One True Theory of Love (15 page)

Because I’d led a charmed life, I had no idea how much I was defined by my naive belief that tragedy wouldn’t touch me. But in an instant, I went from being
that—
a la-la land girl who lived in a little fake snow globe bubble of happiness
—
to being the sort of person bad things happened to.

On the day Henry went to work with Ahmed, he emerged from his bedroom dressed not in his usual T-shirt and shorts but in khaki pants (the pair that did not have a hole in the knee), a button-down shirt and a clip-on tie. He was handover-heart adorable.

“You look precious,” she said. “You
are
precious.”

“He’s making us pancakes,” Henry said. “We need to be there in, like, ten minutes. He can’t be late to work because of us.”

The smell of pancakes and the sound of blues music greeted them from the sidewalk after they’d parked the car in front of Ahmed’s house. Blues music? At seven in the morning? Meg felt a lusty thrill tickle her skin. It was so unexpected. She would never have suspected that Ahmed was a fan of the blues. She would have thought he’d be more of a Kenny G kind of guy. Not that there was anything
wrong
with soothing light jazz, but there was no denying the fact that when you imagined how someone might be in bed, the difference between a light-jazz guy and a blues guy was huge. Blues was plaintive. Insistent. Focused on the heart of the act. Jazz seemed so much more . . . obsessed with the foreplay. And not that foreplay was bad, but too much of it was . . . well, Meg listened to jazz sometimes and thought,
Will that saxophone never shut up?

Henry ran up the steps ahead of her and rang the doorbell three times right in a row. Through the screen door, Meg saw that Ahmed, in khaki pants like Henry and with his shirt collar open, holding off on his tie for as long as possible, was beaming in a way she’d not seen before.

“Good morning, you two!” he said. “I’ve got pancakes all ready.”

Someone was cooking for them—for her—how amazing was that? And then there was his porch, with two Adirondack chairs just waiting for a couple to grow old in together.

His view across the street was of Sam Hughes Elementary, one of the best schools in the district and the one Violet went to and the one Henry could go to if only it wasn’t so inconvenient. If they lived here, she and Ahmed could sit on the front porch together and watch Henry cross the street to school. And then they could go inside, turn on some blues music and have themselves a blues-inspired quickie before they went their separate ways for the day.

“Hey, you.” As Meg stepped across the threshold, she patted Ahmed playfully on the cheek. Henry was already in the kitchen, checking on the pancakes. “I didn’t know you were a fan of the blues. It seems so uniquely American.”

“I am uniquely American,” Ahmed said.

“Indeed, you are,” Meg said. “Who is this?”

“Marcia Ball,” Ahmed said. “From her
Blue House
CD.”

It was a soulful, mournful ballad.
In a lonely heart there’s a tiny spark that keeps the love alive. And if it’s just a dream no one else believes, why do I? Why do I?

“Nice music to slow dance to.” She stopped mere inches from him, unabashedly undressing him with her eyes.

“Mmmm.” The look he gave her was lustful. Nakedly so.

“It’s got a nice saxophone,” she said.

“It does.” Ahmed said it as if he knew what she meant by that.

She stepped farther inside. His house was a small shotgun bungalow with wood floors and built-in bookshelves. His furniture was mission-style, and he had an old upright mahogany Baldwin piano against an inside wall, which Meg had yet to hear him play, although he’d mentioned he’d been taking lessons for the past year. A few pieces of original artwork by local artists adorned the walls.

As they ate, she felt as if they were in a scene from some movie—a romance, of course, the part where some telling detail sparks the single mom’s realization about the rightness of her new relationship. The flourish with which Ahmed served the chocolate-chip pancakes, for instance. Or the cute way Ahmed and Henry clinked juice glasses. Or how sweetly Ahmed cleared their plates and how clearly happy he was to have them there. But she realized there wasn’t just one thing about him that made them such a good match. It was everything.

As Meg drove to school, her heart was light and she cranked her radio when Melissa Etheridge’s “Message to Myself” came on and she sang at the top of her lungs. She didn’t even mind the empty backseat, because she knew Henry was with Ahmed and that, therefore, he was in a very good place.

 

 

At that afternoon’s snack time, her students went a little crazy in the most beautiful of ways. Everything in her kindergarten classroom was part of a well thought-out routine, and the afternoon-snack routine consisted of all the students pushing their desks into groups of four. Chairs were to be silently slid and tucked under the new arrangement.

The children sat two boys and two girls to a table, and Meg sat with the leftovers, one of whom always happened to be Marita. Three kids got to be the cracker kids, and they counted out five baskets of twenty lightly salted whole-wheat saltine crackers and distributed them to the tables. Three other kids got to be the carrot kids, and they counted out five paper plates of twenty baby carrots, along with a small bowl of ranch dressing for dipping, and distributed them to the tables.

Usually, it was all very orderly and quiet, but in a kindergarten classroom, it takes only one kid to throw everything into utter chaos. And that kid, that day, was Lucas, lovely little Lucas.

While Meg’s back was turned, he made race-car noises while sliding his chair across the floor. Still lost in a dreamy fog that involved Ahmed and blues music, Meg ignored his transgression. The other boys took it as permission to make their own race-car noises, and soon the whole classroom was buzzing with boys.

“All right, everyone. This isn’t the Indy Five Hundred,” she said. “Take your chairs, and I’ll put the music on.”

When Henry was a baby, Meg had played classical music to him each night as he’d fallen asleep, which had an unintended and unfortunate consequence: classical music now put Henry in a droopy, Pavlovian stupor. Meg sometimes pictured him as an adult, snoring through symphonies his wife dragged him to. But Meg felt classical music was important, and she wanted her kindergartners to appreciate it (without the resultant sleepiness), so another ritual of afternoon-snack time was the playing of classical music.

When Lucas began to sway and bop his head to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13, Meg ignored him, which his tablemates took as permission to join him. Not only did they sway and bop their heads, too, but when the music swelled in the middle of the serenade and when Lucas waved his arms like a zealous-but-perhaps-drunk conductor, the others followed right along, sheer joy on their misbehaving faces.

Soon, with the exception of Marita, who sat quietly next to Meg and watched with her big brown eyes as she nibbled her square cracker into a circle, the entire class joined in with sweet abandon and ineptness. Meg watched, tears in her eyes from the beauty of the moment. She felt Marita’s hand on her knee.

“Please don’t cry, Miss Meg,” Marita said. “They don’t mean to make you feel bad.”

“I’m not sad,” Meg whispered. “I’m crying because I’m happy.”

L
ess happy was her father, whom Meg visited at his office after school, since she had some extra time before she was supposed to pick up Henry from Ahmed’s house. She’d called Phillip on a break at school and asked if he could squeeze her in that afternoon.

Her father’s tax practice specialized in accounting for the medical profession. With an office located on Grant Road near Tucson Medical Center in a small complex, he was a sole practitioner, although in recent years, since he was nearing sixty, he’d talked about finding someone to buy into the business and eventually succeed him. For now, it was just him and Sandi, his longtime secretary and bookkeeper, whom Meg had never quite figured out.

Or maybe she had—maybe there just wasn’t much
to
figure out. Meg had known Sandi, who was about her father’s age, for more than a decade and yet she knew little about her beyond that she was remarkably large-breasted, had a black beehive hairstyle and read romance novels at her desk during slow times. Her husband was a man named Bud, who liked to go fly-fishing.

When Meg arrived, Sandi gave her a cheery greeting and announced she was heading out for the day.
Must be nice,
Meg thought, and then felt guilty for thinking so. From the first of January, both Sandi and her father burrowed into their tax work and emerged on April sixteenth blurry-eyed and pale-faced, having crammed a year’s worth of work into ten weeks. Sandi was well within her rights to leave early this time of year.

Meg settled with her father in his office—his inner sanctum, as he called it—on his steel-and-black-leather Copenhagen couch. A few years back, he’d donated his old no-style furniture to charity and gone modern.

It had been a surprising choice, because in every other way, he was, to put it kindly, somewhat . . . bland. His glasses were a decade out-of-date, and nearly without exception, he wore khaki pants that sagged in the behind and muted oxford shirts. Even his ideas about secretaries were old-fashioned—he honestly expected Sandi to make and bring him coffee each morning (which she gladly did).

Today, he looked at Meg uneasily. “I think I know why you’re here.”

“It’s your turn, Dad,” she said. “I want to know what’s going on in your life.”

He looked at her for a long moment and then pushed against the bridge of his glasses with his middle finger. At the same time, he searched her eyes, looking, it seemed to Meg, for a way to ground himself, or maybe to find common ground.

“I’ve been married for nearly thirty-five years,” he said.

“That’s something,” Meg said. “Not many people can say that.”

“It’s something, but it’s not enough,” Phillip said. “Just being married isn’t enough for me anymore. If I’m married, I want to be
happily
married. And I’m not.”

On the way to Ahmed’s house to pick up Henry, Meg pulled into a parking lot to call Amy and fill her in on the conversation she’d just had with their father.

“I totally get what he’s talking about,” Amy said. “I’m on his side completely.”

“It’s not about sides,” Meg said.

“When does the shit hit the fan?”

“My sense is pretty soon.” Meg got an ugly feeling in her gut, because while a divorce between her parents might be for the best, it wasn’t going to be easy.

After the call, Meg tried to figure out how she felt about her parents’ impending separation. It was like a heart attack waiting to happen, surprising only in that it hadn’t occurred sooner. Still, it left her feeling numb. Where would her father live? It would be so strange visiting him in a new place! And was she supposed to warn her mother?

Her mother had to know or at least sense it was coming. Getting a job—a reason to get up in the mornings—was probably at least partly in preparation for Life After—a social network, a little extra spending cash, new clothes. Maybe she’d surprise them all and blossom.

When Meg arrived at Ahmed’s house and approached the front door, she saw through the screen that Henry and Ahmed were leaning over his dining room table from opposite sides, engrossed in a game of chess. Dark and light, big and small. She stopped still and watched them.

Since that first day at the coffee shop when she’d gotten all shaky after seeing the two of them huddled together over the chessboard, she’d given some thought as to what had so startled her about the moment, and what came to her was this: when she closed her eyes and let an image of her and Henry float forward, mother and son, the image was most often of them side by side, him knocking into her and her arm loosely around his shoulders, pulling him to her in a bumpy, hanging-out-together sort of way. But when she imagined Henry with a father figure in his life, the image was that of two guys, one big, one small, heads focused downward, working on airplane models or electronic thingamajigs—some guy thing, important only to the two of them. She always pictured herself watching from a distance, swelled with love for the guys in her life, the man and the man-to-be.