One True Theory of Love (22 page)

“Do you have any chocolate?” Meg asked. “I’m in desperate need of some.”

Phillip pushed up from the couch, went to the cabinet next to the refrigerator, pulled out a handful of Hershey’s dark chocolate Kisses and tossed a few to her. He unwrapped one for himself as he began to pace. “That man needs to be shot through his law-school-educated brain,” he said.

“I wish.” Meg felt a tiny bit better as soon as the chocolate was in her mouth. “Since when are you a fan of dark chocolate?”

“A little bit’s good for you,” he said. “I drink red wine now, too.”

“I didn’t even tell you the worst part,” Meg said glumly. “Henry was the one who initiated contact. Henry called him, if you can believe that. He got the number from Amy’s address book.”

Phillip stood dumbfounded. “Why would he do something so stupid? Doesn’t he know how this could ruin things for the two of you and Ahmed?”

“Oh, Dad.” Meg banged her head on the back of the couch a few times, welcoming the pain. “Please don’t say that.”

“Well, it could,” he said. “Middle Eastern men are known to be jealous. They’re like Latin men as far as their women are concerned.”

“Ahmed’s not your typical Middle Eastern guy,” Meg said.

“That’s what you keep saying, but you haven’t actually tested him on something like this, have you? What does he know so far?”

“Nothing.”

“Good,” her dad said. “Don’t tell him anything. I’m sure Jonathan went and sowed his wild oats for ten years and now has finally realized that the grass was not, in fact, greener anywhere else. He’s going to come here and try to win back the girl of his dreams. Just you watch. Don’t fall for it, Meg. And don’t let Ahmed get a whiff of what’s going on. I guarantee he will not react well.”

“I don’t see how I can lie to my boyfriend,” Meg said. “That’s just fundamentally wrong.”

“I’m not saying lie to him. I’m saying don’t tell him.”

“It’s the same thing,” Meg said.

Phillip shook his head in disagreement. “It’s protecting yourself.”

“It’s keeping secrets.”

“People have a right to their secrets,” he insisted.

“I’m shocked you’re suggesting this,” Meg said. “I didn’t think not telling him was even an option.”

“It’s the best option,” her father said. “Besides, there’s nothing to tell. You had a three-minute phone call with the guy and that’s that. A three-minute phone call means nothing. It means less than nothing.”

But Henry calling Jonathan did not mean nothing. It meant something huge—only Meg didn’t know what.

Jonathan explained this story to me and I think he sensed my displeasure with the gift because the voice he used became increasingly soft and soothing as he told it.
There’s another version of the story, Meg
(Jonathan always did like to rewrite history).

In the version I like,
he’d said,
what got released weren’t really evils at all, but gifts if only you’d look at them as such. And once they were gone, what was left in the box was hope.

That was the gift he’d wanted to give me
—
a legacy of hope.

I wish I’d saved the box. It would help me remember that what we consider bad in a relationship might in fact not be bad at all. Things like lust and fear and deceit might be invitations for us to go deeper
—
to see the one we love as he is instead of as we’d like him to be. Men aren’t simpletons. They’re very, very complex, and their souls are screaming for poetry.

 

 

 

 

For story time the next day, Meg chose
Jim’s Lion
by Russell Hoban. “
Listen carefully, now,”
the story says.
“ . . . This is not kid stuff. . . . You’ve got all kinds of things in your head, everything you’ve ever seen or thought about, all in your head.”

It was the story of Jim, a boy who was in the hospital and frightened. A nurse told him to close his eyes and think of a place he loved and an animal would appear there who would find him and then lead him back from danger. Jim imagined a spot at the ocean he’d gone to with his family where they’d all been happy, and he imagined a lion, which he was afraid of at first and unsure if it was real. His nurse assured him it was.
“The real thing is always more than you’re ready for,”
she said.

To help Jim face his fears, the nurse gave him a painted pebble—a don’t-run stone—and after Jim clutched the don’t-run stone in his hand and bravely held his ground with the lion, he grew strong enough for the operation he needed to live.

The ending was not
And they all lived happily ever after.
But things did get better for Jim. Meg had chosen the story especially for Marita, who was back in class and sat on Meg’s right. An uncharacteristically somber Lucas was on Marita’s other side and pressed his cross-legged knee into hers.

After story time, Meg gave her students smooth rocks the size of sand dollars to paint and keep as their own don’t-run stones. At recess, she sat on a bench with Marita and shared a bunch of grapes. Marita swung her legs back and forth, which Meg took as a positive sign.

“How do you like staying with your aunt?” she said.

Marita stopped swinging her legs and leaned her head against the side of Meg’s arm and sighed more wearily than a five-year-old should know how to.

“You’ve been asked a lot of questions by a lot of people in the last few days, haven’t you?” Meg said. “I bet you’re getting sick of them.”

Marita nodded and silently watched as Antonio chased Lucas through the play structure. When he saw her watching him, Lucas darted over. “I’m the fastest runner in the class,” he boasted.

Meg laughed. “And the most confident.”

“I’m the most
everything
.” He snapped his fingers in front of Marita’s face. “Look at that,” he said. “Can you do that? I could do it a million times if I wanted to, which I don’t, because that would get boring.” He snapped in her face a few more times until Meg playfully knocked his hand away.

“You try,” he told Marita.

Marita attempted to snap but had a hard time coordinating her fingers.

“You’ve got to practice,” Lucas said. “I practiced all day yesterday.” He snapped a few more times. “Keep trying, and then one day you’ll be able to do it, too.”

“What did you two think of our story today?” Meg asked them.

“I liked it!” Lucas said. “If I had a finder, it would be a cheetah and I’d climb on his back and he’d run away from anything bad.” He snapped in Meg’s face. “What would
your
finder be?”

Meg brushed his hand away and thought of her father. “Mine would be a lion, like in the book. Quietly powerful, on the prowl to protect me. Just knowing he was out there somewhere nearby would make me feel safe, even if I still had to face the bad stuff on my own.”

“You do, you know,” Lucas said, just before he ran off. “That’s what the story was about.”

When Meg asked Marita what animal she’d choose for her finder, Marita closed her eyes and disappeared into her imagination for a long minute.

“My finder wouldn’t be an animal,” she said when she finally opened her eyes, which were the same color brown as Ahmed’s. “My finder would be a Lucas. And my good place is here with you, Miss Meg. With you and with Lucas, too.”

“I love that,” Meg said.

Marita smiled shyly. “And I love you.”

M
eg’s father had never steered her wrong before. That was what she kept coming back to, again and again. And even though keeping a secret from Ahmed didn’t sit well with her, Meg finally accepted that her father might be right. She wasn’t hiding a crime, after all, just a three-minute phone call.

Yet as she and Henry crossed the park to get to soccer practice, Meg was nervous, because even if keeping quiet about Jonathan’s potential reappearance was in her best interests, it inherently went against what she wanted their relationship to be, which was one hundred percent honest in every respect. She kept trying to tell herself that a ninety-nine-percent honesty rate was still pretty darn good.

Ahmed greeted them both with a big smile and a buoyant hello. Henry said hi back and ran off to join the other boys, leaving the two of them alone.

“My dad wants to take us to lunch at the Arizona Inn sometime over the holiday weekend,” Meg said. “Is there a particular day that works best for you?”

“Friday’s bad, because I’m golfing in the morning. By the way, does your dad golf? We need a fourth.”

“Why don’t you invite me?” Meg asked. “What makes you think I’m not a golfer?”

“Do you golf, Meg?” Ahmed looked amused by the very idea of it.

“Why does that seem so funny to you?”

He stepped closer and tucked her hair behind her ear. She tingled from his touch. “Do you?”

“To be honest, the very thought of golf puts me to sleep,” she said.

He laughed. “I thought that was probably the case. You don’t seem like the golfing type. But it can be very calming, I’ll have you know. Therapeutic. Contemplative. Life slows down on the golf course.”

“I always thought people just went out on the golf course and got drunk,” Meg said.

“I don’t,” he said. “I hang out with my friends, enjoy the landscape, smell the grass. . . .”

Meg beckoned him closer, then put her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him, “Do people ever have sex on golf courses?” She inhaled his exceptionally subtle aftershave and fell into the Pied Piper appeal of him: she’d follow this guy anywhere.

“People have sex everywhere,” he whispered back. “Except us. I never realized how tricky it would be, plotting to have sex with a single mom.”

She pulled back to look into his twinkling brown eyes. “Am I more than you bargained for?”

“You’re worth every complication.” Ahmed bestowed on her a kiss that was overly passionate for the setting—it was just this side of appropriate.

“I like outdoor sex,” Meg offered. “Golf-course sex would be fine with me.”

Ahmed laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind, although there’s always the getting caught factor to consider.”

Meg shrugged flirtatiously. “The risk is part of the fun, right?”

“It’d make the papers if I got arrested for public indecency,” Ahmed said.

“But there’s nothing indecent about you,” Meg teased. “You’re a fine specimen.”

“Why, thank you.”

Just then Catherine approached. “Look at you two love-birds,” she said. “You two are just the cutest.”