Chapter 3: The End of the Day and Off to Sleep

After going over to the refrigerator, looking inside and getting us a couple of cokes, I asked her if she would mind if I ordered pizza rather than cooking something. She opened her drink, took a small drink as if thinking about it and said, "You don't have to go to the trouble of ordering pizza. I'm used to going to bed hungry, it doesn't bother me anymore."

That set me back on my heels, but I quickly replied, "Well it bothers me." As I rubbed the slight padding around my middle, I said, "As you can see I am not used to missing many meals." I smiled to try to lighten the mood and explained, "What I meant was that normally I would cook you something, but in all the confusion, I forgot to take something out of the freezer. I can thaw something out in the microwave if you don't like pizza but..."

She interrupted me with, "No, I really like pizza, it's just that I have already been so much trouble for you. I'm sure you have a lot of things you would rather do than take care of me." As she finished she hung her head as if apologizing to me.

I was stunned so I waited a moment and moved closer to her. I lifted her chin so that she was looking into my eyes as I said, "No, you are wrong! There is nothing in this world that I would rather be doing than being here with you tonight. I am usually bored and waste a lot of my time doing a lot of meaningless things, but certainly nothing that has happened today has been meaningless." I then hugged her to me and said, "I am sorry if I have made you feel that you aren't important to me. You are much more important than anything else I can think of. I am sorry that you got hurt this afternoon but I am glad that we had the chance to get to know each other." I then hugged her even closer as she had begun to cry again.

To break the mood, I asked, "So what kind of pizza do you like, dear?

She considered for a moment and said "I think I like pepperoni best."

The rest of the evening passed quietly. We completely ate a large pepperoni pizza, I ate three slices and she ate five. I didn't dare even tease her about it because I knew from the bath that she was underweight for someone for her age and size. Her clothes finished drying and we both folded them while watching TV together on the couch. I realized that most of her clothes needed replacing, but at least they were clean and she had a halfway decent outfit to wear the next day.

It had been amusing watching her watch TV. I had given her the remote, realizing that she probably hadn't been able to watch much of it with the electricity being off at her house. She had told me that it had been off only about a week 'this time' and that the TV being off and the boredom of nothing to do was the reason she went outside. I had then asked her about how she normally spent her time at home hoping to find some reason other than meanness for the attack on her earlier in the day. I still didn't want to approach it directly, because I was afraid to bring back those memories. She said she enjoyed both watching TV and reading history and adventure books. I thought it was at least partially to escape her real world.

She said she hadn't had anything good to read since school let out in the early summer. The panhandle of Florida has an almost non-existent public library system. She said she loved shows about nature and science and travel and was only lukewarm towards cartoons and soap operas. She was my kind of woman.

It surprised me how many interests we had in common. I had let her take over the remote and after her initial thrill of looking at more than the five broadcast channels she was used to, she settled on a documentary about ancient Egypt on the Discovery Channel. During commercials, we talked about the show and I was able to explain some things and told her that I had been to Egypt while in the Navy. She was more excited about that than the show and asked probing questions about exactly where I had been and what I had seen. Her questions were intelligent, very well thought-out and I had had to admit to her more than once that I didn't know the answer to a particular question. Soon the show was over and she circled the channels twice before we both agreed that there was nothing on worth watching.

We sat together on the couch talking about what we had watched for quite a while. After her eyes seemed to get heavy and even closed for a moment during a lull in the conversation I asked her, "Are you getting tired?" She seemed reluctant at first to admit she was tired but finally when I did several exaggerated pantomimes of her nodding-off she laughed and admitted that she was tired. I told her that I would make up the couch into a bed for the night and she seemed happy with this at the time.