The dessert place was open—packed, in fact, with folks gathering for sweet treats and coffee after their evening’s activities, crowded at tables both inside and out on the sidewalk. I’d passed this place a million times. I’d just never had a reason to come in.
A bright, bustling, cheery place. It felt like a party.
Now, we ordered slices of cake—mine, a yellow diner slice with chocolate icing; his, death by chocolate—and then we wedged ourselves into a small table in the middle of it all. Joe had insisted on paying, and he must have told them we were celebrating a birthday, because when the slices arrived at the table, the waiter lit two giant sparkler candles, stuck them in the slices, and shouted, “Everybody! Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to—”
And then he looked at me.
“Nora!” I shouted—and it felt so great to just shout my mom’s name.
And so the whole room began to sing. And I swear I had never thought of the “Happy Birthday” song as anything particularly special until that moment—but sitting in front of that sparkler candle as the entire room launched into a rich rendition of it, I suddenly wondered why that song didn’t bring me to tears every time. Maybe it was how crowded the room was, or the acoustics, or the sound of all those people singing warm wishes to my long-lost mother: Happy Birthday, Dear Nora …
But my voice got too wobbly to sing.
I spent the second half of the song just taking it all in.
Savoring it, the way I know she would have.
It was nothing like what I usually did to celebrate my mom’s birthday.
But maybe different wasn’t so bad.
* * *
THERE WERE LOTS of upsides to that night.
It had felt surprisingly good to help out the girl in the coffee shop, and it had been surprisingly satisfying to tell off Parker. Sue, while woefully off target, had at least been sweetly trying to cheer me up. Joe had turned out to be great at anti-panic back rubs. And creating power outages. And I had celebrated my mom’s birthday not alone for the first time since she died.
But what, in the end, was my takeaway?
None of the upsides. Just the one crushingly disappointing downside: I got stood up.
That was the sentence that ticker-taped through my head all the next day.
I got stood up. By my future husband. On our very first date.
How would we spin that to the grandkids?
I mean, fine. He’d had a work emergency. I got it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to have left some Saint Bernard dying alone in the clinic.
He’d been busy doing something noble. It was a fair excuse.
But here was the problem. It was now the next day, and the admirable, flawless, and perfect Dr. Oliver Addison, DVM, had not called to apologize.
I mean, if you leave a lady sitting in a coffee shop, even for a good reason, you should call the next day and grovel a little bit. Right? Make some voice contact? Stress in real time how sorry you are? Maybe demonstrate enthusiasm by setting a new date to try again?
Nothing from this guy. Crickets.
Which forced me to wonder something horrible: Maybe this perfect man wasn’t so perfect after all.
Not fair. Hadn’t I already decided he was supposed to solve all my problems?
He was supposed to make things better, not worse. He was supposed to ease my worries, not create more of them. He was supposed to make me feel good—not frigging terrible.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten the memo?
I knew of course that people weren’t perfect. Life was messy. He didn’t even know how much I was counting on him to be the fantasy-man mirage that kept me moving through my personal emotional desert.
I couldn’t legitimately resent him.
But I resented him, anyway. Illegitimately.
He was just so disappointing.
All day long, as he continued to disappoint me, I made excuses for him—maybe he’d been up all night and fallen asleep exhausted?—while resenting the fact that I had to make excuses for him.
And while I waited, my mind drifted more and more to Joe.
Because if Dr. Oliver Addison had been disappointing … Joe, if I’m honest, had been the opposite.
Joe had been surprising. Surprisingly nice. Surprisingly attentive. Surprisingly not at all like what I would have expected a person I’d nicknamed the Weasel to be.
Sixteen
ON THE AFTERNOON before Sue was coming over for our second—and final—make-or-break attempt at her portrait, I took Peanut out for his first long walk since he got sick.
We’d been cleared for little walks almost from the beginning. But before Peanut could do his signature long, rambling, sniff-everything-in-sight stroll, we had to make sure his strength was back.