One True Theory of Love (6 page)

“It’s not that.” He twisted his clear plastic apple juice glass. Meg waited him out, vaguely frightened. “Some kid at Violet’s school likes her. I mean, he
like
likes her. Like, he
likes
her.”

Meg suppressed a laugh but couldn’t help smiling. Fourth grade. This was the age it all began. “And that bothers you because . . . ?”

“Because
I
like her! Hello!” He looked at Meg like she’d gone AWOL.

“She’s your best friend,” Meg said. “That’s different than like-liking her. Are you saying you have other feelings for her?”

Henry sighed. “I just know that the kid at her school needs to
butt out.
”

Ah, jealousy. Really, a fear of . . . a fear of loss, right? Of something being taken away. His friendship with Violet was priceless to him.

“You want things to stay just as they are,” Meg said. The dejection in Henry’s nod nearly broke Meg’s heart. She, too, wanted things to stay the same. Their life was innocent and simple and so very, very good.
Please don’t grow up, Henry. Please don’t change. Except
—
blossom.

“It’s tough when someone comes along and throws everything out of whack and makes you feel things you might not be ready to feel, isn’t it?” Henry nodded morosely again. “You’ve got to stick to who you are,” Meg said, “because who you are is really special, and Violet knows that. If you change to try and keep her, you’ll end up losing her. Does that make any sense?”

“Sort of,” Henry said. “Not really, but sort of.”

Meg let out her breath in a disappointed exhalation at how the conversation had gone—maybe a B-minus on the mom report card. An A for effort, but a B-minus for helping Henry make sense of his world, because there just weren’t always easy answers where the heart was concerned.

“The same holds true for me, Henry,” she said. “You know Ahmed, that guy we met today at LuLu’s?”

“Of course I know him!” Henry said. “I was sitting right there at the same table as you—you think I can’t remember who I met, like, five hours ago? Um, duh!”

“You and your grandmother are so literal that sometimes it makes me want to scream,” Meg said. “What I want to know is what you were up to by telling him we’re single and wanting his phone number. What was that about?”

Henry shrugged one shoulder. “I liked him.”

“I liked him, too,” Meg said. “But I also like our life just as it is. We don’t need any complications right now. If we run into him at LuLu’s again, great. If not, that’s fine, too. But we don’t need to exchange phone numbers and you don’t need to be telling him where you play soccer. It’s not even safe, to tell people we don’t know very well things like that. So don’t do it anymore. Okay?”

Henry made a maybe/maybe-not face at her, telling her without words that understanding was one thing while agreement was something else entirely.

“I’m serious,” she said.

Henry extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Serious. I’m Henry.”

I
think Henry might be having father issues,” Meg told Amy the next day. They were in Amy’s kitchen, with Meg seated at the breakfast bar and Amy standing behind it, chopping vegetables for a salad.

Meg always tried to arrive before Clarabelle and Phillip, because, while Henry played with his cousins, Maggie and Kelly, ages two and four, and while Amy’s husband, David, got the grill ready or tinkered with something in the garage, it gave Meg and Amy time to catch each other up on their respective lives before Clarabelle showed up with her intrusive opinions.

Meg looked forward to the time when she could indulge again in long lunch dates with women friends as she had before she’d had Henry, but at the moment, when she was so busy being the single mother of a nine-year-old, it seemed the only friendships that worked were those that came easy and by circumstance. She was friendly with her fellow teachers and the female staff at Foundation, and of course she had the Loop Group and other assorted residents at the apartment complex to socialize with, but otherwise, she pretty much just had Amy.

At Meg’s declaration that Henry might be having father issues, Amy looked up from the carrot she was slicing. “Did he ask to see Jonathan?”

“No!” Meg said. “God, no!”

Amy rolled her eyes. “You say that like it would be the worst thing in the world.”

“Hell will freeze before Jonathan gets near my son,” Meg said.

Amy arched an eyebrow. “Henry’s his kid, too.”

“Can you say
unwitting sperm donor
?” Meg said. “No, Jonathan had his chance to be a dad and chose not to take it. Thankfully, he has no interest in Henry, so it’s a moot point, anyway. But no—we met this guy yesterday, this very sexy guy, and Henry basically threw himself at him. I felt sorry for him, actually.”

“For Henry or for the very sexy guy?” Amy asked. “And what made him sexy? Give me some spice. My life is sorely lacking in spice.”

“I meant the guy. Ahmed.” Meg looked out the kitchen window at Henry, who was playing some sort of fetch game with his cousins. “
Should
I feel sorry for Henry?”

“Of course not,” Amy said. “It just wasn’t clear from how you said it.”

“Let’s see,” Meg mused, “what made him sexy? Well, his looks, of course. His father’s Iranian, so he’s got those nice dark features. Thick black eyebrows. He looks like a prince. But that’s only part of it. He had this really hard life growing up—his mom died when he was six and he got sent to the U.S. from Iran when he was ten, all alone, and he . . . I don’t know. He has this sensitivity to him that’s really charming. And he doesn’t shy away from opening up, which you don’t often see in guys unless it’s some sort of get-you-into-bed strategy, or unless the guy’s an emotional basket case. He was just, like,
open,
and okay with himself, and, I don’t know,
even-keeled
in a way I found very calming.”

“Because you’re so
not
even-keeled,” Amy said, laughing.

“Hey!” But Amy was right. Meg sometimes thought she was just a grown-up version of Henry and that was why she understood him so well and forgave him so fast. They were mother-and-son bobbleheads, springing this way and that as their passions seized them. “I’m working on it,” she said.

“This guy’s your yin,” Amy said. “Or your yang. You know—your complementary thingamajig.”

“It felt that way,” Meg mused. “It was the oddest thing, but I felt that if I could just tuck myself into him somehow, everything would be okay.”

Amy stopped chopping the celery and gave Meg a long look. “Don’t freak out, but that’s exactly how I felt when I met David. Remember? Didn’t I tell you that?”

Meg shrugged. “I was in the midst of crashing and burning while you were falling in love with David.” Even now, ten years later, she flinched as she remembered how bad it had been.

“That was so rude of me, wasn’t it?” Amy joked.

“Yes,” Meg said. “It was.”

Amy grinned. “He was wearing this crisp white dress shirt and he’d come into the bank and he was all fresh for the day and I just wanted his arm around me. Literally, that white-shirt-sleeved arm. I swear, I must have missed half of what he said, because all I could think of was how to get it around me. It was weird.”

“I was all shaky,” Meg said.

“Me, too,” Amy said. “Shaky’s good.”

“Shaky’s very bad, actually,” Meg said.

“Come on. You’re ready,” Amy said. “When do you see him again?” She sounded out his name. “Ah-med. Ah. Med. Ahmed.”

“I don’t,” Meg said. “We didn’t exchange phone numbers. That was another problem. Henry liked him too much.”

“Come on, go out with him,” Amy said in a pleading tone. “For my sake. I need some vicarious romance in my life. My love life’s the pits.”

Meg laughed. According to Amy, since having kids, her sex life had trickled to near-drought status. David had recently suggested they mark on a calendar two days a week to have sex. Amy refused.
You need to woo me,
she’d told him.
Do the laundry once in a while. That’s incredible foreplay.
Since then he’d folded the laundry exactly twice. It hadn’t helped matters when Amy found a stack of
Playboy
s and
Penthouse
s shoved in their back closet, asked David why he’d not mentioned them, and he’d mumbled something about how he figured that if Amy knew about them, she’d make him mop the floors before letting him indulge.
If you won’t come hither, at least let me have them,
he’d said.
With no housework required.

His reasoning hadn’t gone over well with Amy, to say the least. She felt he should Help Out rather than Jack Off.

“Did you hear about Dad?” Meg asked, changing the subject.

“About how he’s having an affair?” Amy rolled her eyes. “Yes, a million times.”

“He’s not having an affair! Don’t even joke about that.” Clarabelle tossed out the affair accusation fairly regularly, and it always infuriated Meg.
Jonathan
had affairs, not her father. “I saw him last night, and I have the feeling he’s honestly thinking about moving out. Mom said he’s been talking about do-overs and second chances.”

“Promise you’ll shoot me if my marriage ever turns into theirs,” Amy said.

It was already heading in that direction, from what Meg could tell. “Hire a housecleaner,” she advised. “And have more sex.”

As Amy smirked at her, Clarabelle’s ten-year-old Honda Civic pulled into the driveway, and their mother climbed out. She was alone, a most unusual Sunday-morning occurrence.

“Speak of the devil,” Amy said.

“Where’s Dad?” Meg asked Amy.

“Having his affair.”

“Amy,” Meg rebuked, “knock it off.”

“I will,” Amy said, “if you’ll take off your rose-colored glasses and grow up.”

“Geez,” Meg said. “Unnecessary.” She did her best flounce off and went to the door to greet Clarabelle. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “Where’s my dad?”

Clarabelle brushed past Meg and set the bowl of potato salad she’d brought on the counter. “Your father’s cleaning out the garage. After thirty years, all of a sudden he’s in a rush to clean out the garage.”

He’s moving out,
Meg thought.
He’s definitely getting ready to move out.

“Better late than never, right?” Amy said.

Clarabelle slapped her palm on the counter. “That’s exactly what
he
said.” Without another word—without even waiting for Meg to pour a glass of wine for her from the bottle of chardonnay she and Amy had tapped into—Clarabelle headed to the backyard, where the kids were playing.

“There’s trouble in paradise,” Meg said. “Mark my words.”

“There’s always been trouble,” Amy said. “And it’s never been paradise.”

M
eg went through the week as if Ahmed were a fly on the wall watching her every move. She always dressed cute for her kindergartners—kind of bouncy, kind of bopsy—but that week, she took extra time in the morning to make sure her skirts were ironed and to blink on a little mascara. She wore heels to school and reapplied her tinted lip gloss during breaks.

The fantasy she had of Ahmed observing her caused Meg’s mood to heighten as well. Colors were brighter. She was funnier. Kinder. Sexier. Quite simply, the very idea of him enriched her life.

Meg realized exactly what she was doing—performing for a guy she’d spent less than an hour with and who, oh, by the way,
wasn’t there.
But what was the harm? It didn’t hurt anybody.

In fact, it helped everyone. Meg’s students got extra attention, in particular sweet Marita, who’d taken to sitting with Meg on the bench outside at recess until Meg joined in the jump-roping and four-squaring and hula-hooping. Only then would Marita participate. When he pestered, Henry got that extra bowl of ice cream and Meg even refrained from commenting more than once a day about the dirty underwear he felt compelled to leave on the bathroom floor.

Meg fantasized about looking to her classroom door and finding Ahmed there, leaning against the doorframe, maybe holding a sprig of daisies. He’d admire the passion with which she taught. She fantasized, too, of Ahmed passing by the pool while she was there with her Loop Group friends, perhaps visiting a friend of his own. Their boisterousness would catch his attention. He’d see Meg midlaugh, her head thrown back, pure living-in-the-moment emanating from her being. And he’d think,
I want that. I want her.