That, and spinsterhood.
When the kids were small, there was a farm up the road with a makeshift wooden produce stand where we could buy berries and corn and zucchini. We called the farmer Mr. Zucchini because he grew the most enormous squash we had ever seen—not just then, but even to this day. We couldn’t figure out when he stocked his farm stand. We never saw him outside, so we decided he only went out at night. He was a mystery man. All the neighborhood parents liked to tease the kids that on Halloween, Mr. Zucchini gave away dried squash chips and flattened blueberries, something that made them avoid the farmhouse altogether.
One summer several years later, the veggie stand stayed empty. Another mom in the neighborhood said Mr. Zucchini had passed away. None of us had ever known the elusive farmer, but at the end of that summer, Mrs. Zucchini started sitting by the empty produce stand in a little red folding chair, holding a rain umbrella over her head to keep the sun off her face.
She always had a tabby cat dozing on her lap. I came to think of her as the lonely cat lady. I waved at her from my air-conditioned car while she sat in the sweltering heat. I didn’t even know her real name, but without produce in the stand, there was no reason to stop.
One day when I slowed down to wave, I saw her dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. I knew she was lonely and missed her husband, but I was busy with the kids and back-to-school time. The next summer, Mrs. Zucchini stayed inside, and a few years later, she died. The farmhouse was sold, the produce stand dismantled.
I didn’t want to become Mrs. Zucchini with a cat and an umbrella in the summer and no one stopping to visit. I’d tried not to think about the passage of time, but here I was, almost twenty years later, and I didn’t have young children to take care of any longer.
Most of all, I didn’t want Ian and Madison to feel responsible for keeping me company. I wanted them to live their lives independently from me, maybe have dinner with me sometimes, or lounge around on a Saturday and tell me about their week. Bring the grandkids to visit.
But there was something more. What else was I afraid to face?
And then I knew. I was worried that maybe the best years of my life had come and gone. The kids had been my whole life for two decades. I’d been completely immersed in being a mom. I loved every second of it and would do it all again in a heartbeat. Maybe in the afterlife.
But there wasn’t any going back, just moving forward, and I needed to square my shoulders and keep my chin up and take whatever was coming my way. Maybe even embrace it. I was stronger than I’d been in my marriages, I realized, no longer trying to fill an empty space. Maybe I’d been whole all along.
I’d slept with my arm hanging off the bed after Bryan left, leaving Penny with plenty of room to herself. But the next morning, I woke up in the middle, my arms flung out, stretched out on my back, taking up most of the bed, actually crowding my little dog.
I was an unmarried adult woman, feeling, for the first time, something close to exhilaration.
68
“How are things?” I texted Bryan before I went to work one morning in February. It was nearly the one-year anniversary of his move south.
I didn’t get a reply until I was at my desk wrestling with the purchase order software. Wes, Sal, and Paulie gathered around the conference table, already getting excited about the 17th annual strawberry fest, which wasn’t until June. They were in a heated debate over whose wife would make the best shortcake.
Joe was feeding Jerky some of the peanut butter dog snacks I’d brought in.
“We have news,” Bry texted back.
I snuck my phone into my pocket, feeling ridiculous, and went into the bathroom, turning on the water so they’d think I was washing my hands, as if I were doing something wrong texting in there.
“We?”
“Sarah and me…I asked her to marry me, and she said yes. We’re engaged!”
I had been examining my gray roots in the bathroom mirror, trying to remember when I had last visited the salon to have them colored.
Engaged? What?
I put down the toilet seat, cursing the damn unisex bathroom, and sat down, my knees actually shaking.
“That’s great,” I texted back. “So great.”
“I know. I never thought she’d say yes, but she told me she knew I was The One the first time she laid eyes on me.”
I closed my eyes. There it was again. The One. The Fucking One. Had I ever been anybody’s One? Had I been Adam’s? Bryan’s? I shook my head. None of that mattered now. Adam had his RV life, and now Bryan had the new love of his life. In less than a year. I tried to remember when he’d told me he met Sarah but came up blank. Three months before? Anyway, it was within a few months of leaving New York.
I had a sudden, vivid image of Bryan’s face at our small, unfussy wedding ceremony, calm and peaceful as if it weren’t even a big step for him to marry me, as if it was meant to be. Later, we’d toasted each other with sangria and fed each other meatballs at the Italian restaurant, and he’d leaned over to whisper something in my ear.
“Thank you for having me,” he’d said.
“My pleasure,” I’d whispered back.
I was grateful for all the good years with Bryan. I wanted him to be happy, and I knew it wasn’t with me. But to fall in love so quickly—out of nowhere, really—with a swimsuit model/teacher? How had that happened?
Was it fate? Dumb luck?
