“I don’t understand.”
“I know. But I just need time. We’ll have fun. I promise. I’ll be good to you.” She reached out and took my hand. “I really want to be with you. I’m sorry I’m so hard. Please don’t give up on me.”
I looked into her pleading eyes, feeling the warmth of her hand in mine. I took a deep breath. “I won’t give up on you. And I won’t ask what’s going on.” I tilted my head. “But there’s one thing I need to know.”
She looked at me anxiously. “What?”
“You’re not an outlaw, are you?”
A broad smile crossed her face. “No.”
“Good. Because I don’t want to end up in court someday testifying against you.”
She laughed, then she hugged me. “I’m going to make you so happy you came to Chicago.”
CHAPTER
Seventeen
It is impossible to build a solid foundation on the sand of the unkown.
Joseph Jacobson’s Diary
My high school football coach used to say, “Men, sometimes you gotta walk through Hell to get to Heaven.” I was beginning to believe him. As difficult as being thrown out of Colorado had been, I was actually starting to feel grateful that it had happened. I never would have met April if I hadn’t left home. My job at Leo Burnett was fulfilling. My Bank On It campaign was a big success, and April never failed to point out the BankOne billboards we passed. She even cut out BankOne ads she saw in newspapers or magazines.
The next eight months were not what I expected when I first arrived in Chicago. They were good. A better word would be “idyllic.” April and I grew closer, to the point I couldn’t imagine being without her.
I finally met April’s roommate, Ruth. She was not what I expected—practically a photographic negative of April. The evening I met her she was wearing a torn Nirvana T-shirt revealing the tattoos on her arms and neck. She had tattoos on her face and at least a dozen piercings. She wore small safety pins in her ears.
She was friendly and soft-spoken, like April, but otherwise the two couldn’t have been a more incongruous pair. After we left the apartment, I asked April, “How did you two meet?”
“She’s an old friend,” she said. “From Utah.”
The route April took from Mr. G’s to the Jefferson Park station led past my apartment, so I gave her a key to my place so she could save the trip home and wait at my place after her shift on the evenings we planned to go out. She began stopping by and cleaning my place or bringing me food from the diner and leaving it in my refrigerator, usually with a love note.
I remembered what my father had said about love—“You’ll know it’s love when you don’t have to ask.” I now understood what he meant. With Ashley, my heart was always asking. It seemed to me that with her, love was an emotional shell game. With April there was no such doubt. I wasn’t so much in love as love was in me. I felt it all the time with her; in every phone call, every smile, every frown of concern.
In July, I came down with the flu for a week and she barely left my side, bringing me soup from the diner, doing my laundry and picking up my medications. She seemed grateful for the chance to take care of me. The inverse was true too. I wanted to make her happy. Ashley was right. For better or worse, I was a pleaser. And pleasers tend to become doormats for those with different sensibilities. April was also a pleaser. We were perfect together. I’d never been closer to anyone in my life.
Nor had I ever known anyone who was more honest, which was the greatest irony of our relationship. She simultaneously hid nothing present and everything past. It was as if a big curtain had been drawn over the largest part of her life.
Most of the time it was possible to ignore the curtain. But every now and then something would slip out, and I would be reminded that there was something about her I didn’t know—something, perhaps, that could take her away from me.
I learned one more thing. April was highly susceptible to guilt, and whatever it was she was hiding was definitely eating at her. At those times she would pray more and read her Bible and sometimes fast. She would put boundaries between us physically. These times would remind me that even in Eden there were snakes.
April’s birthday came in August. On Timothy’s recommendation, I took her to the Berghoff, one of Chicago’s oldest and most famous restaurants. At dinner I gave her my gift, a silver chain with a Tiffany heart lock pendant in sterling silver with Tiffany Blue enamel finish. She squealed when she saw it. She asked me to put it on her. After that I never saw her without it.