“You keep doing that!” he teased me.
“Okay, okay, it was a mistake. Let’s move on.”
“The freeway is clearing up so I should be there in about a half hour, I think. Then I think I’ll move in, in about four months. We will get engaged a year after that and married within a year after that. I think we should have time alone together before we have kids, don’t you? So maybe first kid at thirty. Second at thirty-three or thirty-four. I’m fine to have three if we have the money to do it comfortably. So, with your biological clock, let’s try for the third before thirty-eight or so. Kids will be out of the house and in college around fifty-five. We can be empty-nested and retired by sixty-five. Travel around the world a few times. I mean, sixty is the new forty, you know? We’ll still be spry and lively. Back from world travel by seventy, which gives us about ten to twenty years to spend time with our grandkids. You can garden, and I’ll start sculpting or something. Dead by ninety. Sound good?”
I laughed. “You didn’t account for your midlife crisis at forty-five, where you leave me and the kids and start dating a young preschool teacher with big boobs and a small ass.”
“Nah,” he said. “That won’t happen.”
“Oh no?” I dared him.
“Nope. I found the one. Those guys that do that, they didn’t find the one.”
He was cocksure and arrogant, thinking he knew better, thinking he could see the future. But I loved the future he saw and I loved the way he loved me.
“Come home,” I said. “Er, here. Come here.”
Ben laughed. “You have to stop doing that. According to the plan, I don’t move in for another four months.”
JUNE
I lie in bed all morning until Ana shows up, and she tells me to get dressed because we are going to the bookstore.
When we walk into the behemoth of a store, I follow Ana along as she picks up books and puts them down. She seems to have a purpose, but I don’t much care what it is. I leave her side and walk toward the Young Adult section. There I find a trio of teenage girls, laughing and teasing each other about boys and hairstyles.
I run my fingers over the books, looking for titles that I now own on my own bookshelf, their pages torn and softened by Ben’s fingers. I look for names I recognize because I got them from work and brought them home to him. I never guessed correctly, the books he’d want to read. I don’t think I ever got one right. I didn’t have enough time to learn what he liked. I would have learned though. I would have studied it and learned it and figured out who he was as a book reader if I’d just been given enough time.
Ana finds me eventually. By the time she has, I’m sitting on the floor next to the E-F-G section. I stand up and look at the book in her hand. “What’d ya get?”
“It’s for you. And I already paid for it,” she says. She hands it to me.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say, too loudly for a bookstore, even though I realize that’s not the same as a library.
“No,” she says. She’s taken aback by my reaction. Hell, so am I. “I just thought, you know, it’s a really popular book. There are people out there going through what you are going through.”
“You mean there are millions of misguided friends buying books for their sad friends.”
She ignores me.
“There are other people that have gotten through this, and I wanted you to know that if all those stupid people can do it, you, Elsie Porter, can do it. You are so strong and so smart, Elsie. I just wanted you to have something in your hand you could hold and know that you can do this.”
“Elsie Ross,” I say, correcting her. “My name is Elsie Ross.”
“I know,” she says, defensively.
“You called me Elsie Porter.”
“It was an accident.”
I stare at her and then get back to the issue at hand.