The Heart Gives Second Chances
Chapter 4: Glass Frogs
Over that year, Becky went on two dates, one with a young man who asked her out while he waited for his girlfriend. But desperate and despite my warnings and her misgivings, they went out to a local steakhouse, had a fun time, slept together, then, as predicted by everyone, even the other brainless silk flowers, he ghosted her. She didn’t cry for him, but she didn’t dance as much for a week.
Then a month of too many similar couples, cheating husbands and wives, sex workers, and young, cute couples that didn’t know better, those kept our spirits alive. Becky met an older woman. Someone kind, like a grandmother who works out, runs marathons, swims, and does Pilates with women half her age. I only knew of her from Becky’s mind, her thoughts the next day, and her smiles as a patron’s dress or hairstyle reminded her of Lucy.
They never married, nor did they move in together, they had two different lifestyles, and they knew that close quarters would destroy the relationship. I used to think that all couples had to live together, share a bed, and do cute things together, but after years of reading the minds of the few successful couples who came to the restaurant, I learned that whatever worked, worked. Do that, and screw everyone else. I wish I knew that in my past life, it would have saved me a lot of angst.
One stormy, wet night, Vicki arrived with a guy our age, her age, who she kind of liked. He did glassblowing and specialized in beautiful birds and frogs. She had never explained why she collected glass frogs, but she had a vast collection, so many that I never bought her any. I tried to buy her other lizards, but those always ended up in a drawer or the back of the closet. She never threw them out, but also never displayed them. I retreated to chocolate gifts, nice specialty brands that she displayed and shared with others.
Franklyn, Frankie to his mother and teachers, Frank to the general public, and Lyn to his close friends, had a strange face, non-symmetrical, with a right eye a bit large and a misshapen right cheek, ugly by the world’s standard, but somehow Vicki liked him and loved his off-set appearance. With broad shoulders and large arms, he stretched his only nice shirt, a cheap one he bought at a reuse store just for this date.
Becky faked a smile at him and sat them at Vicki’s favorite table for first dates, the one where I first met her as a flower. Becky had removed the paper flower above and replaced the paper cupid on the wall with a picture of two cupids hugging.
“What do you do for fun?” Vicki asked the most standard first date question, something she perfected years ago. She used that on me, and I answered, ‘You.’ She laughed. I laughed, but now I cringed and remembered Hank and that awful night, the worst in my life, where I could only watch and dread and scream in frustration from non-existent lungs.
“Fun? Fun’s for losers, blow glass, nothing fun about that,” Franklyn said with a smirk. His response caused Vicki to pause in her menu perusal and glance up to notice his blue eyes, long eyelashes, and partial right eyebrow, where an ember had burnt off the hair and left swirled skin. The skin glistened as if wet and danced in the flicker of the fake candle on the table. She stared at it, and something shifted inside her, like a crack in an ice block, or as if that ember landed on a pile of dry, dead leaves and started to smolder.
“So you’re too stupid to pick a sane hobby, like skydiving without a parachute?” Vicki said with a frown. She didn’t know if she liked him and his caustic humor, but at least she would enjoy a not-boring date. I liked him, he had pure thoughts, thoughts about how he liked her eyes and liked how slow she moved and yet with purpose, from tentative movements, her fingers would linger over her fork before she decided that she wanted it, and with deft quick movements, picked it up and used it. I also loved that about her.
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