At the time, Crystal really had no intention of dating this very young man, marriage or no, but she couldn’t stop herself from talking to him. He showered her with attention, and she had fun gently teasing him in return. As Christmas approached, they joked about mistletoe.
Dennis was still living with Janet then and, by his account, trying to make the best of the shaky marriage. She had two daughters from a previous relationship, whom Dennis said he loved as his own. He wasn’t ready to give up just yet. But on Christmas Eve, Janet sent him out for something—a lightbulb, maybe, or milk. The grocery stores were all closed, so he went to Rite Aid. He grabbed the milk and strode up to the counter. Just as he was taking out his wallet, he looked up and there she was: Crystal, with her daughter in tow. He knew just what to do. He grabbed a sprig of plastic mistletoe from next to the register, threw down a ten, and, with a parting nod to the cashier, bounded up to her.
“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”
She smiled. She may have rolled her eyes a little. “Yeah, okay. Sarah, go pick out a card, I’ll be right back.”
They stepped outside into the frigid air. As the glass doors closed behind them with a little suction sound, shutting out the Christmas music and leaving them in the quiet dusk, Dennis held the mistletoe aloft. “Can I have that kiss now?” he said.
And he leaned down and kissed her. And she kissed back, and back, and back.
The next day, Dennis celebrated Christmas at home with Janet and her kids, and Tim came to our house for Christmas after spending the night at his parents’. Gwen and Dave came, and we all opened presents and ate ham and laughed in the glow of the tree. Mom had fun; she was proud to host her sister in her home, happy that her boyfriend and her family were together. But there was a cold undercurrent beneath the warmth of the day. If she and Tim didn’t last, she thought, next year would be ruined by the pain of missing him, of remembering him here amid the tinsel and the holiday music.
The glow from that drugstore evening carried Dennis all through the holidays. In the meantime, he and Crystal continued their dance at work. They didn’t repeat the impulsive kiss, but they did go to the Black Horse Tavern on Friday afternoons when they got out early. They’d drink coffee for a couple of hours, until it was time for Mom to pick me up from school, just across the street.
Soon Dennis started coming around to our house with Mom’s friend Richard once a week to watch Seinfeld with us. Richard—a jokey man I called Hairball because of his wild mane and full beard—had always been very kind to Mom, and it was clear that he liked Dennis better than Tim. I took this endorsement seriously, and Dennis was smart about making his case to me. He talked to me, asked me about my interests. He seemed intelligent and didn’t patronize me like some adults did. I also thought he was very good-looking, with those long dimples and cute teeth. He was more striking than Tim, it’s true, but he was also only eight years older than me. I called him Denny.
Following some depressing natural law, Mom’s car had been giving her trouble since the moment she’d paid it off months earlier, and Denny was good with cars. What’s more, he was around—she couldn’t always afford a garage, and when the Tempo wouldn’t start, she had little choice but to call Denny, who always came and could always get it running again. In my diary at the time, I wrote, “Tim just comes and has sex with Mom and then goes back to college. But Denny does things for her, he fixes her car. He fixed everything he found broken around the house. Why won’t she date Denny?”
Denny seemed to enliven my mother from the start. I knew, the moment I met him, that first night when he came over with Richard, that my mother was lying when she said they were “just friends.” Of course, she may not have been honest with herself about her feelings, either. Denny was full of barely contained energy, and he poured that energy into my mother just by looking at her. I knew he could tempt her away from Tim and his constant disappointments. I was tired of her overwhelming sadness when things with Tim weren’t going well, sadness that came upon her like a wave I was powerless to block, a force that drowned us both.
Finally, Dennis walked out on a fight with his wife and never went back. They filed for divorce, and the proceedings moved along swiftly. He went to the courthouse downtown to finalize the divorce during a lunch break from work. When he returned and parked, Crystal had just gotten back from lunch, too, and they walked into the Shop together. As they approached their stations, he was walking ahead of her, and she said, “Hey!”
He turned around, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Yeah?”
And she stepped forward, grabbed his shirt collar, and planted a huge kiss on him, right in front of everybody. People stopped what they were doing to stare.
“There,” she said. “Now you can go back to work.”
Later, Dennis said of that moment, “It wasn’t the day I put a tack through my finger, but it could’ve been. She just blew me away. All the time, really.”
22
* * *
after
Not long after I arrived in Texas, Tootsie took the whole family on a trip to the Six Flags park just outside San Antonio, about three hours away. We stayed at a Motel 6 that night rather than drive home. When she announced that it was time to change for bed, the boys started stripping off their clothes, flinging their tiny shirts to the floor and hop-wiggling out of their pants. I gathered my pajamas from my bag and then stood there, hesitating. “It’s okay,” Tootsie said. “We’re all family.” But I hardly knew these people, did not feel like one of them. My uncle Jimmy was right there, and though of course he wasn’t looking at me, I wasn’t about to change with him in the room. I think Tootsie simply forgot what it was like to be twelve years old, considered me too young to have developed a sense of modesty. I mumbled something about having to go to the bathroom anyway and changed in there, behind the shut and locked door. That moment was when I realized that I was wary of all men, not just those on the official suspect list.