I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(5)
“Are you sure?” asked Cornelia, solemnly and as if she had someone specific in mind. I could guess who the someone might be, and for a second, I faltered.
“Zach says he will never have a happy day for the rest of his life if we aren’t together. Not ‘I can’t imagine having a happy day,’ but ‘I will never have a happy day,’ with this total assurance. No one has ever said that to me.”
“Ah,” said Cornelia. “Yes, I can see how maybe no one would have.”
“Three: anytime he goes to someone’s house or apartment, he takes a gift. And I’m not just talking about to fancy dinners, but on any occasion. Baseball-watching parties. Study sessions. Board game nights. Drop-by-for-a-beer kind of occasions. And not just flowers or a bottle of wine. But action figures. A funny T-shirt. A copy of the New Yorker with a Post-it marking an especially good article. A giant bag of gumballs. A garden gnome.”
“How completely adorable!” said my mother, and Cornelia clapped her hands.
What I did not add was that I knew what all the gifts were because, about a month after we’d begun dating, Zach had mostly stopped going places without me. If he were invited over to a friend’s house, he would ask me to come, and if I declined, he’d smile, shrug, and stay with me. And if I were invited somewhere, he would ask to come along, so charmingly that I would forget how to say no. Eventually, because it was just easier, I accepted it all, asking people ahead of time he if could come, saying yes to him even when I was tired or had too much homework or loathed watching baseball (I always loathed watching baseball). My friend Hildy declared it hideously dysfunctional and took to kidnapping me, sneaking up on me at the library or as I was coming out of a class and whisking me off to a restaurant or a bar or to her apartment. I felt bad about not telling Zach, worse about outright lying to him, but time alone with Hildy was far beyond a guilty pleasure. It ranked up there with food and sunlight and books.
“Four: he sincerely tries to reduce his carbon footprint. He has a low-emission car but rides his bike or walks whenever possible, even in the freezing cold; checks his tire inflation obsessively; drives no more than five miles over the speed limit, ever, even on the highway; never eats beef; consumes only locally produced food. He actually taught himself how to can.”
“Amazing,” said my mother.
“Impressive,” said Cornelia. “Although I do worry about botulism.”
I didn’t say that no matter how a conversation with Zach about climate change began (fracking, Hummers, a documentary on polar bears [there being no sadder sight on Earth than a starving polar bear, all baggy skin, huge paws, and haunted eyes]), it would end with an exhortation to save the world for our future children and their children and their children’s children, my stomach backflipping harder with each generation. Zach with his long line of offspring conga dancing relentlessly into the future, while I could not for the life of me—not after an extraordinarily good day with him or a few glasses of wine—envision even a single baby.
“Five: if we’re in a fight, he won’t walk away or go to bed or hang up until it’s resolved.”
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said my mother. “Going to bed mad is wretched, like trying to sleep with sand in your sheets or with a possible gas leak in your boiler.”
I had to laugh at this; only my mother would equate the risk of death by carbon monoxide with the discomfort of sand.
“I agree,” I said. “Who could ever marry someone who would let a fight just dangle there overnight?”
Cornelia raised her hand. “I did.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Teo? But he’s the best person in the world.” It was the God’s honest truth.
“Yes, but he believes in the restorative power of silence, walking away for a while, calming down, looking inward,” Cornelia said, “which is obviously incredibly annoying.”
“Someone should smack him,” growled my mother.
“Don’t think I haven’t come close. More than that, though, he’s got this faith.”
“In God?” I ask.
“In us—which seems to amount to the same thing for him.” Cornelia rolled her eyes. “He trusts in our ability to weather any storm so much that sometimes he actually forgets we’re fighting. He’ll just walk into a room where I’m fuming and start telling me a story about how it’s so windy that he just watched our neighbor chase his trash can lid all the way down the street. And I start laughing and forget that I loathe him and everything he stands for.”
“The rat bastard,” said my mother.
“Poor Cornelia,” I said. “Number six: Zach never tailgates, ever, no matter how slowly the car in front of him is going.”
“Because the driver in front of you could be anyone—an organ donor, a war hero, a man who’s just lost his best friend, a kid with a new license doing her best,” said Cornelia. “Not tailgating acknowledges the mystery and humanity of strangers. It’s one of those small habits that speaks volumes.”
“Like how someone treats waiters,” said my mother.
“That was number seven,” I said.
“Well, bravo, Zach,” said my mother.
“Eight: he laughs at my jokes.”
“Huge,” said Cornelia. “Colossal. Immeasurable.”