One True Theory of Love (30 page)

M
eg traded some watching-the-kids time with Violet’s mother later in the week and took Ahmed on a surprise date to Seven Cups, a Chinese tea shop on Sixth Street. She’d read in
Tucson Green Magazine
that it was the premier Chinese tea supplier in the world—right there! Six blocks from her house and it was the best in the world! And even though Ahmed was Persian and not Chinese, Meg thought he might enjoy some world-class tea. Besides, it was the thought that counted, and for that, Meg hoped to score major good-girlfriend points.

They went at the end of what had been a stressful workday for Ahmed, and the moment they entered the small tea shop, the world outside fell away. Soft Eastern music invited them in, and the lights in the shop were dimmed. Meg watched how Ahmed’s face relaxed into calmness, like Henry’s did after a nice backrub.

“Have you been here before?” Meg spoke in a quiet voice, as did virtually everyone in the shop. In the back there was a fish tank, which Henry would love—maybe they’d bring him along next time.

Ahmed shook his head. “I’ve noticed it as I’ve driven by, but I’ve never stopped in before.”

The retail part of the store was in the front and the tables in the back, and as they waited, unsure whether they should seat themselves, Meg slipped her hand into Ahmed’s and kissed his cheek. “Maybe if there were sidewalks out front, more people would walk by, notice it and stop to visit. Oh, wait. The RTA’ll take care of that. I keep forgetting.”

He grinned at her. “You’re not going to let that drop, are you?”

“Nope,” she said happily.

As he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to him, an Asian woman approached and escorted them to a middle table, leaving them to study the tea menu.

“What do you recommend?” Meg asked Ahmed.

“Sadly, I usually drink Lipton’s Earl Grey tea,” he said. “Iranians drink a lot of tea, but I don’t know that our tea palates are very refined. It’s more the ritual that’s important.”

“Just what is the ritual?”

“You’ll see,” Ahmed said. “For me, the very act of preparing a cup of tea for myself often changes the course of my day. It’s very calming.”

Meg chose a yellow tea, since she’d never heard of it before, and she ordered it in a glass rather than a pot. Ahmed ordered black tea in a pot.

They were served and their conversation meandered quietly as they waited for their tea to steep and cool. It was a skill, Meg thought as she watched how Ahmed filled the requisite wait time with a gentle story here and a funny comment there. There was a real art to his conversation that Meg hadn’t noticed before. She could feel herself being led by him, drawn into the expansively cozy mood he was establishing.

“You
are
different when you have tea.” Meg twisted her glass gently, watching the tea leaves float downward. “It’s as if this moment is in your blood and you’re coming home to it.”

He smiled at the observation. “In Iran, nothing of importance is discussed until several cups of tea have been consumed.”

They chatted and enjoyed their tea, and when a fiftyish American man approached their table and asked how they liked the tea, Ahmed asked if he was the owner. He was, and introduced himself.

“Austin Hodge.” He shook first Ahmed’s hand and then Meg’s as they introduced themselves.

He correctly guessed that Ahmed was from Iran and asked him questions that indicated he was more familiar with the country than the average American was. “I’m fascinated by Iran,” he said when Meg pointed this out. “Probably because I’ve always wanted to go there.” He told of the one tea-growing region in Iran and asked Ahmed if he had read any Rumi and told him a Sufi story he knew. His manner was gracious and giving and he stood with his fingers linked in a unique yin-yang position, which Meg found delightful and immediately imitated, finding it established her firmly in the moment and made her feel at peace.

“He was so cool,” Meg said after Austin Hodge left.

“It’s nice to find people who actually know something about Persian culture,” Ahmed said. “You don’t see that every day. He knows more than I do about Rumi and Hafez and Sufiism.”

“Do you study Persian history?” Meg asked, making a mental note for future gift-giving opportunities.

“You know,” Ahmed said, “I have studied it a bit, but I’ve come to realize I’m not all that interested in the glories of the past. The Persian Empire. Cyrus the Great. The rugs, the poetry. Give me the modern writers and artists and filmmakers any day. Creativity’s thriving in Iran, in spite of the repressive government.”

“Maybe because of it,” Meg suggested.

“I have a few books that I bet the owner of this place would find interesting,” Ahmed said. “I should drop them off.”

“I’d like to read them, too,” Meg said.

“You would? Essays and short stories and poetry by Iranian writers?”

“Sure,” she said. “Or maybe you could read them to me. I think I’d like that best of—”

She was interrupted by her cell phone, which brayed out rudely in the hushed tea shop. She quickly reached to silence it.

“It’s my dad,” she said. “I’d better take this.” Meg was sure she was violating all sorts of tea-taking protocol by answering the phone. “Sorry,” she beseeched Ahmed. “He’s just going through a tough time right now.”

“Go ahead,” Ahmed said.

“How’s my favorite father today?” Meg said by way of greeting. “I’m having a lovely tea date with Ahmed, so I can’t talk long. What’s up?”

“You’re with Ahmed?” Phillip asked. “Did he tell you we met for lunch today?”

“No, he didn’t tell me you met for lunch today.” Meg eyed Ahmed, but he gave no indication he’d even heard what she’d said, even though he must have. “Did you invite him or did he invite you?”

“He invited me,” Phillip said.

Meg gasped as a crazy thought came to her: maybe Ahmed had asked her dad for permission to marry her! He was the type to honor such a custom. She couldn’t tell if she was right by looking at Ahmed, though, because his expression remained frustratingly neutral.

“What’d you talk about?” she asked her dad. She was probably off base anyway.

“Oh, this and that.” Phillip cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I was hoping you could go to the house and get my baseball-card collection. I left it in the hall closet.”

Her father’s baseball-card collection was probably as valuable to him as either of his daughters, and that was only a slight exaggeration. “I can’t believe you didn’t take it with you.”

“It completely slipped my mind,” he said.

“That’s understandable considering the circumstances,” Meg said. “But you can’t really think Mom would do anything to it, do you? She knows how much it means to you.”

“ ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,’” he said.

“But she’s the one who scorned you,” Meg said. “She’s been scorning you for longer than I’ve been alive. Sure, I’ll get it. I’ll head out in a few minutes.”

Meg agreed to stop by the house on her way home, and Phillip would come over to pick up the card collection after the UA baseball team practice. After Meg hung up, she looked expectantly at Ahmed. “Well?” she asked. “We’ve been sitting here for over an hour making small talk. Were you planning to tell me about your lunch date with my father?”

“I had lunch with your father today,” Ahmed said.

Meg laughed. “Really? What a surprise! Did you talk about anything interesting?”

“Not about anything I can tell you at the moment,” Ahmed said. Meg waited for a teasing smile, or a hint of dampened excitement, but he was impossible to read.

“That’s it?” she prompted. “That’s all you’re going to say about it?”

“Yep.”

Meg sipped her tea, disconcerted. Ahmed’s engaging and unguarded mood had soured with her father’s phone call, and it was her fault. “Again, I’m sorry for answering my phone,” she said. “It was rude of me. I shouldn’t have.”

Ahmed reached for her hand across the table. “I like that you’re there for your father, no matter what. It’s a great quality and one of the things I love about you the most.”

Meg sensed his sadness. “I know you’d like to be there for your dad, too. I wish he’d let you.”

“Fathers feel they have to be heroes in their kids’ eyes,” he said. “But I’d take a flawed father who loves me over a nonexistent father any day of the week. Wouldn’t you?”

His look was intense with conviction, and as Meg looked into the brown eyes she loved so much, she saw the heart of the boy he’d been. She saw Henry’s heart, too, and it occurred to her that without knowing it, Ahmed was speaking for Henry as well as for himself: a flawed father was better than no father at all, as long as that father loved his child the best he could. The implications of Meg’s realization were huge, but they could not be denied.

“I think maybe yes,” she agreed. “As long as there’s love amidst the flaws.”

M
eg pulled up to her parents’ house—make that her mother’s house—and looked at it from the curb for a long moment. It was a weird feeling, to think how a house could end up being more permanent than the family who lived in it.

At the front door, she punched the bell and listened to the familiar ding-
ding
-ding and waited for her mother’s footsteps. When she didn’t hear them, Meg rang the bell again. Still nothing, but she could see her mother’s new convertible in the garage, so Meg walked around to the backyard to see if maybe Clarabelle was there.

When she wasn’t, Meg’s gut kicked out a warning: something wasn’t right. She walked back around to the front, and as she did, she flipped open her cell phone and speed-dialed her mother. Through the closed windows, she heard the phone ring inside, but no one answered.

Meg’s heart quickened. She rang the doorbell insistently and redialed her mother’s number. When the answering machine came on, she began a frantic are-you-all-right tirade of a message. Only then did her mother pick up. “Meg?”

“Mom! Where
are
you? Are you okay? I’ve been ringing the doorbell for ten minutes now! Are you
there
? Are you inside?”

There was no mistaking the exasperation in her mother’s voice. “Well, of course I’m inside, Meg. This isn’t a cell phone, you know.”

“Open the door,” Meg said. “Let me in.”

There was silence on Clarabelle’s end.

“Mom?”

“I really wish you’d call before stopping over,” Clarabelle said. “I’m busy right now.”

“Doing what, watching
Wheel of Fortune
?” Meg said. “Open the door or I’m going to break it down.”

Clarabelle harrumphed, and from the change in her breathing, Meg could tell she was coming to let her in, berating her the entire way: who talks to their mother this way? Why don’t people respect privacy these days? Why do people think just because someone’s home they’re required to answer their door?

Wa-wah-wa-wah-wa-wah-wa.

It was like those Charlie Brown cartoons: the instant Clarabelle kicked into her holier-than-thou, rhetorical-question bullshit, Meg stopped listening. But Clarabelle sure got Meg’s attention back in a hurry when she opened the front door.

Her mother—her
mother
, hello!—stood before Meg in strappy high heels and a gorgeous, elegant, deep blue silk—Meg didn’t even know the word for it—dressing gown—was that what it was called? Rich-lady lingerie?

Clarabelle’s hair was mussed and something about her was clearly out of sorts. Her lips looked not bruised but a bit puffy and her makeup, while not exactly wrong, was not exactly right, either. It looked like it had sort of been schmeared around in the throes of . . . Meg was dumbfounded. She’d never seen her mother like this, but there was no denying it: Clarabelle looked like she’d just had great sex. Meg stared at her mother and tried to shake off the thought, tried to come up with an alternative explanation. “Were you asleep?”

“Of course not,” Clarabelle said. “It’s only six o’clock.”

“Then why are you dressed like that?”

Clarabelle raised her chin haughtily. “If you must know, I’m entertaining a gentleman caller.”

“A
what
?”

Clarabelle enunciated her words this time, even though they’d been perfectly clear before. “A gentleman caller.”

“You’re getting
laid
?”

“Must you be so crude?”

Talk about crude! Clarabelle was still a married woman!

“I’d be willing to bet a hundred thousand dollars it’s not Dad in there,” Meg said.

Clarabelle rolled her eyes. “Your father—now there’s a losing bet,” she said. “All he ever did was age me, sitting around watching baseball on ESPN all the time. I feel like I’ve gained back ten years of my life since he’s been gone. Maybe twenty!”

“But . . . but . . . ,” Meg sputtered. “Who have you been having sex with?”

Clarabelle looked for a moment like she wasn’t going to answer. Meg raised her eyebrows to let her know she’d wait as long as it took.