from him. Generic merchandise will not please her (or any girlfriend, especially one he is hoping to win back). Hope that answers your questions!
All the Best,
Shelby
But when Nick offers Shelby those gifts? Was that a Freudian slip, a revelation that Holly is Shelby’s alter ego and Nick is me, or at least a symbol of my thoughtlessness? I finished the book that night, though of course the ending was predictable: the party guests openly mock Nick’s pathetic attempt at reconciliation, and after he is physically thrown from the house he stares through the front window as Kris bends to one knee, pulls a black velvet box from his pocket and looks hopefully up at Shelby/Holly. I threw the book across the room while simultaneously wondering if Alice Candello might be more palatable if she laid off the wine.
The next day I decided that I would have dinner with my best girl: Mom. I bought the fixings for her favorite meal: chicken, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, garlic, white wine for the crock pot cacciatore accompanied by baby potatoes smothered in butter and finished off with a dessert of chocolate ice cream. Though she had been the author of the torment I had endured on numerous blind dates, she’d always had the best intentions. When she arrived, I greeted her at the front door and took her coat. “Right this way, Madam,” I said and offered my arm.
“My,” she exclaimed, “all those dates turned you into a gentleman!”
“I was always a gentleman,” I protested.
“Yes, but you’re nice again!”
I was trying. She sat down in the living room as I trotted to the kitchen to check on the potatoes and fetch the remainder of the wine I’d used in the recipe, and when I returned my mother was bent over, pulling something from under the sofa. Shelby’s book.
“What’s this?”
“A poorly written book,” I said, reaching for it, but she just stared at it, mesmerized.
“Shelby wrote a book?” She looked from me to the cover and back again. “It’s so … bright.”
“Here.” I pried the paperback from her hand and ushered her to the table, where I would painstakingly steer us clear of anything resembling a serious conversation. After commenting on each element of the meal—the peppers were cut in perfect strips, the chicken was not at all dry, the potatoes were very white—my mother insisted on helping me clean up. When she entered the kitchen she stared at the counter, spellbound.
“Isn’t that the crock pot you gave Shelby?”
I trod lightly. “Yes. How about some chocolate ice cream?”
“Why is it here? Are you back together?” she asked hopefully. “Is that the reason for this special dinner?”
“No, Mom. She didn’t want it. She left it. That’s all.”
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry.” Then she considered for a moment. “Who wouldn’t want a crock pot?”
“Shelby, Mom. Shelby didn’t want a crock pot.”
Over dessert I caught my mother staring at me pityingly and in response I offered an almost manic performance to demonstrate that I was fine, just fine—happy, in fact—laughing like a maniac at her Reader’s Digest jokes, springing from the couch to refill her wine glass, saying that the blind dates had not really been so bad.
“I’m so glad,” she said. “Because Mrs. Sitterly’s daughter Sally is lovely. She owns her own daycare center. Can you imagine?”
I could. A room full of diaper-clad, sticky-fingered puking machines.
“I think kids could cheer you up,” she stated confidently as she patted my knee. “Bring you back to your old self.”
I wanted to ask about this alleged old self she clearly missed, but I understood what she meant: effortlessly cheerful, consistently engaged, much more tolerant with her and even Mr. Bojangles, who I suddenly recalled had urinated on my new leather gloves with impunity last Christmas. Even Shelby, who must have paid a hundred bucks for the now piss-soaked clumps, patted the unapologetic cat on the head and tsked about aging and bladder control. Why couldn’t she have been more patient with me?
“I’m fine,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced myself.
“How about another date,” she said with a wink. “Get you right back in the saddle!”
When my mother left I spent the rest of the evening imagining what I would rather do than embark on another blind date: undergo a root canal, take a punch in the mouth, get thwacked with a cattle prod.
SALLY SITTERLY WAS LATE, BUT that was all right with me, the new and improved, back-in-the-saddle, determined-to-be-patient man. I tried not to think about my mother’s face and how it rose and fell with the tide of events: the successive failures of her matchmaking efforts, the discovery of Shelby’s book wedged under my sofa, the initial hope and subsequent disappointment triggered by her vision of the inadequate, offending crock pot. I had to hand it to her; she did not give up easily. Eight dates, each a particularly excruciating endeavor, though of course I kept the gory details to myself. These were, after all, the daughters of her friends and I was the common denominator in an equation that persistently equaled disaster. My mother just wanted me to be happy. Maybe it was my fault, this dating purgatory, for thwarting Shelby’s blind date so long ago. Maybe I’d kept her from meeting the man who would have bought her the perfect gifts, supported her literary endeavors, drawn her fully into his life. The man she had not given me the chance to become. I sipped my beer. I cringed as I considered the name Sally Sitterly and the type of woman who might own a daycare center: merry, serene, hearing-impaired. What the hell, I thought. Kids are all right.
“Sorry I’m late!”
I looked up as the familiar voice registered, and there she was, all smiles and sequins, the fruit of my mother’s most recent effort: Shelby.
falling forward
Faith was sipping organic aloe juice and munching Skinny Chips when she was summoned, via telephone, to spring Ed from jail for the third time that month. What had he done now? she wondered. The sheriff wouldn’t say, but he did tell her that she had better bring $500 because this time it was bad.
She clamped down the receiver, slid her feet into the salted water churning in her footbath, and tried to put Ed out of her mind. When the phone rang again fifteen minutes later, she was elbow-deep in the chip bag sopping crumbs with her wet fingertips, her toes raking the hard plastic nubs on the floor of the Vibra-Matic.
“It’ll do him good to wait,” she said. “Let him think about what he’s done, whatever that is.”
She heard a ruckus in the background—the clanging of pots and pans, like the sound of a hubcap skittering down the road—and then Sheriff Waldon’s weary voice: “Get him out of here, Faith.”
By the time she arrived at the jail—really just a room with a desk and four cells—smelling of ginger-peach spray and fingering a small bump that had sprouted suddenly just above her left wrist, Ed was asleep.
“Well,” said Faith to Sheriff Waldon, “I guess I’ll do some shopping. I’m all out of yogurt and echinacea.”
“He was cursin’ up a white storm all night.” The sheriff glanced over at Ed’s cell. “I don’t want a replay when he comes to. Please. Let’s just get him up.”
Faith frowned. “Well, what’d he do this time?”
Sheriff Waldon gave her a defeated look, then jerked his head derisively toward the row of cells. “Ask him.”
FAITH AND ED HAD BEEN neighbors going on two years, and although they were nearly the same age—fifty-six and sixty-one, respectively—Faith felt she was a paragon of health next to Ed, a creased and rumpled man with doom etched in his face. She shook her