They met in a beauty parlor.
He'd taken some friends' kids there for haircuts. She'd noticed him, but he seemed to get along so well and seemed so comfortable with them that she'd assumed they must be his.
A year later they were engaged.
I remember he'd sit against the wall in our eighth-grade science class and make the sound—obnoxiously loud—of a truck downshifting. It was an uncannily accurate representation. I think the teacher hated when we’d urge him on, to get his bwrrrr to shatter any sort of classroom atmosphere she may have had that day.
He loved to laugh. It was like a bark—short and piercing.
She spoke almost without plan. She moved loosely in time, reciting people they’d met, places they’d gone, but always emphasizing how much people loved him, and, without really saying it, how much she loved him.
It was almost like watching a life collapse, a private moment that had to be spoken to us so that we would understand.
I didn’t know until tonight he’d been adopted. He never spoke of it.
Her face was almost radiant when she spoke, alive and beautiful. When she finished, it died.
She stepped away from the mic and walked, tears, head down, into shadows.
I didn’t go see him in the casket. I prefer to see him differently.
Light a candle to remember the dead.
I was making the salad when she came in and dropped her coat across the back of the chair.
Her salads were always better than mine. I tend to be quite conventional saladly, putting together the usual combinations (she called them bachelor salads) of tomatoes and lettuce, a few bits of this and that that I might have sitting in the refrigerator. Hers were vastly better.
Early on we’d agreed that if possible, I’d do the entrée and she’d do the salad. Our decision wasn’t based on culinary abilities, but something of a whim: I liked her salads; she liked my entrees. In practice, most days one of us ended up doing both since we were rarely both at home to cooperate on dinner.
Tonight she’d been late at work, trying to finish up a layout and article for the next issue. I’d had the day off—a fluke—and had spent most of the day doing few of the things I’d told myself to do the night before. Doubtlessly she’d be a bit annoyed that I’d managed to clutter up the living room with the magazines I’d been reading, and that I’d not cleaned out the garage.
I’d thought she’d be a little later than she was. I figured I’d given myself enough time to straighten up and cook before she arrived so that I wouldn’t quite be my cluttered self, but I’d obviously overestimated the time she’d take.
She walked over to where I was attempting to tease the salad into something that would pretend at her style. There was a pause—almost like a sigh—before she peeled an orange and tossed in the segments, hunted down some pine nuts, and crushed some black pepper (for me, since she wasn’t entirely fond of the stuff). She moved this, arranged that, and made it look right.
We sat to dinner. I managed to botch the stuffed peppers, burn the bread, and forget the vegetable side dish, but our salad was delicious.