood clutching the back of a chair on the other side of Trey. His voice sneered as he continued. “You sissified him with your cooing and fawning and now we’re stuck with a mama’s boy that doesn’t have the guts to eat his ve-ge-ta-bles. . . .” He yelled the last word right into Trey’s ear and I saw my brother flinch, bits of zucchini still stuck to his face. I looked to my mom, but there was no salvation there. Only a grown-up reflection of my brother’s gut-sick fear.

So I did what I always did when my dad went all Wicked Witch of the West on us. I locked eyes with Trey, whether he could see me or not, and designed stuffed animals in my mind. I was on animal number three when I heard the door slam and my dad’s car peel away. I wondered if the stuffed animal in Trey’s mind was blood-red too.



Shayla was excited that she’d had two mornings today—the first one with the bright-red sunrise, the shower, and the strawberry jam, and the second one without the sunrise and shower, but with more strawberry jam. Strawberry jam was a big item in Shayla’s little life. I was only grateful that she’d fallen back to sleep for a couple hours between her two breakfasts. Toward the middle of our “second morning,” we ventured out of our new home and into the streets of Kandern. A short walk brought us to the Hauptstrasse, a street lined with small stores and restaurants that ran the length of the town. I’d read on the Internet that Kandern was actually classified as a city, the smallest city in Germany by some accounts, but the narrowness of the streets and the smallness of the buildings gave it that barely-larger-than-a-village feel I found quaint and endearing.

I decided that if Kandern were human, it would be a middle-aged man with a big, rounded belly, weather-chafed cheeks, and a hesitant smile. He’d be wearing tuxedo pants below the waist and a plaid shirt above it, equal parts sophistication and down-home charm. Kandern was a farmer looking for a banquet and hoping he’d fit in when he got there.

Shayla and I walked up the street hand in hand, pausing to stare into storefronts at homemade pottery and thick-heeled shoes, then halting again for Shayla to run her fingers under a fountain’s waterspout. Though the rest of the town seemed deserted for a Saturday, one plot of real estate was bustling with activity. A farmer’s market filled the small square, and stands brimming with fresh fruit and vegetables begged me to spend some of the money Gus had loaned us yesterday on an apple for Shayla. I listened to the conversations going on around us as we wandered the market and waited in vain to hear a word I recognized. There were none. That would come eventually, I told myself—but still, I had never felt more foreign, and I found it disconcerting.

When Shayla finished her fruit, we headed into a nineteenth-century church just behind the market and decided in unison that its garish, life-size crucifix, complete with profusely bleeding wounds and dying grimace, was a little too graphic for our tastes. High above us, in the rear balcony, an elderly gentleman brought a pipe organ to life with hands and feet and soul, and the broad chords of “Ode to Joy” filled the church with a warmth and power that made my heart smile. Shayla, unfortunately, wasn’t as entranced as I was with the music, and she dragged me out of the church after just a few minutes to continue our exploration of Kandern.

The square at the center of town, the Blumenplatz, was framed by knobby trees and paved with cobblestones. By the time we got there, we’d become accustomed to the greetings we received from just about every person we passed. At first, I’d figured they were mistaking us for someone else, but as I observed other travelers on Kandern’s sidewalks, it became clear that these curt greetings were a common thing in this culture. The word they said sounded like tuck, and after a bewildered “They don’t even know us” from Shayla, she’d taken to the game with vigor. She had no clue what she was saying, but she uttered her tucks with the kind of verve that earned her smiles and pats on the head.

We found a small paper store, on the corner of the Blumenplatz, with racks of postcards displayed outside. “Let’s get this one for Twey,” Shayla said, pointing to a picture of a cow posing in front of snowcapped mountains.

“You sure?”

She nodded vigorously. “Twey likes cows,” she said with conviction. “He dwinks milk all the time.”

There was no arguing with that kind of logic, so we bought the card and headed home. Bev and Gus were waiting on our doorstep when we got there.

“Are we late?” I asked, embarrassed to have kept them waiting.

“Not at all!” Gus swung Shayla off the ground and perched her on his shoulder. “We old folks tend to get places early, and today’s no exception.”

Bev wrapped me in a motherly hug. “Did you sleep all right, honey?”

“Right until Shayla woke up.”

“I had two mohnings this mohning,” came Shayla’s voice from above me.

“How’d you manage that?” Gus said.

“I woke up and I ate hawd bwead and then I went to sleep and then I woke up and ate hawd bwead again.”

“You think the bread made an impression on her?” I said to Bev.

“But Shelby said we’d get some diffewent bwead this afternoon and maybe a toastoh to toast it.”

Gus raised an eyebrow at his wife. “Who’s going to break the news?”

“Here’s the bad news, ladies,” Bev announced. “Only grocery stores are open on Saturday afternoons in Kandern. All the rest of the stores are closed. And they stay closed until Monday morning.”

“They do?” It seemed like a pretty poor economical choice to close stores on the two days of the week when people were actually home, but who was I to question it?

“We can’t get a toastoh?” Shayla asked.

“I’ll loan you mine,” Bev assured her. “But before we do that, how ’bout we go to school and show your mo—and show Shelby where she’s going to be working?”

Shayla seemed to think she had a say in the matter and pursed her lips in thought. I laughed at the independent streak that was already so strong in her and wondered what her teen years would be like. For her and for me. “Let’s go, Shayla.” I lifted her down from Gus’s shoulder so she could walk next to me on the narrow sidewalk.

We arrived at the school a few minutes later, and Gus gave us a royal tour of the premises. One building was nondescript, four stories high, and had recently had a gym and auditorium built onto it. The second building, which stood behind the first, had just been renovated and was home to a state-of-the-art library. The school’s classrooms were divided between the two buildings, and it was in the second, newly renovated one that I found mine.

As the academic year had started five weeks before, the teacher covering for me had already made herself at home in the space. There were posters on the walls, pictures and quotes, a portrait of Shakespeare and a poem by Frost. The desks were arranged in two arching rows. I counted just twenty-two of them. A good sign indeed. My last teaching assignment had involved inner-city classes of nearly thirty students, and this, in comparison, looked like a cakewalk.

Gus finished our tour with the gym, a tall, broad space flanked on one side by bleachers and on the other by high windows. I figured I might as well get this visit over with on my first day at school, because chances were slim I’d ever enter the space again. Gyms, in my experience, had nothing to offer but sweat, which I considered humanity’s greatest design flaw, and pain, which only looked noble in the worlds of Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. So I looked around, acknowledged the gym’s size and technology, and mentally checked it off my list of places to see.

Gus was giving me a rundown of the competitive sports in which the school’s teams participated when a door above the bleachers opened and a man carrying a bucket entered the gym. Years of effort had trained me well in the art of greeting men who, even from a distance, appeared to be rather attractive. I looked away and focused on my double chins, which Trey insisted I didn’t have. But in the distorted mirror of my mind, they were the size of a cherub’s rear—and nowhere near as cute.

“Hey, Gus,” the sandy-haired man said, raising a hand in greeting.

“Scott! What are you doing working on a Saturday?”

“Beats sitting at home,” the younger man answered. “Where’s Bev?”

“I traded her in for a younger model!” Gus laughed. “Actually, she’s giving a little guest of ours a tour of the ladies’ room. Don’t go too far—she’ll be wanting to see you.”

“Not going anywhere,” Scott answered, hiking up his jeans and hunkering down to peer more closely at the benches in the bleachers. “I’ve got a boatload of gum to scrape off before I’m through here.”

“Great thinking, my friend! That’s one less thing for old Gus to do!”

“A custodian?” I whispered to Gus, my chins swinging against each other in my mind as I spoke.

“The head coach and health teacher,” he answered.

“Scott Taylor!” Bev shrilled from right behind me, scaring me so badly with her deeply Southern exclamation that I thought I’d have to make a trip to the ladies’ room myself. “Get your buns down here so you can meet my new friends!”

Her voice echoed around the gym as Scott threw up his hands in mock surrender. “Yes, ma’am!” he yelled down to a beaming Bev.

“Smart boy,” Gus whispered to me, traces of husbandly pride in his smile. “When Bev gives an order, the only correct answer is a resounding ‘Yes, ma’am!’ Learned that on my honeymoon.”

Scott trotted over to us moments later, and I realized he was taller and younger up close than he’d appeared from afar. A quick glance took stock of his short, wavy hair, his deep-brown eyes, and the shadow of stubble across his jaw. I added love handles to my chin obsession and bent down to straighten Shayla’s blue hair clips.

“Scott, my boy,” Gus said, “I’d like you to meet Shelby Davis, your future wife.”

I straightened slowly—dumbfounded. If Shayla’s eyes could have outgrown her face, they would have done so at that moment. Just as my embarrassment was outgrowing my poise. I looked from Gus’s cheerful smile to Shayla’s frozen stare to Bev’s Cheshire grin. I looked into the rafters, I skimmed the gym’s blue floor, and I sent up a prayer, once again, for a spontaneous Rapture.

“Well, it sure took you long enough,” Scott said, and I could see from my peripheral vision that he was extending a hand toward me. “Where’ve you been all my life?”

The smile in his voice proved either that he had a healthy sense of humor or that he shared a delusional disorder with my former friend, Gus. “Running from humiliating moments just like this one,” I answered his question, shaking his hand without ever actually making eye contact.

“She’s the English teacher we’ve been waiting for since the beginning of the school year! And this,” Bev added as if this were the most normal conversation in the world, “is Shayla. Shelby’s daughter.” She caught herself. “I mean . . . Shelby’s . . .”

“‘Daughter’ is fine.” I laid a hand on Bev’s arm, distracted from my embarrassment by concern for the little girl who still stared up at all four of us as if we’d suddenly sprung horns.

“You getting ma-wied, Shelby?” she asked, eyebrows drawn.

I rolled my eyes. Then I rolled them again for good measure. I stopped there because I felt a headache coming on. I picked Shayla up and brought our faces nose-to-nose. “Remember when we talked about this before?” My little girl nodded seriously, her knees digging into my midriff. “What did I tell you then?”

“You’re too busy to get ma-wied.”

“Right.”

Shayla pushed away from me, and I set her down on the floor. With eyes riveted on Scott, who’d been observing our exchange in amused silence, arms crossed, the pale little girl in the blue turtleneck took a step toward him and, hands on hips and forehead furrowed, stated, “She’s not going to ma-wy you!” She said the words with such conviction that part of me was offended.

Scott hunkered down in front of his pint-size confronter and looked very seriously into her eyes. “Do you know any jokes?” he asked.

Shayla was taken aback by the question. Then again, so was I.

She looked up and around, scanning her memory for a joke, and burst into a smile when one came to her. “Why didn’t the man see the elephants?” she asked.

Scott appeared to think hard and then give up.

“Because they were weawing sunglasses!”

Three of the four adults in the gym frowned in confusion. We were still racking our minds for a trace of humor in Shayla’s joke when Scott chuckled and said, “See? That’s a joke. And Gus here was just making a joke when he talked about your mom getting married.”

I held my breath. I’m pretty sure Gus and Bev did too. Shayla, on the other hand, was holding nothing back. She leaned in and, in a conspiratorial whisper, said, “Gus’s joke wasn’t vewy funny.”

“Hey!” Gus was mildly insulted and immensely entertained.

“You tell ’im, Shayla!” Bev said.

“You’ll get used to them,” Scott told me, pointing his chin toward my new friends as he stood. “They grow on you.” He paused. “Kind of like a parasite, come to think of it.” He bent low to flick Shayla’s chin. “It was very nice to meet you, little girl.”

“I’m four!”

“Well then, it was very nice to meet you, big girl.”

Shayla found my hand and slunk behind my leg.

“Back to work!” Scott declared, walking toward the door to the bleachers, then turning back to level a pleasant “You two really need to get a hobby” at Gus and Bev.

We exited the building without another word spoken, but once we were well out of earshot, I turned on Gus with an incredulous “What was that?”

Bev took Shayla’s hand, crossed the street, and headed toward home. Gus patted my back as we followed after them and met my wild-eyed disbelief with a long, hearty chuckle. “Oh, Shelby,” he said when it had passed, “if you could have seen your face!”

“Do you introduce all your friends like that?” I tried to keep my voice cheerful, but there was lead spreading in my lungs.

“Only the ones I like!”

Bev said, “Actually, I don’t recall him ever doing that before.” She smiled at me over her shoulder while Shayla gripped her hand to jump over a puddle.

There was something dirty-brown in my mind as we walked toward home. Gus’s bold introduction had destabilized the part of me I’d so carefully kept calm over the last two days of change—the part that wanted to flinch like a patient in a dentist’s chair every time something new or unexpected came along. I’d done well so far, taking all the newness in stride while I’d stifled my more natural instincts to run and hide with comfort words like “This will pass with time” and “Change never killed anyone.” I’d expected the language barriers and feelings of alienation. I’d expected the jet lag and the pervasive, gnawing lostness. But I hadn’t foreseen being introduced to a perfect stranger as his future wife. It had never crossed my mind. And it had jolted all kinds of fears and insecurities out of their carefully assigned cages.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Well-meaning people who wanted to introduce me to every available, nonsenile bachelor they knew were old hat to me. Old hat and insulting, although I knew there was a compliment hidden under the strategy of well-planned “chance encounters,” blatant hints, and sudden disappearances that left me face-to-face with unmarried specimens of the masculine persuasion. The subtext of the ploys was positive. It said, “We think you’re too good to be wasted on a collection of stray cats.” Though I appreciated the sentiment, I also found the meddling intrusive and the exhortations belittling. I didn’t want a husband any more than I wanted a festering rash. I had never had a serious boyfriend. I had never made a list of proposal scenarios. I had never designed wedding gowns in my head. Other girls’ dreams were my “nevers,” and I intended to keep it that way. But I had sworn off felines years ago in an attempt to outwit the old-maid stereotype.

And here I was in Germany, with just over twenty-four hours of international living under my belt, facing the same brand of matchmaking I’d battled all my life. I wasn’t sure if it was the jet lag or the impending start of a new career or the sight of the little girl galloping like a pony ahead of me, but the overt matchmaking didn’t feel funny at all this time. It felt invasive and insensitive and just a few notches too close to impossible on my sliding scale of life’s probabilities.