Can I Get An Amen? (20 page)

“Mark?” His name came out like a riddle.

“I’m so sorry that I haven’t called.” His voice was strong but sincere. “But I would still love to take you out to dinner tonight. If you’re free.”

And all the contingency plans I had made in case he did call went right out the window. I wasn’t going to pretend I was busy or tell him that I was seeing someone. I forgot about all the cautions I had repeated, all the warnings about another broken heart. At that moment, I didn’t want vindication. All I wanted was to be next to him. “Yeah,” I said, feeling a thawing sensation in my body. “That would be great.”

There was a smile in his voice when he spoke again. “Do you like Cuban food?”

A
s he pulled out my chair, the metal legs screeched against the industrial tile floor. The restaurant, which was located at the end of a strip mall in a blue-collar, largely Hispanic town in New Jersey, didn’t seem like a typical choice for a first date, but the lighting was dim, the food smelled good, and the music made you feel like all was well with the world. The other tables were filled with families and older couples, mostly Hispanic. I was totally and unconditionally charmed.

Mark sat down across from me, wearing a thin thermal-knit long-sleeve navy blue shirt and a pair of jeans. He smelled good in the way that some men just do, without the aid of aftershave or cologne. He wasn’t wearing his glasses tonight but was still unquestionably handsome. He looked around the room, as if trying to view it from my perspective, then smiled shyly. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but the food is amazing.”

“No, it’s great,” I assured him. “I’m excited to try it.”

As if on cue, a busty, heavily made-up woman with olive skin and curly, almost black hair came to the table with two menus.

“Hola, Marcos. Me alegro de verte,”
she said, smiling warmly, a large gap between her two front teeth. She set a menu down in front of each of us and appraised me like a mother.

“Hola, Armena,”
said Mark, rolling his
r
perfectly, sounding as comfortable in Spanish as he did in English.
“¿Cómo estás?”

“Buena,”
she answered, before nodding toward me.
“Ella es bonita, Marcos.”

“Si, Armena.”
Mark smiled shyly.
“Ya lo sé.”

“Bien,”
she said, walking slowly away.

“Sorry,” he said, turning back to me.

“What did she say?” I asked.

He lowered his head and leaned toward me. “She said”—he glanced at the waitress, who was staring back at us—“that you are very pretty.”

I looked down at my menu and blushed. I had worn a ruffly sleeveless silk chemise and tight black jeans with black boots, which I had rushed home to get on my lunch break. My sweater was hanging on the back of my chair.

Mark had offered to pick me up at home, which as far as he knew was Kat’s home. “Actually, I have to work late,” I had said, “so maybe we could just meet at the restaurant?” But we settled on Mark picking me up at work. I had changed and primped in the women’s room after most everyone had left for the night, the office all but empty and silent as I applied my shimmery gray eye shadow and slicked my lips in a barely there pale pink gloss.

“So what is good here?” I asked, always embarrassed by compliments.

Mark looked reluctantly away from me and at the menu. “Their
ropa vieja
is amazing.”

I read the description. “Sold,” I said. Though this cuisine originated on a warm Caribbean island, it sounded perfect for a cold December night.

Mark ordered for us after introducing me to the waitress. “He is a good man,” she said in heavily accented English, patting Mark on the shoulder.

The restaurant was BYOB, so Mark pulled a bottle of red wine from his beat-up army surplus messenger bag. I immediately recognized the brand; it was a respectable twelve-dollar bottle available most everywhere. I remembered my first date with Gary, how impressed I had been when he ordered a shockingly expensive bottle of cult Cabernet. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

Armena opened the bottle and brought us two tumblers, into which Mark poured the wine. There was no pretentious swirling or sniffing, no bombastic presentation of the cork as there had been with Gary. Mark simply held up his glass.
“Salud,”
he said as our tumblers clinked.

“Where did you learn Spanish?” I asked.

He ran his fingers through his hair and looked like he was trying to remember where along the timeline of his life he had happened to pick up the language. “I lived in Honduras for a few years between college and graduate school.”

Again I felt a little intimidated by his adventurous résumé. “What were you doing there?”

“I went down to do some volunteering, building houses and schools, that kind of thing.” He spoke as if it were the most natural, commonplace thing in the world. “But then I ended up teaching English after a while.”

“How long did you stay?”

“Three years. Then I came back to the States.” He took a sip of his wine. “What do you do for that law firm?”

“I’m the assistant to one of the partners. It’s just a temporary thing until the economy picks up,” I said dismissively. He didn’t lie and tell me it sounded interesting, didn’t patronize me by pretending to be impressed. He just nodded as if processing the information. “What do you
want
to do?”

“Well, I used to work at an advertising agency in Boston.”

“And you want to get back into that?”

“Not really,” I said with an embarrassed laugh. “I think I’m figuring all of that out right now.” I thought of Luke reminding me of how much I used to like to write.

“What about you?” I asked, realizing that I hadn’t yet asked him about his work. “What do you do?”

“Oh…” He shifted in his chair, as if surprised I’d turned the focus back to him. “I work for a nonprofit.”

“Really? What sort?”

“Well, we are sort of a catchall. But our main focus is poverty, I would say.”

“What is it called?”

He paused to take a sip of wine. “The Need Alliance.”

It wasn’t long before Armena brought our appetizers. We ate with our hands, and Mark watched me, chuckling as I struggled to tame my unruly empanada.

Our entrees came and I drank more wine than I intended to. Soon I had that warm, content feeling in my stomach, and the inhibitions in which I had wrapped myself were starting to fray. But the conversation flowed easily and happily, and I often caught myself staring at the handsome, interesting man across from me, feeling—for the first time in a very long time—lucky.

He cut one of the last bites from his roasted pork loin. We had been talking about college; he had gone to Columbia for graduate school. “Don’t you owe me a long story?” he said.

I tilted my head and sighed, remembering everything that had brought me here, to this tiny little Cuban restaurant with the laminate table and neon
OPEN
sign, thinking that maybe there
was
something to all those clichéd condolences that are intended to give perspective and hope.
Things happen for a reason.
“It’s not really a happy story,” I said with a bittersweet smile.

Mark rotated his tumbler of wine with his fingertips. With his sleeves pushed up, I saw that the prominent veins on his hands wove their way up to his arms and ran over his taut, long muscles like twine. “I didn’t think it would be.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, intrigued by his intuition.

“Long stories never are.” He sat back in his chair and looked at me intently. He was effortlessly seductive.

I didn’t debate what to say or coyly put off the truth. The facts came out easily and painlessly. “I lived in Boston with my husband,” I said plainly. “Well, my ex-husband now,” I added quickly. “He left, and so I ended up moving back home to Jersey.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.” And it was. I realized that it really wasn’t such a long story after all. “Now I have a question for you,” I said, feeling emboldened by the liberating honesty. “Why did you wait until today to call me?”

He looked a little sad. “It’s a long story,” he said ironically, trying to smile.

Just then, as if by divine intervention, he was let off the hook as an old man stood and took his wife by the hand. They began dancing with slow, small steps. He had one hand around her waist; the other they clasped, she fitting into his chest perfectly
as they danced like they must have danced a thousand times before.

Armena came to clear our plates and nodded her head toward the dancing couple, saying something in Spanish to Mark. “She said that every time they hear this song, they dance,” he explained. Conversations paused at tables all around the restaurant as patrons gazed at the old couple with admiration and fondness. The song ended and they sat, with as little ceremony as they had stood. There were a few claps. Mark looked at me and smiled.

. . .

Mark’s car idled in front of mine in the parking lot by my office. “Why don’t you let me drive you home?” he suggested.

“No, I really am fine.” The wine buzz that I had had over dinner had faded, though I didn’t want to get out of his car just yet.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure.”

He pulled into a spot near mine and got out to open my door, extending his hand to help me out. I lowered my chin into the neck of my coat to ward off the cold.

“I had a great time tonight,” I said, as I stood with one hand on my driver’s side door handle.

Mark didn’t say a word. Instead he leaned slowly in and slid his hand onto my lower back, planting a whisper of a kiss on my lips. I never imagined such a gentle kiss could feel so explosive.

“I’ll call you,” he said as our lips parted, his mouth still inches from mine.

I
was lying on Kat’s bed, staring at the huge glass lantern that hung from the ceiling. It was romantic, I decided, to have something like that above your bed. When I got a place of my own, I’d get one just like it.

“So you like him,” said Kat. It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. She sat up in bed and regarded me carefully, waiting for my reaction. Though she hadn’t been thrilled when I’d let myself in early Saturday morning, I had plied her with bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon, which I’d picked up on the way there.

I rolled over and faced her. “Yeah. I like him.”

“But he had no explanation for why he didn’t call until the morning of the night you guys were supposed to go out?”

“He just said it was a long story.”

This was not an excuse that would typically fly with Kat, but he had earned merit points for the unusual and unpretentious choice of locale for our date.

“So when are you going to see him again?”

“He just said that he’d call.”

“He has three days. Tops. If it goes longer than three days, then he has some weird baggage… like a wife and kids.”

I knew that Kat was just trying to reacquaint me with the rules of the road for dating, but I was too dangerously blissful to pay any attention. “I can’t wait for you to meet him,” I said.

Kat gave me a look of warning. “Just… be careful, Elle. It’s been a while for you, and this is the first guy since Gary.” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “Just don’t fall too hard too fast.”

I knew that this was going to become common advice, echoed by Luke and then Jill. But the truth was that it was already too late for cautions and warnings. Even
before
last night, it would have been too late. “Don’t worry, Kat,” was all I said.

“Does this mean you are over the whole Gary thing?” Coming from anyone else, this comment would have sounded flip and insulting, but Kat wasn’t trying to minimize my divorce. We were just treading in uncomfortable waters for her; she hated self-help-y language.
Does this mean that you’ve begun to heal from the breakup of your marriage?
It was something Kat would simply never say.

“I don’t know if you ‘get over’ things like that. I think you just kind of learn to live with it.” I thought for a moment about how easy it seemed to be for Gary to leave, about what, exactly, it was that I had mourned. “But I don’t think any of it would have happened if Gary and I had been meant for each other. I mean, by definition it couldn’t have.”

Kat’s silence said everything. I knew that she was thinking about how convenient this epiphany was, what a cozy little coincidence that it came to me on the heels of meeting someone new. I would have thought the same thing.

. . .

Mark did call. He called that same day, when I was elbow deep in dirty clothes in my parents’ laundry room. I had been neglecting my laundry for a couple of weeks, and today suddenly felt like the perfect day to tackle it. Not only did I rigorously sort my clothing according to color and fabric type, but I pretreated stains and meticulously folded a load that had been left in the dryer. That’s what a great date can do; it can be like a shot in the arm. I closed the door to the washer and pulled my cell phone from the pocket of my sweatpants.

“Hey,” said Mark, his voice deep and slow. “You made it home okay last night?”

It sounded like he was in the car. “Yeah,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear. “Totally fine.”

“What are you up to this week?”

I grinned like a teenager. “Just work, really.”

“I would love to see you.” I pictured him driving, gripping the wheel hard as he spoke. “Tonight I have some work that I need to do and tomorrow I have plans, but what about Monday after work?”

“Monday sounds good.”

“Do you want me to pick you up at work again? Or do you want to go home first?”

“Why don’t we meet at work? It’s just easier.” I resolved to come clean about where I really lived, whom I really lived with.

“I’ll pick you up at five thirty, so we can grab dinner before the show.”

“Show?”

I knew he was smiling. “You’ll see.”

. . .

The message at church the next day was on acceptance, and the soft-spoken, humble John Blanchard stood before the congregation, telling the story of the woman at the well, in which Jesus and his disciples passed through Samaria and stopped at a well to draw water. The disciples continued on to a small village to buy food, leaving Jesus alone. “It was noon, the hottest time of the day, when she came, to find Jesus resting there.” Reverend Blanchard held his Bible in both hands in front of him, with gentle reverence. “All the other women had gone in the morning, but this woman—this woman was an outcast among outcasts.” The Samaritans, he had explained, were despised by the Jews, but the woman at the well was the object of particular ostracism, having committed adultery. “But Jesus spoke to her. He spoke to her, he drank from her cup, and he offered her the living water, which is life everlasting.” His voice grew in power, reaching a crescendo as he spoke of eternal life. “He did these things because Christ doesn’t care about our reputation. He doesn’t care about our sins or our past. Pauper or prince, leper or king, he offers us all his magnificent grace.”