“Fifty-two! The longest I’ve ever been with anyone is four months, and that was back in freshman year.”
“Up until today, that didn’t feel nearly long enough.” Grace raised her eyebrows. “You know, he refused to die in the hospital. So our sons transferred him back home. And our last kiss… oh, I’ll never forget that one! I leaned down to peck him on the lips. But he French-kissed me instead.”
“No, he didn’t!”
“French. Kissed!” She yelled the words as she spun around toward me. “He was sexy to the end!”
We both laughed so hard, we couldn’t have taken another step if we tried.
“And then he sighed, the two most beautiful sighs in the world, like he was reliving our life together. You know, he always made me feel so beloved.” Grace’s eyes shimmered with tears.
Always beloved. That was so far from how Dom made me feel during the last weeks we were together, even before the breakup. Try nuisance. Try pest. Try anything but beloved.
“You must miss him,” I said softly.
“More than you know. Or maybe you do.”
“I thought I missed Dom—that was his name. But now I sort of wonder if I missed the idea of him more.”
“Why do you say that?”
I flushed. It was hard to admit the truth to myself, let alone to another person. But I had kept my heartbreak a secret for too long. “He had a big presentation, and it must not have gone well. He didn’t get the funding he was expecting.”
“And he blamed you,” Grace guessed.
“Yeah! It was so unfair, because we hadn’t even seen each other for a week. And then before that, he was on vacation with his family.” I peered up at Grace on the step above mine. “How did you know?”
She shrugged. “At first was he charming? Complimenting everything about you?”
“Yeah,” I said, so astonished that the slight breeze could have knocked me off my feet. For our third date, I had asked Dom to join me for a long run, ending with a three-mile loop around Green Lake to his rental house. His roommates had been tossing around a football on the lawn. Thanks to my two older brothers, who had trained me well in all things sports, I’d intercepted the football and thrown it back in a beautiful spiral.
“Whoa, you found the perfect woman,” one of his roommates had said, tossing the football to me.
“Hands off,” Dom had said, knocking the football out of my reach. “This goddess is all mine.”
With her hands on her hips, Grace asked, “Did he tell you that no one had ever understood him the way you did? That he’d never been able to talk to anyone the way he could with you?”
“Yeah! How did you know?”
Grace’s lips pressed together. “And what happened after the first time you disagreed with him?”
“It was our fourth date,” I said, remembering the day clearly because I had kicked myself for a full five days afterward when Dom didn’t answer a single one of my texts or calls. I knew I had blown it, but I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. “He asked me what I thought about the website for his game. So I told him I didn’t think it was unique enough.”
“Let me guess. He took it as a personal insult that you criticized it, right?”
“How did you know?”
“And then after that,” said Grace, “I bet nothing you could do was right or good enough.”
I remembered how Dom’s criticism had begun to creep into our conversation, so subtly, I could never point it out to him: You really don’t know about f-stops? Whenever I bristled, he said I was being overly sensitive. I demanded, “Really, Grace, how do you know all this?”
“My daughter was married to a narcissist, and he just picked and picked and picked at her. She thought she was living in crazy town, but it was just him, diminishing her to make himself feel more important. Thank goodness they got divorced before they had kids. How long were you together with Dom?”
“Six weeks.”
“You should be grateful that you got out as soon as you did,” said Grace, drawing her hood over her head as the rain restarted.
After months of blaming myself for the breakup, the world might have spun off its axis, Grace’s answer was that startling. It was shocking to consider that even though Dom went to the right school, knew the right people, drove the right car, aspired to the right career, he may never have been my Mr. Right.
We walked in silence for such a long time that Grace misread my quiet. Without warning, she spun around to apologize. “I’m sorry, honey! Did I offend you?”
“No!” I told her emphatically. “I think this might be the first time that I’ve thought straight about the whole thing. I mean, I was so wrong about Dom, what if I find out that my next guy is a narcissist, too?” I grimaced. “Maybe I should just go solo forever.”
“You can’t shy away from love just because you’re scared and—” Grace stopped suddenly with a sharp intake of breath.
“Grace! You okay?”
“Okay, I get it!” She called up to the sky. “Girls, I get it.”