“Have you really been praying for me?” Lincoln asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I pray for everyone we care about. Plus, I like to pray for things that seem possible. There are so many things that I pray for that seem almost too big even for God. It’s rewarding to pray for something that might actually happen. It kind of keeps me going. Sometimes, I just pray for a bumper crop of zucchini or for a good night’s sleep.”
“So you think it’s possible that I might meet a girl?” He felt genuinely grateful to think that Christine was praying for him. If he were God, he would listen to Christine’s prayers.
“The girl.” Christine smiled. “More than possible. It’s probable even. Tell me about her.”
He wanted to. He wanted to tell someone. Why not Christine? He couldn’t think of anyone who would be less judgmental.
“If I do,” Lincoln said, “you can’t tell anyone else. Not even Dave.”
Her face fell.
“Why not? Are you in trouble? Is it a bad secret? Oh my God, are you having an affair? Don’t tell me if you’re having an affair. Or breaking the law.”
“I’m not breaking the law … ,” he said. “But I may have employed questionable ethics.”
“You have to tell me now,” she said. “Or it’ll just drive me crazy.”
So he told her everything, from the beginning, trying not to play up the parts of the story that made him sound shady, but trying not to play them down either. By the end, Christine had nervously rolled the first pizza crust thin as tracing paper.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, scrunching the dough back into a ball. He couldn’t read her face.
“Do you think I’m horrible?” he asked, sure that she did.
“No,” she said. “Oh no, of course not. I don’t know how you could read people’s e-mail without actually reading it, if that’s your job.”
“But I shouldn’t have kept reading hers,” he said. “There’s no getting around that.”
“No.” Christine frowned. Even her frown looked like it wanted to be a smile. “No, that part’s messy.
You’ve really never met her? Do you even know what she looks like?”
“No,” Lincoln said.
“There’s something really romantic about that. Every woman wants a man who’ll fall in love with her soul as well as her body. But what if you meet her, and you don’t think she’s attractive?”
“I don’t think I care what she looks like,” Lincoln said. Not that he hadn’t thought about it. Not that it wasn’t exciting in a weird way, not to know, to imagine.
“Oh, that is romantic,” Christine said.
“Well,” Lincoln said, feeling like he was getting off too easy, “I know that she’s attractive. Her boyfriend is the kind of guy who dates attractive women. And I know that she’s had other boyfriends …”
“It’s still romantic,” Christine said, “falling in love with someone for who she is and what she says and what she believes in. It’s actually much more romantic than her crush on you, which would have to be almost completely physical. You might be nothing like she thinks you are.”
Lincoln had never thought of it like that.
“Oh, not that she would be disappointed,” Christine said reassuringly. “How could she be?”
“It’s felt like enough,” he said, “that she thinks I’m cute.”
“Lincoln,” she said quietly. “Cute has never been your problem.”
Lincoln didn’t know what to say then. Christine smiled and handed him two green peppers. “Your problem,” she said, “at least in the immediate sense, is that you have to stop reading this woman’s e- mail.”
“If I stopped, do you think I could try to meet her?”
“I don’t know,” Christine said, rolling out the dough again, “you’d have to tell her about the e-mail, and she might not be able to get over it.”
“Could you get over something like that?”
“I don’t know …It would seem pretty weird. David stole my dice one summer, before we started dating, so that he would have something of me to keep near him over break. He carried them in his pocket. That seemed kind of romantic, but kind of weird, and this is much weirder than that. You’d have to tell her about how you’ve gone to her boyfriend’s concerts and how you walk by her desk. I don’t know …” Christine started spreading tomato saucewith her fingers in bright red swirls on the dough.
“You’re right,” Lincoln said. It didn’t matter that Christine wasn’t as judgmental as Eve or his mother or anyone else he could have told about Beth. There was no one he could tell, no one he respected, who would tell him that this was going to work. “I guess I ruined it the moment I decided to keep reading her e-mails. The thing is, I never really decided that. It wasn’t like a formal decision.”