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“The truth is, and I’ve never even told Lucy this—”

“Then don’t tell me,” I stopped him. I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say next.

“No, I want to. Actually, I have to, because . . . Actually, it was your grandmother who was making the speech.”

“Your grandmother was Hester Abromowitz!” I gasped as a shot ran up my spine.

“Yes,” he admitted, and then looked at me, concerned. “Are you okay?” he asked me, clearly noticing the blood draining from my face.

My date for the evening was my mother’s best friend’s grandson. I remembered seeing little Zachary when he was born. I think I remember buying him a blue blanket! And Hester had showed me a million pictures of him through the years.

“I’m sorry, I know this sounds really weird,” he said. “I just really liked what your grandmother had to say.”

“No, I just . . .” I tried to speak normally and compose myself. “I know my grandmother liked your grandmother very much.” My mouth was suddenly dry, so I sipped my Coke and took a deep breath. “She used to tell me how your grandmother knew all the ladies by name, and all the styles her clients enjoyed.”

“I don’t know why I never said anything. I guess I was embarrassed that I came up with it at her funeral. Your grandmother’s words, though—they were so poignant. Your grandmother spoke so beautifully that day about my grandmother and the way she loved her job that I couldn’t help but be inspired by it.”

“So you’re saying that this would never have happened if I—if my grandmother hadn’t given that speech that day?”

“That about sums it up.”

“My grandmother’s words were so strong that it made you come up with this idea?”

He nodded. “Yep, pretty much. Your grandmother is a really
cool lady. Lucy never stops talking about her. Maybe when you come back into town, we can all have dinner one night?”

“I’m sure she’d love that!” I told him.

“Do you think it’s too late to tell her how much her words moved me that day?”

“Heck no!” I erupted with a full smile. “You’ll make her day! She’ll get a huge kick out of it!”

He laughed. “Who says ‘She’ll get a kick out of it’ anymore? Has anyone ever told you that you’re an old soul?”

“More times than I can even recall,” I told him, smiling and feeling so proud.

After my second cheesesteak, the fries, and two Cokes, I skipped over to the bike.

“I don’t even know how you can move with all that food in your belly,” he said, walking toward me.

“I feel light as a feather!” I jumped in the air.

“I hope they didn’t slip anything into your cheesesteak when I wasn’t looking.” He laughed.

“Like a drug?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Like a drug.”

“I don’t care if they did.” I threw my hands in the air. “Zachary?” I asked him.

He laughed again.

“What? Did I say something funny?”

“It’s just that no one ever calls me Zachary except my mother.” He continued laughing.

“Zachary?” I said again.

“What?” he answered, putting his arms around me.

I looked into his eyes. “Lucy tells me I should play coy, but I can’t help it. I just want to tell you now that I am having the greatest night of my life.”

“I am, too,” he said, taking me tighter in his arms.

We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. I wanted to kiss him so bad I didn’t care if I’d seen pictures of him as a bare-bottomed toddler in the bathtub. The best way I can describe it was that my lips were magnets and I couldn’t keep them back any longer. And then . . . oh, mercy . . . he kissed me.

So I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him right back.

I thought of the people around Pat’s, who must have been staring at us and our public display of affection, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was keep kissing him as we pulled each other in tighter.

I was sweating. I was positively sweating with nervousness and adrenaline. My mind was racing a mile a minute, and all I could think of was one thing: I was falling in love.

I had known Zachary—not Hester’s grandson, but this kind gentleman Zachary—for only a short time, but I knew. This man was my soul mate. He was the single solitary reason I had turned twenty-nine that day. This had to be the reason for everything. I was sure of it, positive. I suddenly knew the question I’d been looking for: Who was my soul mate? Zachary was my answer, and I knew it was true.

I wanted to keep on kissing him and kissing him. To experience the perfect kiss, the perfect moment—this was what kissing was meant to be, and I didn’t care who saw, and I didn’t care what else was going on around us. We continued to kiss and kiss and kiss.

At that point, I could feel only the sensation of his lips touching mine. He was the only person I cared about in this world. He was the reason all of this had happened. This was my wish, my question, my answer. It was Zachary all along—of course it was.

He stopped kissing me for a moment and leaned near my ear.

“I think you are amazing,” he whispered. “I think you are beautiful and amazing.”

I had never been kissed this way before, not by the few men I’d dated prior to marrying Howard, and certainly not by Howard. How could I have ever kissed Howard in this way? I never loved Howard. I never loved my husband in the way that I was loving this man. And then I realized something: maybe Howard didn’t love me in this way, either. Maybe Howard had his secret, too. He didn’t love me in the way that I didn’t love him. That was why he had affairs. He was trying to find something that I was just incapable of giving him. Surprisingly, I wasn’t upset about this newfound revelation of how stupid and pointless our life together had been. This was my chance to experience the one thing I never got to feel in my entire life: true love.

“Just keep kissing me,” I whispered back to Zachary.

And he did.

It must have been ten minutes before he took my hands in his and looked into my eyes.

“Is it too soon to ask you to marry me?” he asked with a grin.

i don’t kiss and tell

I’m not going to tell you what happened next.

I mean, if a lady doesn’t have her dignity, what
does
she have?

I can tell you, however, that he was a pure gentleman, a kind, considerate . . .

Oh, I can’t keep it in!

We made love! We made mad, passionate, unadulterated, pure love. It was a night of passion for the record books!

You might not want to hear this from someone who could be your grandmother, but you have to understand. Whether we’re seventy-five or twenty-five (or seventy-five trapped in the body of a twenty-nine-year-old), women still need to feel that passion. No matter what age we are, we still want to feel the warm body of a man who is there only to unleash the deepest, darkest parts of our most secret sexual desires. Every woman should feel that at least once in her lifetime. If you’re married to a man who can give you that on a nightly basis, my hat’s off to you.

I’ll tell you this: the things that he did to me, Howard never did to me, in all the years we were married. Who taught this boy
these things? Seriously, where did he learn to do the things he did to me? Did other women teach him these things (and where did they learn it?) or did he learn it from that Internet? Does
Playboy
magazine still dole out that information?

Well, it could be this: maybe we both felt so free that anything was okay. Maybe it was me. I’ll tell you something, I never felt that free with my body. Howard never once asked to see my body. Never once. He never took off my clothes like Zachary might have (or might not have—I mean, I’ll tell you as much as I can, but really, a lady doesn’t kiss and tell) just to look at my body and feel the parts of my body that I had felt earlier that morning. I’m not talking the private parts here. I’m talking about touching and feeling everything from my smooth elbows to the curve of my shoulders to the tips of my toes. Who knew that someone touching the small of my back could send me to a place of sheer exhilaration, the likes of which I never felt before?

I don’t even know how many times we did it (I am blushing still, even as I’m telling you this). I don’t know how many times he kissed my lips (and every other part of my body). In those few hours, though, all those gushy things you hear, stuff like how your bodies become one and how you can feel each other’s thoughts, I felt all of them. I felt it every time he looked into my eyes and every time he kissed a part of my body. I felt it every time he even touched a part of my body, and I felt it with every word that came out of his mouth. It was a lifetime of love encapsulated into one night. If I summed up all my years with Howard, it would have equaled ten minutes, maybe less. Five.

Afterward Zachary was cuddling me in his arms. We were both hot and sweaty, but I still needed the blanket to keep warm.
I loved feeling his arms around me. I felt so safe, like everything was meant to be. I didn’t even know what time it was. I thought it must have been three or four in the morning, but I came to find out later that it was much earlier than that. I had fit a lifetime into just a few hours.

My back was up against his body—spooning, I think they call it. My mind was racing, thinking about the day, about Lucy, about Barbara, about Howard.

Isn’t that crazy? I tried to get him out of my head, but I just couldn’t. As much as I was feeling for Zachary at that point, my mind was on Howard. I was so damned angry at Howard. I was angry that I’d wasted my life with him. I thought about those times when Barbara was little and I knew he was out cheating on me. I should have left him. I could have found another life. I could have found love. Instead, I wasted everything I could have had for the sake of security.

Back and forth I went, my mind was going a mile a minute about Howard. I was angry, I was sad, I wanted to tell him how I felt. I wanted to have it out with him. I wanted to tell him,
Great, I got all the diamonds in the world, but once, just once, couldn’t you have just slipped me a note with a heart on it? Couldn’t you just once have told me I looked pretty when I didn’t spend hours dolling myself up? Couldn’t you have once, just once, come home with some flowers because you were thinking of me? Not because you cheated on me and you felt bad, but because you thought about what a great wife I was, or how well I was bringing up your daughter? Damn you, Howard! Didn’t you think I bought your daughter up well? Was I not a great wife to you? Did I ever make any huge demands on you? Did I shut my mouth and let you do what you wanted? How did you pay me back? How did you pay me back, Howard?

“What are you thinking about?” Zachary asked as he pulled me in closer.

I didn’t answer him, though. I just kept thinking of Howard.
Am I right? Was I a terrible wife? Did I get lazy in the way I loved you? Did I not tend to all of your needs? Why couldn’t we have ever discussed it? Why, in all the years of our marriage, couldn’t we have sat down and discussed the state of the marriage? What were your problems with the marriage? What were my problems? How could we have made it better? Instead, we spent all those years tiptoeing around each other.

But now I had the chance to change everything.

“Hey,” Zachary whispered as he spooned me tighter. “Where are you?”

He was right. My body was right up against him, but my mind had clearly gone someplace else.

“Sorry,” I said, taking his hand. “I was thinking.”

“Are you upset about something?” he asked as he turned me around to face him. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“All of a sudden you’re different. Are you regretting something?”

“About you?” I asked him. “I don’t regret anything about you,” I said, giving him a peck on the lips.

“Do you regret we slept together the first night we met?” he asked, concerned.

“Oh god, no. Trust me, I don’t regret this night for a second. I wanted this more than you could ever imagine.”

“So . . .” He paused. “Is it Howard?”

My heart jumped when he said that. Did he know? Did he know the truth? How did he know?

“Why would you . . . How do you know about Howard?”

“Because you mentioned him a bunch of times this evening. Was he a long-term thing?”

“He was.” I started to tear up.

“Were you engaged to him?” he asked me.

“Yes, I was. I was very young, though,” I told him.

“Is it over now?” he asked me.

I didn’t know how to answer that at first. In one sense, there’s no way it couldn’t have been over. The man dropped dead in his coleslaw from a heart attack. Even if I didn’t love him and he didn’t love me, would he always have this hold over me?

“Yes,” I said, stroking my hand through Zachary’s hair. “It’s over now.”

“So what is it?” he asked.

I turned around again and he resumed spooning me, pulling me in tight. Tears came out of my eyes. Thoughts of my husband and the life that we shared went through my head.

“I . . .” I said, wiping my eyes. “I have a major regret in my life.”

“That’s it?” he asked.

“That’s a lot,” I said. “Believe me, it’s a lot.”

“No,” he said, turning me toward him again. “It’s not a lot.”

“No, you don’t understand,” I told him. “Believe me, you don’t know the half of it.”

“What I know,” he said, “is that you’ve got a lot years ahead of you to make up for anything that you’ve ever regretted.”

“No, I don’t. That’s the point,” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “You may not think you do, but you’ve got a lot of years to change what you think you might have done wrong.”

At the time, I thought I knew what he meant. Later, I would take his words and turn them into something very different. I wasn’t yet at that point, though. I was still twenty-nine, and I was still in the bed of this young handsome man who only wanted to share the world with me.

What if I
did
have a lot of years ahead of me? Throughout the day, I had thought about the possibility of staying twenty-nine. For all I knew, I would be twenty-nine forever. Sure, I’d wished to be twenty-nine for a day, and I got my wish, but I didn’t get it in writing. Maybe I could have a choice. Maybe I could stay twenty-nine forever if I wished hard enough. Lucy would understand. Barbara would get on with her life. Frida already said she would learn to deal. This wasn’t about them anymore, though. This was about me. This was about righting the wrongs in my life.