Incredibly embarrassing that she wanted something so outwardly ordinary and conventional and yet still it hadn’t happened.
Embarrassing…and painful…and horrible…that she could feel the bitterness kicking in. She had to try so hard, sometimes, not to mind that both her younger sisters were now happily in love, married or engaged, with babies on the way.
She had a secret little chart tucked away in her head, and mentally awarded herself a gold star for every day she went without feeling jealous, or saying something pointed and mean, or wallowing in regret.
And even though the mental chart had quite a few gold stars on it, she hated that it existed in the first place, and no matter how much she’d disliked…well, tried to dislike…“Cap” Capelli in high school, she understood so well what he’d meant when he’d said with that wry drawl and quirked mouth, “Life’s a funny thing.”
* * *
Mary Jane Cherry was one of those women who looked way better at thirty-five than she’d looked at eighteen, Joe decided.
In high school, she’d had frequent skin breakouts and an orthodontic plate and puppy fat, and her hair had been an indifferent brownish color, worn too long. Now she had it cut to shoulder-length in bouncy layers with professional blond highlights, her skin was smooth, dewy and well cared for and the puppy fat had turned into a kind of ripeness that looked warm and inviting, along with the soft creases at the corners of her eyes and the smile lines around her mouth.
It was a little disturbing that he remembered her so well, but then, he’d made an extensive study of girls in high school. If he went to a reunion—which, to be clear, he had no intention of ever doing—it would probably turn out that he remembered them all.
Joe listened to Mary Jane’s car engine, heard “the noise” and knew she should have brought it in for a checkup about five hundred miles ago. He did some further exploration and diagnosis, and came up with at least three major repairs that the car needed right now.
Mary Jane was lucky it had held up this far, and hadn’t left her stranded somewhere with smoke billowing from the engine. He would need to order parts from the distributor, and when they arrived he’d need to pull apart the whole engine to put them in. It was Tuesday today. She wasn’t getting the car back before Friday at the earliest.
He did a grease and oil change on another car, and then a wheel alignment and a tire rotation on a third, knowing that both clients would be back soon to pick up their vehicles. The bad-news phone call to Mary Jane would have to wait.
Which was a pity, because it gave him more time to think about her.
How well she’d held up in the looks and youthfulness department. How surprised he was that she was still here. She’d been intelligent, articulate, hard-working, always earned good grades. He somehow would have expected her to have moved away, in search of wider horizons.
In high school, the girls had been divided into two groups—the ones who thought he was gorgeous and had wild crushes on him, and the ones who thought he was gorgeous and couldn’t stand him.
Naturally, Mary Jane was in the second group, and naturally, he had been all about the girls in the first.
He’d dated—hell, he couldn’t remember—at least five or six of them. The prettiest and wildest and most popular, because those were the ones you could get the farthest with, and were the ones that made the other guys look at you with envy and respect, cementing your position as the coolest kid in school.
Looking back, he could see how much he’d been riding for a fall. Sometimes, he wanted to reach back in time and slap his teenage self upside the head. Hard. He could also see that if just a few things had gone differently, the fall might never have happened.
Because he’d come so close.
Seriously close.
Even now, he might easily have been starring in some long-running TV crime show, or choosing between movie scripts that had Oscar potential written into every line. As he’d said to Mary Jane, life was a funny thing.
There had been a major series of audition callbacks where he’d ended up in the running, along with just one other guy, for the lead role in a crime drama series, and the other guy—now a household name—had gotten the gig. There had been one gorgeous female smile that he’d caught in a crowded diner and had followed up on instead of letting it slide.
Just those two events, and his whole life had gone off on a completely different track from the one he’d envisaged.
He couldn’t let himself think about it, because on the one hand, he’d fallen so far short, but on the other, there were two things about his life now that were so incredibly precious he couldn’t imagine himself without them.
The owners of the other cars showed up both at the same time, and he took their money and returned their keys and remembered he still hadn’t called Mary Jane Cherry, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He was just about to pick up the phone when his father came in, towing two identical seven-year-old girls and looking pretty tired.
The girls, of course, were Joe’s two precious things.
“You’re going to tell me it’s easier fixing cars than taking care of these two,” he told his dad.
“Nah, we had a great day.” But a tiring one. Dad couldn’t gloss over that.
“What did you do?”
“Played on the beach at the lake. Did a round of mini golf up at that place with all the waterfalls. Had ice cream.”
Dad couldn’t keep up this pace all summer. He had prostate cancer, and the only good thing about this was the doctor’s promise that it would kill him so slowly he’d likely die of something else first, fifteen years from now.