Читать книгу Starting From Square Two - Caren Lissner, Caren Lissner - Страница 7

“This girl, Erika, told me she’s just like me, but we’re really very different,” Gert told her support group on Long Island.

The group was for young widows. Until a few years ago, most of the “young widows” in Gert’s area had been in their forties and fifties. Now there was a handful in their twenties and thirties, too. Gert found it worth the forty-five-minute rail jaunt each Saturday morning to talk to people who could understand what she was going through.

She hadn’t gone to the group right away. In the weeks after Marc had died, she’d been surrounded by close friends and relatives. They were at the funeral, at Marc’s parents’ house, stopping by Gert’s apartment. Gert needed to be squeezed among a crushing throng of people who knew Marc so well that they understood the profoundness of the loss; people who knew his interests, his kindness, the expressions on his bespectacled face. Only people who knew him as well as she did could understand the depth of the void.

Right after the accident, Gert’s mother temporarily moved into Gert’s condo in Queens. She had already tried to convince Gert to move back to L.A., but failed. Gert’s best friend from childhood, Nancy, had tried, too. But Gert wasn’t sure she wanted to go back yet. All the experts said that you shouldn’t make major changes in your life within a year after a death. Besides, deep inside her, she feared that going back home would make her feel even lonelier. At least in New York, there were people like her. Alone.

For a while, relatives stopped by her condo to visit. Co-workers of Marc’s from the brokerage firm sent cards and flowers.

Then, slowly, the comforters tapered off. That meant that entire days yawned open with emptiness. Gert would pull herself out of bed, slog to work, get the occasional call from a friend who’d emit platitudes about taking things one step at a time, come home and, if she could stand to do something normal for two hours, watch a movie. In the past, no matter what happened to her, she knew he would be at the end—the end of the phone line, the end of a rough day, the end of the long commute home. Now, only she was there. All she had left to cling to were the vestiges of old routines.

Gert’s parents found her a therapist on Fifth Avenue. For the first six months, she went every week and talked to an overly clinical woman who was nevertheless a good listener. But she realized that she would have rather stayed home. What she really needed, she decided, was to interact with people her own age who’d lost a spouse.

Gert knew she wouldn’t have found such a support network if not for September 11. Most of the young widows’ support groups in the area had sprung up because of that day. Marc had died only four days before that, on the seventh. The funeral was two days later. If it had been two days after that, it probably would have had to be postponed. She’d lost him, buried him and forty-eight hours later the world had exploded.

She found several groups advertising on the back page of the Voice. The first day, she had felt intense self-loathing as she walked into the room. All of the women were strangers, and they looked strange, too. Strange and sad. They were women who had absolutely nothing in common with her—except for one horrible event. But she had forced herself to hold back her tears. She sat down in a hard school chair in the circle. She listened. And she talked. She found out they all had similar experiences to hers. The other women in the group were prone to dazing out for five minutes at a time for no reason, too. They, too, were still getting sales calls for their husbands and not knowing how to respond. They, too, were incessantly told by well-meaning people that they would feel better soon. They, too, had assumed they would be married to one person for the rest of their lives—and suddenly had had that person yanked away forever.

The only time Gert felt unburdened was when she was in the group. Normally she struggled under the weight of knowing that if she bumped into someone and had to explain that her husband had died, it’d be an uphill battle to deal with their awkward responses, to make them understand how she felt and all of the challenges she faced. The women in the group just knew.

“Where were you when Erika said this?” asked Brenda, a heavyset thirty-five-year-old nurse. Brenda, who had the voice of an evangelist, had become the group’s de facto leader. Their group had been started by a social worker from a local hospital, but the social worker eventually had found they were able to run it on their own.

“We were staying at Hallie’s apartment Friday night,” Gert said. “Hallie was my roommate in college. Erika is her friend from high school. Anyway, Hallie was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and Erika and I were smoothing out our blankets on the floor, and Erika got serious. She turned to me and said, ‘I know you think no one understands what you’re going through. But every day when I wake up, I still want to say hi to Ben. He was in my life for so long, and then he was gone. I love him and I never get to see him anymore. So believe me, I know how you feel.’” Gert paused to take a deep breath. “And I know she was trying to be helpful, but having your husband die in a car accident is not the same thing as breaking up with him because you weren’t sure you loved him and then he ends up with someone else. I wanted to tell her this—”

She broke off.

“But you didn’t,” said Leslie, a short owl-eyed girl who had been married to a man thirty years older than she. Gert felt sorry for her, imagining she’d taken the first guy to be smitten with her—and then Gert felt bad for being judgmental.

Brenda said to Gert, “You could have told her.”

“But she was only trying to help,” Gert said.

Michele shook her head. She was thirty-four, a paralegal. “They all are,” she said. “But don’t you ever want to say, no, this is how it really feels? Losing your husband feels like nothing, dead, like you want to jump back into that week when you had him back, and all you can do is look back because there aren’t things to look ahead to anymore.”

“I can’t say all that,” Gert said.

“Honey, you need to let someone in,” Brenda said. “Don’t be afraid of being real with people.”

If I was real with people, Gert thought, I’d lose all of them.

The other topics at the meeting were standard: How they’d gotten through special occasions, how they filled their free time, how they were managing their financial affairs. Marc hadn’t had any life insurance, except for the $1,000 policy he’d gotten—along with a free Discman—for signing up for a Sony Mastercard. Who would ever have thought to get life insurance for a twenty-seven-year-old? Marc’s parents, luckily, paid for the burial and for a year of the mortgage on the condo. Some of the women in the group had had to sell their homes.

“The problem with moving isn’t necessarily about money,” a woman named Arden said. “I can’t pack up his things. Some of them, I haven’t touched since he died.”

Gert thought of the extra bedroom in the condo, the one Marc had used as a workroom. It held a computer, trophies going back to his high school soccer championships, even Boy Scout patches. She had barely touched these things since he’d died. Sometimes she wandered into the room and stood there for a while, in a comfortable haze.

“Don’t push yourself,” Brenda told Arden. “Everything has a time.”

“It feels like you’re putting him away when you put something aside,” Leslie said. “A pipe exploded last year and it poured all over Jesse’s Yankees cap, and I had to throw it away. Then I started crying.”

Everyone was quiet for a minute.

“But see, they got to the Series,” Brenda said. “So he was watching over them.”

Leslie laughed. “I don’t think he did that.”

“See?” Michele said. “We can smile when we remember, not just cry.”

Gert’s mind started drifting. She found herself wishing that Chase were there. Chase was a quiet girl with short hair and a shy smile who had come to several meetings and then stopped. Chase was twenty-nine, too, and she had lost her fiancé around the time that Gert had lost Marc. She seemed like a nice person, and Gert had hoped they would become friends. But Gert hadn’t gotten to the point where she felt comfortable asking for Chase’s home number or inviting her to do anything. And then, suddenly, Chase had stopped coming. Gert wasn’t sure why. As much as she liked the women in the group, most of them were a few years older than she. She hoped Chase would come back.

People like Chase—fiancées—had it worse than everyone, Gert thought. They hadn’t even married their loved one yet. They had had to lose someone they loved before they’d officially become related. They didn’t even get to call themselves widows. What should they be called? In this day and age, there needed to be a less clunky term than Bereaved Significant Other.

Gert noticed that the people in the group were getting up, and she realized the session was over. She’d been dazing again.

She had to stop doing that.

Todd called that afternoon.

Gert was scrubbing the house. When they’d first moved in, they had used a maid service once a week. She’d felt a little spoiled, but all of the neighbors in the condo building used the service, and it was something good to spend their money on when they were making more than enough of it. One day, Marc had been on the phone with his mother and had mentioned something about the maid coming, and his mother had had a fit, saying they were being lazy. Gert knew it was aimed at her. Marc’s mother liked Gert, but she could also be hard on her. Gert had, after all, taken over the duty of raising her little boy. Marc’s father was a big bear of a man who made bad jokes and always greeted everyone with a new dopey nickname. Marc had picked up this habit, with his own litany of nicknames. He and his father competed over who could make up the worst one. Gert missed Mr. Healy’s cheerful face.

Gert had always felt much more comfortable around Marc’s father than Marc’s mother. Mrs. Healy was overbearing. Everything had to be the best. Marc and his older brothers were driven, all in finance and real estate, all hustling tirelessly. That’s how they’d been raised. That’s what they got praised for.

Gert pushed thoughts of the Healys out of her mind and moved the mop slowly across the kitchen floor. There was a tiny rainbow near a corner where the sunlight bent through a glass candy dish, and she mopped the spot.

A shrill sound startled Gert. The phone. She stared at it for two rings, then picked it up.

“Is Gert there?” a voice asked.

Gert knew instantly who it was. She smiled. If nothing else, Todd was disarming. Even if she wasn’t going to date him, or anyone else right now, she certainly could be friends with him. She had felt incredibly comfortable talking to him at the bar. He was completely different from Marc, though. Marc was sure of himself, maybe even a little cocky. Todd was just Todd.

“It’s the Sober Guy,” Todd said.

“Ah,” Gert said. “Is that what your friends call you?”

“Sometimes,” Todd said. “They’re always saying, ‘Come on, just have one little drink.’ They don’t care that I’d lose my job. My company is like the CIA. They do drug tests when they hire you that can track marijuana you smoked two months ago.”

“Better stick to crack,” Gert joked, then winced, wondering if it was too sharp a comment to make to someone she barely knew. It would have made Marc smile, if he were there.

Todd laughed. “So how are you doing?”

Gert hadn’t had anyone ask her that in weeks, except her parents, who were still trying to convince her to move back to the West Coast. She’d confirmed their worst fears right after college when she’d married a guy from Boston and moved to Queens.

“Not bad,” Gert said.

“What are you doing today?”

“Just cleaning my place.”

“I need to do that,” Todd said. “My roommate’s a slob. Do you live alone?”

“Yes,” Gert said, balancing the phone on her shoulder so she could keep mopping. Yes, she thought. I live in a condo with two bedrooms. The second one eventually would have been the baby’s room. It’s ridiculous that I live here, but I don’t want to move.

“How was your day?” Gert asked.

“Great,” Todd said. “I ate lunch at this bar by my old job. And I just had tea, and the bartender looked at me like I was crazy, but I told her I’m not allowed to drink because of work, and you know what she guessed I must be? A brain surgeon. Do I look like a brain surgeon?”

“Anyone can look like a brain surgeon,” Gert said.

“Wow. I feel so important now.”

“What’s your old job?”

“Oh. For a little while after college I was a courier in the diamond district. My friend’s family owned a jewelry store. They needed people they trusted to do those jobs, so we both worked there for a while, walking around the city transporting jewelry and hoping not to get mugged. It was kind of fun, and I got to hang out with my friend’s family, who have this old-fashioned business that not a lot of people have anymore. One time, on a Friday after work, they took us to their apartment on the Lower East Side and they had a zillion relatives over and cooked Romanian food. It was incredible.”

Gert realized that Todd liked long answers, long explanations. He wasn’t concerned about boring her. It didn’t mean he was full of himself—just that he wasn’t constantly checking to see if he was saying and doing the right thing. He had no affectations, no pretensions.

She liked it.

The other line beeped, and Gert ignored it.

“Do you have to go?” Todd asked.

“No. But I am cleaning….”

“Okay. Well, what I wanted to ask was…do you want to have dinner some night?”

“Um…” Gert said, looking around the room. “I guess, maybe.” She realized she was being too tentative. “I mean, sure. Why not?”

“Great,” he said. “My schedule gets a little strange. I’m working nights the rest of the week, but I’m free after next weekend. Unless you wanted to get together tonight.”

Gert thought putting it off for a week would be wise. She could use the week to work up to it. But looking around again, she realized she didn’t have anything to do that night. She might as well go. Todd seemed harmless enough.

“Either way is fine,” Gert said. “I didn’t have any major plans tonight.”

“Really?” Todd said. “Do you want to do it tonight? I don’t want to push, but it might be nice to see you before my schedule gets crazy.”

Gert was flattered. She accepted.

When she put down the phone, it rang instantly.

“Hey!” Hallie said.

“Hey,” Gert said. “You sound excited. What’s up?”

“Erika knows this bar where some of the Giants hang out. Do you want to come tonight?”

Gert hesitated. “I could,” she said. “But I probably can’t.”

“Why not?” Hallie asked.

“Well,” Gert said, “do you remember that guy Todd, from the bar?”

“Choo-Choo Boy?” Hallie suddenly seemed intrigued. “Did he call you? Did he ask you out?”

“Yes,” Gert said. “He asked if I wanted to have dinner.”

“That’s great!” Hallie said. Gert was glad Hallie was excited for her. “It’s at least a start,” Hallie added. “When are you going?”

“Tonight,” Gert said.

Hallie was quiet for a second.

“Tonight?” she said.

Gert hesitated. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. “I said I would,” she said.

Hallie was quiet again.

“You haven’t been out on a date in a long time,” Hallie said. “Maybe you should have a powwow with me first to plot strategies.”

“Okay.”

They met at four outside a coffee shop. Hallie snuffed out her cigarette before entering. The New York smoking ban still wasn’t to take effect for two months, but Hallie wanted to practice. Gert was glad for the ban, but kept her opinion to herself. It wasn’t that she was a priss; it was just that secondhand smoke gave her a sore throat.

“Here’s the thing,” Hallie said, sitting down at a square white table with gold flecks in it. The coffee shop was filthy, but cozy. “You know that you can’t accept a date for the same night. It makes you seem desperate.”

“It’s not a date,” Gert protested. “It’s just a friendly dinner. Besides, Todd’s going to be busy next week. His schedule’s going to get crazy.”

“With work? Or with dates?”

“With work.”

“How do you know?”

“Why would Todd lie?” Gert said. “I just met him.”

“I don’t know.” Hallie shrugged, winding paper from someone else’s straw around her pinkie. “For some reason, he just struck me as a little off. I wouldn’t be so trusting so soon. Believe me, I’ve seen what’s out there. You have to be careful.”

“I will,” Gert said, knowing Hallie was only trying to help but wondering how she’d gotten so cynical. Todd was a nice guy, right?

Gert looked around. She noticed that many of the people in the coffee shop were reading the paper. But the women who were reading it kept peering over the top, to see who else might be there.

Hallie said, “I think I’ve met half the weirdos in Manhattan. And I think Erika’s met the other half. I don’t want you to get disillusioned.”

“Did you ever think,” Gert said, choosing her words carefully, “that maybe you and Erika try too hard and obsess too much? You strategize and analyze, and men can probably sense your frustrations.”

Hallie looked hurt. “I can’t act relaxed and happy with my station in life when I’m not,” she said.

Gert wasn’t sure what to say.

“Do you remember when I dated Steve for six months after college?” Hallie asked. “While I was dating him, guys hit on me all the time. And of course, I didn’t need them, because I was with him. They must have sensed that I was happy. And then, after Steve and I broke up and I was miserable, no one ever came up to me. But I couldn’t help being miserable. So there’s a Spiral Deathtrap of Dating: When you’re with someone, you look happy and relaxed, and thus, a lot more people than you need are attracted to you. When you’re sulky and alone, no one is attracted to you, and thus, you stay sulky and alone. I can’t look content when I’m not.”

“I know you can’t look happy all the time,” Gert said. “Maybe what I’m getting at is that when you and Erika are together, you both come off as less approachable.”

Hallie looked beyond Gert, at the wall. “That’s not the real problem,” she said. “The real problem is that the ratio of women to men around here is too high. I should move to Silicon Valley or Alaska, where the male-to-female ratio makes sense. Or, I could get silicone implants.”

Gert cringed. “Guys hate silicone implants,” she said.

“You know so much about guys,” Hallie said to her, “but you’ve only really been with one.”

It struck Gert as odd that Hallie and Erika always claimed to know so much more than she did about men, yet they were still single. They were always trumpeting their dating rules and they were still alone.

There’s a law Hallie should cite, Gert thought. Gert’s Law of Dating: The more rules you cite about it, the less you really know about it.

“Anyway,” Hallie said, toying with a cigarette she didn’t intend to light, “I want you to have a good time with Todd tonight.”

Gert smiled. “Thanks,” she said.

“But,” Hallie continued, looking serious, “don’t let your guard down. If a guy seems too good to be true, he usually is.”

“Oh, I know it could end up a total disaster,” Gert said, waving someone else’s smoke away. “But we’ll be in a public place. What could happen?”

“You have my cell phone number, right?” Hallie said. “Call me if there’s any trouble. Even if I’m talking to Jeremy Shockey, I’ll be there for you.”

Gert laughed. “I will.”

The houses across the street from Gert’s were white and connected to each other. From window to window dripped a string of unlit Christmas lights, which normally hung there until just before Easter. On a dark, overcast day like that one, they looked like buds. Flurries coated the barren branches outside and made little hammocks in the corners of the windows. Not much of an accumulation was expected—it was too warm.

Gert stood in the room with Marc’s trophies, staring across the street. She saw a little blond-haired girl peeking out a round third-story window. She remembered when the girl had been a tiny baby in a carriage. Seeing the infants in her neighborhood go from carriages to walking on their own two feet made Gert conscious of her age. Lots of things were making her conscious of that lately. She wasn’t fond of the reminders.

The girl was part of an extended Greek family who lived in attached houses on the block. Gert’s section of Queens, only a few subway stops east of Manhattan, was very Greek.

She returned to her bedroom, to her mirror.

The anticipatory feeling of a date was one of the nicest parts, she had always thought. You knew you were going to see someone you liked. You could scrub extra hard in the shower. You could get a haircut. You could stare at yourself in the mirror. Well, not for too long.

Even though Gert was just going to be friends with Todd, she still felt compelled to at least look half-decent for him.

She stared at her reflection and tried to figure out what she could say to him.

I rode on a train once.

Nah, that wouldn’t do.

My uncle used to work for Conrail.

Trains are cool. I’ve got a full complement of HO models.

Somehow he’d see through the lie. And just because he worked on a train, didn’t mean he collected them.

She could hum the song about “getting the train through” from Sesame Street. They could talk about kids’ TV shows from the 1970s. Marc’s oldest brother had been on Zoom, which was taped in Boston. That always impressed people of a certain age.

There she was, thinking about Marc again.

She had to stop.

How would she tell Todd about him?

She probably shouldn’t mention Marc to Todd right away, she decided. The only way to talk about Marc was to give him his proper due, to tell everything that had happened. He wasn’t something you could chat about like the news or weather. If it wasn’t the right time to tell everything about him, you shouldn’t broach it.

Okay. She needed a conversation topic.

The male canon. Oops—she’d left something off the list when she’d told Hallie and Erika about it: Fletch. Guys loved Fletch.

What were some lines from Fletch?

“Excuse me, miss? Can I borrow your towel? My car just hit a water buffalo.”

Didn’t really work too well in conversation.

It wasn’t a good quote for tonight, anyway. It was too base. Guys didn’t necessarily like girls to get too base. Except guys you’d been married to for five years and dated for three, whom you could say just about anything to. Who you could wrestle with at 10:00 a.m. during a blizzard when the city was locked down and the mayor had ordered everyone to stay home. They should have worked on having a baby that day, just like everyone else. They were both waiting for promotions at work. Just one year each at their new salaries, and then they were going to try. There was always more you could have. More, more, more. And all of a sudden, you’d lose the most important thing of all.

“Hi,” Todd said, coming into the entrance of Sal’s, an Italian restaurant in Chelsea near the movie theater. He was wearing sneakers, but he looked like he’d just gotten a haircut, and he was smiling.

“Hi,” Gert said, standing inside the door. The restaurant was moderate-sized, with a family of six chattering near the back. The tablecloths and walls were a rich red. A waitress appeared and led them back.

“I was just on the subway,” Todd told Gert, “and some woman insisted I’d gone to school with her brother. She kept saying my name was Cody. The whole ride, she stared at me, going, ‘You’re sure you’re not Cody?’”

“You should have showed her your driver’s license.”

“Imagine if I pulled it out, and it said ‘Cody,’” Todd said. “That would be freaky. Like The Twilight Zone.”

“I loved The Twilight Zone!”

“Me, too. The old episodes.”

As they sat down, Gert was glad the conversation had started easily. She was also grateful for the dinner-and-movie date. It was simple, it was inexpensive, and it guaranteed that after dinner you wouldn’t be asked back to the guy’s apartment to watch a video—a common male strategy in college that had meant something else.

“I like this place,” Todd said. “The food’s good, and the prices are right.”

So he was practical. Gert was glad. She didn’t like when people tried to impress her with fancy restaurants that provided mouse-sized meals. Marc’s co-workers at the brokerage firm had taken them to places like that all the time. She had always left starving.

“So,” Todd said, “thanks for coming out on such short notice.”

He seemed a little nervous. Gert smiled. “I wasn’t doing anything special,” she said. Ooh! Her friends would smack her for admitting she was alone on a Saturday. She added, “I could have gone out with my friends tonight, but I can see them anytime.”

“How long have you known them?”

“Since college,” she said. “Well, Hallie since college. Erika is her high school friend.”

“Who was the one with big hair?” Todd asked.

Gert laughed. Everyone had such varying perceptions of looks. Erika had been dressed to kill that night, and Hallie had been practically naked, but what Todd had noticed was big hair.

“I didn’t think either of them had big hair,” Gert said.

“I didn’t mean any offense,” Todd said. “Brian was the one who thought so. I didn’t notice anyone having big hair.”

“That’s okay,” Gert said. “I think Erika was sort of interested in Brian.”

“Girls always like Brian. He’s engaged to a woman he works with.”

“Then why was he at the bar?”

“Why not? We were waiting to meet friends.”

The waitress brought their water, and she stood at the table expectantly. “You ready?” she asked.

“I guess we should pick up our menus first,” Todd said, smiling, and the waitress nodded and took off.

Todd added, “Brian lived in England for a year and he said they never give you water when you sit down. You have to ask for it or you’ll never ever get it.”

“Really?” Gert said. Then, in a barely passable British accent, she added, “That’s rather peculiar, don’t you think?”

“I rather believe so,” Todd said.

“A shame, old boy.”

They ordered appetizers and talked more. Todd spoke animatedly about his job. He said his company’s trains ran from Croxton Yards in Jersey City up to Binghamton, New York. It was a six-hour run, and usually it was just him on the train, plus an engineer who was driving it. There was a children’s hospital that they passed in upstate New York each time, and the kids would always wave out the window at the train. Sometimes, they’d make a sign, like Blow Your Horn! This was Todd’s favorite part of the run.

Todd said to Gert, “Do you like your job?”

Gert told him about working for a marketing and public relations firm that handled only pharmaceutical companies. She had majored in communications in college, but she wasn’t sure what she’d do afterward. She’d finally found a job as an assistant at a PR firm. The pay was low and the people seemed phony, so she kept her eye on the want ads. Then she saw an ad to be the assistant to a vice president of a different firm. The pay would be much higher, and the building was right next to a midtown subway stop, but she’d be less focused on creative work and more on meeting her boss’s needs. Still, she had been happy enough outside of work that she didn’t really care what she was doing during those hours. If she wanted, she could work on a portfolio and move over to the creative side. She actually had wanted to do that for a few years, and had tons of good ideas for product promotions. But for some reason she hadn’t gotten around to finishing her portfolio yet.

“Are you guys responsible for the goodies?” Todd asked. “Like the notepads and rubber pill toys and clipboards doctors get with the names of drugs on them?”

Gert laughed. She usually just got blank stares when she told people what she did. At least Todd was creative. “Our company doesn’t make them, but it does research to see if they’re a good way to increase product name recognition,” she said. “We might get twelve people in a room and bring out a tray full of those toys, then take them out of the room and see which ones they remembered.”

“Wow.” Todd closed his eyes. “I remember…that you’re wearing a red shirt and you have long hair, and dimples.”

Gert smiled shyly.

The waitress set down a bowl of calamari, along with a huge, soft stuffed red pepper. Gert was hungry. She hadn’t eaten Italian food in a while.

They made up their plates, and they ended up talking so rapidly that Gert only ate half her meal. She barely even tasted it. She hadn’t expected to enjoy Todd’s company so much. He told her that if the train broke down anywhere along the route, whether it was pouring rain or sloppy snow or in the middle of a dangerous city at 3:00 a.m., it was his job to jump out with a flashlight and walk the length of the train to find out where the problem was. “Some of those trains are a mile long,” Todd said. “And you don’t want to get out and walk the length of a train in a desolate area at 3:00 a.m.”

“I wouldn’t try it,” Gert said.

She told him about the worst part of her job, dealing with her often-cranky boss, Missy, and about the odd cast of characters at her old job. They had been so brain-dead that after a certain point, she’d stopped smiling for fear they’d complain about not getting the joke.

“So how did you end up in your line of work, anyway?” Gert asked Todd.

“Well,” he said, wiping his mouth, “it was strange. It wasn’t a job that would have occurred to me at all.”

“So what happened?”

He hooked some linguine around his fork. “I majored in history in college,” he said, “and I wasn’t that great a student in school, but history was the one thing I was interested in. I love finding out how things came to be. There are so many stories. I knew I wouldn’t have lots of jobs lined up after graduation with that major, though. For a while I led tours in a museum part-time. Then I was reading the help-wanted ads in the paper one Sunday morning, and I saw this boxed ad at the bottom of the page for an information session for a train company, and something kind of clicked. Working for the railroad is kind of a cliché, but I’d never actually thought you could do it.”

“It seems like a job people had a hundred years ago,” Gert said.

“Exactly!” Todd said. “That’s what I thought. But that’s what interested me. There’s such beauty in trains. Cars and planes and buses change every year, but if you look at a passing freight train, with its string of yellow and orange and brown boxcars, it looks the same as it did fifty years ago. And trains travel through the most historical points in the country, too. They’re like moving museums of America. But when I first saw the ad, I didn’t know if I should go to the info session. It didn’t seem like a job that people who went to college did. I tried to talk myself out of it.”

“Yeah….”

“But I realized something: I had majored in history because I loved it. And now I could look into a job I might love, too. My heart told me to go.”

“And you went,” Gert said.

“And I went. The recruiters actually try to talk you out of it. They tell you about the crazy scheduling, the long hours, the drug testing, and the hard work. But everything they said to scare us off was something that made me want to do the job more.”

“That’s great,” Gert said. “A lot of people don’t follow their heart.”

“Especially about work.”

He asked Gert where she’d grown up. She said she was from L.A., and that her parents were still there. She said she’d come east for college. She didn’t say she’d stayed and married a Bostonian, though. She told Todd that her younger brother was still in L.A., and that he’d done nothing for two years after high school and was now waiting tables. She told him about her best friend from childhood, Nancy, who lived there with a husband and two kids. She said she usually talked to her about once a week, and the same with her parents.

Todd told her that the friend she had met at the bar, Brian, was someone he’d known since elementary school. He said he only had a few close friends, but once he got along with someone, they were friends for life.

Gert realized by the time they’d finished dessert that she had gone for more than an hour without thinking of Marc. It was the first time in a year and a half that that had happened. Even when she was sleeping. She’d had a dream two days earlier, in fact, in which she was sure he was right next to her. She could even smell him. Then she awoke. She wanted to crawl back into the dream. She wanted so desperately to fall back to sleep.

When Todd asked whether she still wanted to see a movie, she was glad, because she’d been wavering on it. What she really wanted to do was find out more things about him—not sit in a theater with her mouth shut. But she wasn’t going to say that, because then he might suggest going back to his place, and that would ruin everything.

“Well,” she said, “it is pretty late.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Todd said. “I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have to go to work at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow. Could we do it another time, though?”

He wasn’t trying to get her back to his apartment! And he wanted to see her again. She hadn’t botched the date. What luck!

“Sure,” she said. “That sounds good.”

“Do you want to take a walk before we head home?”

It was bitter cold outside. He took her hand for a second, without thinking, and then let go when they got near the waterfront. “What’s out there?” he asked.

“Water,” Gert said.

He laughed. “I knew you were smart,” he said. “It looks like an island.”

“Long Island?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a bench facing the water, and they sat down. She wondered if he was going to ask The Question. At what point did guys ask women about their ex-boyfriends and past relationships? It didn’t happen on a first date, right? She wasn’t sure.

The women in her support group had talked about this: If you met someone new, at what point did you tell him that your husband had died? For the older women, it wasn’t much of an issue, because their suitors generally figured they were either divorced or widowed and asked about it. But with younger women, it wasn’t expected at all. And Gert had found that when you told someone such news, particularly young people, they often had no idea what to say. Sometimes they just stared at her, stunned. It was almost as if they were waiting for her to comfort them.

But Todd didn’t ask about Gert’s former boyfriends. He asked about her friends, her college, her dreams. He told her that he figured that someday he’d have kids, travel and see the world—not by train—and be a good person so that he’d be satisfied when he got old and looked back on his life. He said what was most important to him was to be with the people he cared about and make them happy.

He was simple, Gert thought. Much simpler than Marc.

But he was the kind of guy, she thought, that someone could fall in love with.

Gert found out Todd was younger than she was—twenty-six. Hallie had a “Rule of Twenty-Seven.” If a guy was still single after twenty-seven, she said, there must be something wrong with him. If he was decent, it was unlikely that he’d even get that far. So once a woman surpassed the age of twenty-seven, she would always be dating guys younger than her.

Todd was Gert’s brother’s age, which she found a little strange. It was like dating one of her brother’s meatheaded friends. But Todd wasn’t anything like her brother. Gert loved her brother, but he could definitely be a meathead sometimes.

They made plans to see a movie the weekend after next. Then Todd gave Gert a quick kiss on the cheek.

She could still smell his cologne and feel the brush of his stubble afterward. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed that.