***
I took my time walking over to the main house. Still unsure whether I’d made the right decision in agreeing to this dinner, I told myself I could always change my mind and cancel. Yet despite having the freedom to do that, I found myself in front of her door, knocking with that gigantic loaf of bread in my other hand.
Someone I didn’t expect opened the door. It wasn’t Heather or her mother, but rather a guy who looked around Heather’s age.
“Who are you?” I asked, looking him up and down.
“Eric. Who are you?”
Before I had a chance to answer, Heather’s dog came running toward me and rubbed his gigantic head all over my legs. He had the biggest freaking head I’d ever seen on a dog.
The guy repeated his question. “So, who are you?”
I finally gave in and scratched the dog’s head. “I’m renting the boathouse. Where’s Heather?”
“What do you need from Heather?” he asked, seeming defensive.
Who the hell is this guy?
I ignored his question. “Where is she?”
“Her mom isn’t feeling well. She’s in the bedroom with her.”
I should probably just get the fuck out of here.
“Tell her I stopped b—”
“Wait!” Heather suddenly appeared. “Noah, don’t go.”
The dog barked as if to echo her request.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Heather seemed flustered. “My mother doesn’t want to come out of her room. This is typical of her.” She looked over at the guy. “I see you’ve met Eric. He was just leaving.”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “Think about what I said, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” She answered dismissively, without even looking at him.
“I mean it, Heather,” he insisted.
“Goodbye, Eric.”
After he slammed the door, there was a bit of awkward silence. The dog walked over to the corner and planted himself on the floor now that the drama was over.
Looking down at my shoes, I noticed they were pretty dirty. It had rained earlier, and I’d stepped in some mud. I couldn’t walk through the house like that.
“You mind if I kick these off?” I asked. “They’re all muddy. I don’t want to dirty your floor.”
“Go for it.” Heather said. She watched me remove my shoes. “Your feet are huge.”
“Thanks for the notification.”
“In case you didn’t know.” She laughed.
I changed the subject. “So, who was that guy?” I asked, taking a few steps into the living room, still overly conscious of my damn feet.
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, we don’t have anything else to talk about at the moment.”
She let out a deep breath. “He’s my ex. I wasn’t expecting him to show up tonight. I didn’t even know he was in town for the summer.”
“He doesn’t live here?”
“No. He moved to Boston. We broke up shortly after he left for Boston University a couple of years ago. We were supposed to go to BU together, actually. And then things got really bad with my mother, so I never went. He went without me. We thought we could make it work long-distance, but he decided he didn’t want to be tied down.”
Shit.
“You were supposed to go away to school?”
“Yeah. I was enrolled in their nursing program.”
I shook my head. This girl had given up the most important time in her life to be a full-time caretaker at twenty years old. I thought about where I’d been at her age: away at college with all of the freedom in the world. I’d taken it all for granted.
“I’m sorry to hear that—that you couldn’t go.”
“It’s okay. I’ve gotten used to the idea. Anyway, I really wasn’t prepared for him to show up here tonight.”
“Listen, I know you’re too polite to suggest this, but we can do this another time if your mom isn’t feeling well. I can jus—”
“No! I invited you over. This is my night off. I don’t want to waste it. Besides…” She looked down at my hands. “You brought…bread.”
I’d practically forgotten. “Yeah. Ugh…I didn’t have much time to decide what to bring. I had a bottle of wine but then remembered you can’t drink.”
“Well, legally I can’t, but I can certainly drink if I—”
“No, you can’t. Not with me giving you the alcohol.”
She looked up at the ceiling. “Okay, then.” Waving her hand, she said, “Please, come into my kitchen, grumpy.” She took the bread. “Can I get you something to drink?”
I stuck my thumbs in the loops of my jeans, feeling uneasy about this so-called dinner for two. “Sure. Anything is fine.”
“Seltzer okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
She popped open a can of cranberry-lime sparkling water from the fridge and handed it to me.
She stood across from me and watched me take my first sip. “Thank you for the bread.” Her face looked flushed. “God, you make me nervous, Noah,” she added. “And the fact that this night has turned into a clusterfuck is really not helping. On top of that, you won’t even let me have a drink to calm down.”
No one could ever accuse this girl of not saying what was on her mind. She was honest to a fault.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t have a drink. I said I wasn’t going to be the one to give it to you.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “I was half-joking anyway. But I could use one right about now.”
Ironic that she claimed I made her nervous, because she made me downright uncomfortable. She stood across from me in a tight black shirt with her tits squeezed together. Her long, blond hair, which she typically wore up, was loose and cascading down her back, and her legs were on full display in a tiny denim skirt. I most definitely wasn’t supposed to be noticing those things—thus, the discomfort.
“Why do I make you nervous?” I asked. “You shouldn’t let anyone have power over you like that. There’s no reason I should be making you nervous. I’m just standing here.”
“It’s not what you’re doing. It’s who you are. From the moment we met, you’ve intimidated me. This dinner was supposed to be an attempt to get over that, but so far no luck.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like that I made her nervous, but maybe it was better this way. The alternative—me being overly nice to her and leading her on—wouldn’t be good, either.
“You know….” I said. “You shouldn’t let people see you sweat. It doesn’t matter what I think about you. My opinion is meaningless in the scope of your life.”
“Oh, I know that. But I want to get to know you, and it would be nice to do that without constantly fucking things up.” She looked back toward the bedroom. “I’m gonna go in and ask my mother to come out one more time, okay?”
“You don’t need to do that. Let her be.”
She wouldn’t listen to me. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
After Heather disappeared upstairs, I wandered around the living room, expecting to find some photos to look at. There weren’t any, not a single one. Fathead—that was the name I’d made up for the dog—stared at me.
There was a large collection of figurines on a shelf, mostly children.
Her voice startled me. “I see you’ve found my Hummels.”
“Is that what they’re called?”
“Yes. I collect them.”
“I was wrong about you,” I teased. “You’re not a teenager. You’re eighty.”
She chuckled. “Don’t make fun of my Hummels.”
“I’m joking.”
She moved closer to me. “There’s a cool story behind them, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“There was this nun…Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel. That’s where they get their name. Anyway, she studied the arts before she gave up her life to join the convent. But even amidst that sacrifice, she never lost her identity. She continued her art, and she’d draw these little people. Someone discovered her and made an agreement with her to make them into figurines. After World War Two, US soldiers stationed in Germany sent these to their families. I loved hearing that. To me, they represent nostalgia and innocence—hope. They make me happy. Or, at least, at one time they did.”
Interesting. But not anymore? “How long have you been collecting them?”
“Since I was about eight. I’d ask for them for birthdays and stuff. I stopped collecting them some years back, though.”