Love's Little Instruction Book (12 page)

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Take in a movie with Presley, maybe. Walk down to get an ice cream cone with my mother after dinner. Go jogging. Or biking. I’d really liked to go biking.”

“I haven’t been biking since I was a kid,” Dave told her.

“I haven’t been on a bike since college. I used to bike through Paris on my way to class, but after I got married … ” She shook her head. “I don’t even have a bike anymore.”

Dave tried to shake the mental image of pedaling along behind her as she rode through the streets of Cambridge. “You could pick a bike up cheap at any tag sale,” he told her. “I actually passed one a few blocks from here on the way over that had a couple. That way you could ride on weekends or whenever you got the chance, but it wouldn’t be a huge investment or loss if you didn’t get to it.”

She sat up straight. “Do you think they’d still have them?” she asked.

“They might. I’ll take you there after we finish our drinks, if you like.”

She smiled at him and he could actually feel his heart soaring within his chest. He hoped that they’d have the perfect bike for her at the tag sale. Heck, he’d even offer to buy it for her if they did. He just wanted to make her happy so that he could have that smile turned back on him again.

• • •

The tag sale was like any other. Denise made a beeline for the bikes, looking them over critically and checking the prices written on pieces of masking tape that were attached to the saddles. “If you see something that you like, we can probably haggle down the price a little,” he said as he walked up behind her with his hands in his pockets.

She pushed up the kickstand of one and carefully pushed it forward, squeezing the hand brakes to see how well they held. “It’s only twenty bucks,” she said, looking up at him. “A lot less than I’d pay in the store.”

“I told you this was a good idea,” he gloated.

“Would you like to take it out for a ride?” a woman wearing a short, waitress style apron with huge pockets asked her.

“Could I?” Denise asked. “Just to the end of the street and back.”

“I trust you,” the woman replied. “You have an honest face, and besides, I have your friend here as collateral.”

Denise laughed and Dave smiled weakly. She threw a long leg over the seat, hopped on, and pedaled off down the quiet side street as Dave watched admiringly.

As she got further away, he wondered over to the makeshift tables to see if there was anything that he’d like for himself. There was an assortment of old tools laid out — hand tools, mostly. He didn’t actually own a set of tools, but had always felt like he should have. Instead he used Mrs. Silva’s late husband’s old tools on those rare occasions where she’d needed odd jobs done around the house. He was playing with an adjustable wrench when Denise rode back into the driveway.

“This is great!” she told him as she dismounted. She turned to the woman in the apron. “I’ll take it.”

“So much for haggling,” he muttered, shaking his head. He supposed that, having married rich, Denise didn’t worry much about things like twenty dollars for a used bicycle, but for Dave, haggling was half the fun.

Denise parked the bike off to one side, then went over to Dave as he hefted a hammer in his hand, balancing the weight of it. “I bought it!” she told him happily. “Now I just have to find the time to ride it.” She looked down at the hammer he was holding. “Did you want that?”

“Not really. Just looking. You can find a lot of neat stuff at tag sales and flea markets.” A little girl in a
Little Mermaid
T-shirt wandered over to the table, looking google-eyed at a toilet paper cover in the form of a doll in a crocheted hoopskirt. Dave smiled at her and then looked up at Denise. “There’s a really good flea market out in Revere on Sundays. They hold it at this old abandoned drive in. And there’s another one out in Brimfield, but that’s just a couple times a year and it’s more about antiques than stuff you really need.” He looked at her critically. “You’d probably like Brimfield, though.”

“Gee, thanks.” She laughed.

Dave, realizing what he had just said, felt abashed. “I didn’t mean … ” he began, flustered. “I mean, you’re the kind of woman who would appreciate — ”

“Oooh!” exclaimed the little girl, pointing at something on the table. “Pretty!”

Denise and Dave looked to see where she was pointing. It was a small white figure of a bride and groom, arm in arm under a heart shaped arch. “Can I see?”

Denise hesitated, then picked up the static figures and knelt to show them to the child, whose eyes were wide and round. “Oooh,” she said again. “That’s
beautiful
.”

Denise smiled wistfully. “Yes,” she agreed. “It is.”

“That’s a strange thing to be selling at a tag sale,” Dave remarked. His mother and father’s wedding cake topper was still in the family, proudly on display in his mother’s curio cabinet.

The lady in the apron, perhaps sensing another sale, approached them. “Are you bothering the nice people, Gracie?” she asked.

“She’s fine,” Dave assured her. “She was just curious about the cake topper.”

“Gracie’s my neighbor’s little girl,” the apron lady informed them. “She’s sure that everything for sale here is a treasure.”

“It is an unusual thing to have at a tag sale,” Dave noted. He didn’t want to offend the lady by directly asking about her decision to sell the memento of her wedding, but at the same time he wondered.

“I’m getting divorced,” she told him without being asked. “My about-to-be ex-husband decided that he would rather up and move to Hawaii than be with me. A lot of the things here,” she said, looking at the variety of items on the table, “are either his or are things that are associated with him.” For the first time Dave registered the fact that many of the items on the table — the tools, the sports memorabilia, the beer mugs — were all decidedly male oriented. He didn’t know what to say.

“It’s good to be able to let go,” Denise told her. “Instead of dwelling on him, just think about you from now on. Without him, you’ll be able to call all your own shots. It will be great.”

The apron lady smiled grimly. “That’s what I aim to do. Come on, Gracie, let’s find your mommy.” She took the little girl by the hand and led her towards a heavyset woman in a green tank top. Denise stood up and looked at the small figures in her hand.

“That’s really sad,” Dave commented after a long moment of silence. “That the marriage didn’t work out, I mean.”

Denise started at the bride and groom in her hand. “Yes,” she said at last. “I guess it is.”

“Does it remind you of your wedding?” he asked gently.

Denise shook her head. “No. We didn’t make a big song and dance out of it. Jason and I eloped while we were both still in college. It was the most romantic thing you could ever imagine. He asked me at a little sidewalk café in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. We hopped a plane that night for Jamaica — they only have a twenty-four hour waiting period there, and so were married on a beach at dawn less than forty-eight hours after the proposal.”

It crossed Dave’s mind that when he was in college he couldn’t have afforded a Greyhound bus to Cape Cod, let alone a jet plane for two to Jamaica on an impulse, but he didn’t say so out loud. “Does that mean that you didn’t have anyone there? No family, I mean?”

She tilted her head slightly sideways to look at him. “No,” she said evenly. “My mother was a little hurt by that, I think, but she never came out and said as much. I’ve always wondered what his family thought. They were kind of stiff around me, but then again, they were always kind of stiff, anyway.”

“Did you miss having a wedding with all the trimmings?” he asked gently.

She smiled a sad little smile. “I think every little girl dreams of having a big wedding with all the trimmings, but I didn’t miss it at the time. No. I think I was just happy to be young and in love and marrying the man that I thought was my prince.”

She looked across the driveway to where the lady in the apron stood next to little Gracie, talking to the woman in the green tank top. She stared down at the cake topper in her hands, sucked in her lip a little, then crossed the driveway with Dave trailing behind. When she reached the three females, Denise knelt down in front of the little girl and held out the cake topper. “Would you like this?” she asked, a little shyly.

Gracie didn’t hesitate at all. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed, reaching for it.

“If it’s okay with your Mommy,” Denise added, looking up at the lady in the tank top.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Thank you!” Gracie blurted out. “Oh, thank you, thank you! It’s the most
beautifulest
thing I’ve ever seen.”

Denise smiled and straightened up. “The cake topper plus the bike came to twenty-two dollars, right?”

“Right.” The apron woman nodded, reaching for the cash.

• • •

Denise rode her new bike back from the tag sale. Dave drove back, and was waiting for her when she got back, rocking gently on the porch swing. Denise wheeled into the driveway and parked her bike, then walked up to him, shining and slightly breathless. “That was a good deal. Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” he replied. “It rides well?”

“Yeah. Mind you, I’m still not sure when I’ll get time to actually ride it, but at least I have it and that’s a start.” She came up on the porch and sat down next to him on the swing, setting it to rocking again. They sat together in companionable silence for several long minutes while she caught her breath. They stared straight ahead, looking at Dave’s car parked in the street, each alone with their thoughts.

Finally Dave said, “That was nice of you, giving that little girl the bride and groom.”

She drew in a breath, but didn’t look at him. She tried not to think about her marriage. It was in the past, and she liked to keep it there, but suddenly there it was in the forefront of her mind again. “Yeah, well. I like kids.”

“But you never had any of your own?” he asked, curious.

“I thought there’d be time, you know? And Jason said he wasn’t ready yet. He was busy taking over as a CEO in his family’s business. So I waited. I waited to have my children, and I waited so long that I ended up without a husband.”

“What happened?” Dave asked. He knew the answer but didn’t want her to know that he’d listened to the office gossip about her.

She shook her head. “I stayed home and cooked his meals and went to his functions and hosted his dinner parties, and he worked late and screwed his secretary.” She couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice, even now.

“I’m sorry,” he said truthfully. “No one should have to go through something like that.”

“Yeah, me too,” she said. “They say the wife’s the last to know, and after it all came out, people would say that I must have suspected something, but I honestly didn’t know that it was going on. Not ’til the end.”

“How did you find out?” he asked, gently pushing the porch swing back and forth with his foot. There was something comforting in the movement.

She looked up at the gingerbread woodworking in the cornices of the porch posts. “She told me. His secretary. Confronted me, really. Said that the only thing keeping her from having him was me — that he was too soft-hearted to tell me himself that he didn’t love me. He loved her instead — physically, spiritually, emotionally. So why didn’t I just give up that sham of a marriage and let her have him?”

“Dear God,” Dave muttered.

“I think what I said was a little stronger than that,” she admitted with a half-hearted smile.

“So you left him?”

“No. I stayed to confront him. I didn’t trust her. Hell, I don’t think I believed her at first. And then I thought that if it was true, then it had to have been her fault. She must have made him. Tricked him, somehow. Seduced him. I was so sure that it had to be her fault.”

“You must have really loved him,” he said quietly.

Had she loved Jason? Oh, God, she had! She thought that he would be the man she’d spend the rest of her life with. “I thought I did. God, I thought I did. But none of it was what I thought — not him, not my marriage, not my life. None of it.” She stared at the porch railing, stripped bare. “He made a half-hearted attempt to get me to stay. Told me he loved me, that he didn’t want the marriage to end, that he’d make it up to me.”

“But you sent him packing.”

Her smile held no joy. “I took him back. I figured after six years together, he deserved another chance. Maybe it was like a seven year itch sort of thing. He said he didn’t love her. Said he didn’t know why he’d done it, but that he’d have her transferred to another office if that was what I wanted. So I stayed.” Her voice was full of bitterness. “And I tried to be a better wife. I thought maybe if I kept the house cleaner, made better meals, was a better lover … ” She blinked. “No one can say I didn’t try.”

“I’m sure you did,” he told her. “But it didn’t make a difference?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t trust him. At first, I thought that was a bad thing. A good wife trusts her husband, you know? But every time he said he had to work late, I wondered. Finally, I packed up a picnic dinner one night. Champagne, stuffed mushrooms, French bread, rare sliced roast beef, and coconut macaroons — those were his favorite cookies, and I made them myself, grating the coconut by hand and then topping each one with a little maraschino cherry.” She drew in a deep breath. “God, I was pathetic.”

“No,” he told her. “You weren’t.”

She glanced at him, but didn’t reply.

“So … you caught him?” he asked gently after a long moment.

She shook her head. “He wasn’t there. So I looked up her address on my cell phone and I drove to her building. God, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill anybody on the drive over there, I was so upset. I didn’t know what her apartment number was and so I just stood outside the building waiting for him to come out. It started to rain, but I still stood there. I knew. I just knew. And while I waited there, I had time to think. If he walked out that door, it was over. No more chances. No more apologies. Over. AIDS and other STDs aside, there’s such a thing as self-respect.”