Truly(51)
“Most of the time it’s not this busy,” Ben said. “This is holiday-weekend busy.”
“I guess everywhere’s going to be like that today.”
“Yep.”
She pulled a few steps ahead, interested by something around a bend. Her hair changed colors as she moved in and out of patches of sunlight. Dull wheat in the shade, but shiny and bright when the sun hit it, falling around her shoulders. The wind had made a mess of it on the bridge. She’d tried to put it right with her fingers, but it still looked disorganized.
He liked it that way. He liked how adaptable she was, how comfortable in this park, with him, even though she’d lost all her stuff and all her plans, and even though New York hadn’t lived up to her expectations. If he were in her shoes, he’d be sullen and pissed off, trying to find somewhere to hole up, but May was rushing around corners, pointing out a neat building or a great view.
She was delightful.
“Did you see this?” she said as he came around the bend. “It’s huge!”
It was a big rock. He checked for leprechauns, statuary—anything to make sense of her excitement—but he found nothing but more rock.
“I’ve seen bigger,” he said.
She made an exasperated face. “Men. You’ll say that about anything. My family went to the Grand Canyon once, and my dad had tears in his eyes. He wouldn’t admit it, but I saw them. And by the time he got home and our neighbor asked him about it, he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty deep. So did you get that lawnmower blade sharpened?’ ”
Ben smiled. “What’s your dad do?”
“He’s an engineer at the nuclear power plant. He used to do something extremely boring related to safety measures, and now he does something extremely boring involving the decommissioning.”
“Whereas your job was so exciting.”
She laughed. “You have a point. But I liked it.”
“How’d you get into it to begin with? Is that what you wanted to do?”
“No, I wanted to illustrate children’s books.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your …” He couldn’t think of the word for what kind of paints or whatever she used. “What kind of art?”
“My medium,” she said. “Pastels, mostly. Some watercolors. I draw a lot of cartoony people, little bunnies, fat squirrels. Happy stuff.”
“You should draw me something.”
“What, right now? Like with a stick in the dirt?”
“Later. On a napkin.”
She smiled, testing a foothold with her toe. “Okay. I’ll sign it and everything, and then you can keep it in your junk drawer forever.”
He probably would.
“So did you ever do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Illustrate?”
“Just a little bit. In college. Mostly stuff I wrote myself, which doesn’t count.” She gave the boulder a pat and started walking again.
“Why not?”
“Why doesn’t it count, you mean?”
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“You know how families are. My mom thought the art was nice for a hobby, but she wanted me to figure out how to make a living. There was a lot of talk about health benefits and insurance, and I believe the phrases life-altering catastrophe and major strain on the family were used. So I switched from fine arts to graphic design. I thought I could maybe illustrate greeting cards. When I graduated, I wanted to move to Chicago, but Green Bay had the job listed, and who could turn down a job with the Packers?”
“So then you met Dan, and the rest is history?”
“Complete with shrimp fork.”
“How’d that happen, though?”
“The shrimp fork?”
“No, you and Thor.”
He knew how the shrimp fork had happened. He’d found the video on the Internet after she went to sleep last night. Listening to Dan’s proposal had made him so tense, he’d just about strained a muscle in his neck snapping the laptop closed.
He’d thought the video went viral because of what May did at the end, but it was Thor and his numb-nuts proposal. The lamest declaration of love in history.
Ben no longer wondered why she’d forked him. He wondered how she’d endured a relationship with such a douche for four years.
She shrugged. “I met him through work. He asked me out. I said yes.”
“That’s the whole story?”
“No, not really. But you know. More or less.” The path emerged into open space, and she stopped short. “Wow, what’s this?”
“Long Meadow.” They came out of the woods into a broad, undulating lawn that stretched in both directions, surrounded by trees and sky. Kids ran wild, moms sat on blankets in the grass, a group of shirtless men played Frisbee.