Forever, Interrupted(56)
“All right, well, let’s get to it, shall we? We’re already missing previews!” Ben said.
“Well, I still need to print the tickets. Will you guys go get us some popcorn?”
Ben looked at me incredulously and rolled his eyes. I laughed at him. “I want a Diet Coke,” I said.
Ben and Marshall ran ahead to the concession as Ana and I picked up the tickets from the kiosk.
“Who is this guy?” I said to her. She shrugged. “I don’t know. He keeps asking me out and I finally just relented and invited him here to get it over with.”
“So it’s true love, I guess,” I said. She picked up the tickets and started walking toward Ben and Marshall.
“True love, schmoo love,” she said. “I’m just trying to find someone that doesn’t bore me to tears for a little while.”
“You depress me,” I said, but I wasn’t paying attention to her when I said it. I was looking at Ben, who was asking the cashier for more butter on his already buttered popcorn. I was smiling. I was grinning. I was in love with the weirdo.
“No, you depress me,” she said.
I turned to her and laughed. “You don’t think that one day you’ll meet ‘the One’?”
“Love has made you sappy and gross,” she said to me. We had almost met up with Ben and Marshall when I decided to tell her the news.
“Ben’s moving in,” I said. She stopped dead in her tracks and dropped her purse.
“What?”
Ben saw her face and caught my eye. He knew what was going on, and he smiled at me mischievously as he put a handful of popcorn into his mouth. I smiled back at him. I picked up Ana’s purse. She pulled me aside by my shoulders as Ben watched, standing next to a very confused Marshall.
“You are crazy! You’re basically sending yourself to a prison. You wake up, he’s there. You go to sleep, he’s there. He’s going to always be there! He’s a great guy, Elsie. I like him a lot. I’m happy that you two found each other, but c’mon! This is a death sentence.”
I just looked at her and smiled. For the first time, I felt like I had something over her. Sure, she was stunning and gorgeous and lively and bright. Men wanted her so badly they’d hound her for dates. But this man wanted me, and unlike Ana, I had felt what it was like to be wanted by someone you wanted just as badly. I wanted that for her, but there was a small part of me that felt victorious in that I had it and she didn’t even know enough to want it.
SEPTEMBER
Ana and Kevin are only three minutes late. She opens my door with her own key. Ana looks hot. Really hot, spared-no-expense, pull-all-the-punches hot. I am dressed like I’m going to the grocery store. Kevin is right behind her, and while I am expecting some overly tailored douche bag with hair better than mine, I find a much different person.
Kevin is short, at least shorter than Ana. He’s about my height. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt; looks like he got the grocery store memo too. His face is nondescript. His skin is mostly clear but somewhat muddled; his hair is a shade of brown best described as “meh,” and he looks like he neither works out nor is a slovenly couch potato.
He leans toward me, around Ana. “Kevin,” he says, shaking my hand. It’s not a bold handshake, but it’s not a dead fish. It’s polite and nice. He smiles and I smile back. I see him take in his surroundings, and I start to look around my house as well, as an impulse. I see my living room through his eyes. He no doubt knows about me, knows that my husband is dead, knows that Ana is my best friend; maybe he knows that I feel like he is trying to take her away from me. As he looks, I feel self-conscious about all of Ben’s things around us. I want to say, “I’m not some crazy woman. It’s just too hard to put these away yet.” But I don’t, because saying you’re not crazy makes you seem crazy.
“Shall we?” Ana says. Kevin and I nod. Within a few seconds we are out the door. We cram into Kevin’s Honda. I offer to take the backseat, and I squeeze myself into it by ducking and crunching behind the passenger-side door. Why do two-door cars exist? It is the most cumbersome of all tasks to try to wedge yourself into the backseat of one.
On the way to the restaurant, Ana is clearly trying to give Kevin and me a common thread upon which to build a relationship. It feels so strange. I get the distinct impression that Ana is trying to make sure Kevin and I get along. She’s trying to make sure I like Kevin. She’s never done that before. She’s never cared. Most of the time, meeting me is their death knell. She uses me to let them know that she doesn’t need alone time with them, that we are all friends. This isn’t that. She’s not kicking him out the door. She’s inviting him inside.
“How did you guys meet?” I ask from the backseat.
“Oh, at yoga,” he says, paying attention to the road.
“Yeah, Kevin was always in my Tuesday night class and he was just so bad”—she laughs—“that I had to personally help him.”
“I’ve tried to explain to her that instructors are supposed to help their students, but she seems to think she was doing me a favor,” he jokes, and I laugh politely as if this is hilarious. I’m missing whatever it is this guy has going for him. “Worked out in my favor though, since it got her to ask me out.”