Rhymes with Cupid

by Anna Humphrey

  But then . . . then I marched right out the front door like a girl on a mission. I was halfway down the front path, stomping through the snow, when I remembered I’d forgotten something: the opal pendant. Each day, since the afternoon I’d discovered it belonged to Patrick’s grandmother, I’d been making myself mental notes to return it. And, each day, for one reason or another, I’d convinced myself it wasn’t quite the right time. The night I’d shouted at Patrick in the backyard, I’d carefully placed it in a small wooden box I kept in my desk drawer, coiling the chain carefully before closing the lid. Now I ran back up the stairs in my boots, tracking snow across the hardwood to retrieve it.

  A minute later, I was back on Patrick’s doorstep. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed the knocker and banged it three times. The red car, still in the driveway, was covered by a thin layer of snow. Patrick had to be home. I knocked again. The sound echoed across the empty street, and still nobody answered. I walked back up the path and looked at the upstairs windows, expecting to see the flick of a curtain closing. I knew Patrick was inside, but he was determined to avoid me. Well, too bad, I thought. I picked up the knocker again. I’d stay there all night if I needed to. I’d knock until all the other neighbors complained about the noise. I’d bang on that door until my fingers went numb and my nose started to run from the cold and the snow piled up all around me. I’d knock until the sun—

  “Oh. Elyse. Good to see you again.” The door opened and Patrick’s grandfather peered out. “You’ve come back for the pickles.” He smiled and slid his reading glasses into his pocket, motioning for me to come in. “They’ve got a good crunch to them. You won’t be disappointed.” I stomped the snow off my boots and stepped into the house. Then I wiped the fog off my glasses and put them back on, looking around for signs of Patrick.

  “Oh, no. I’m sure they’re really crunchy,” I said as patiently as I could manage. “But I just came to talk to Patrick about something.” My heart was beating fast and my palms were sweaty—just being in his house—just wondering how on earth I was going to begin this impossible conversation.

  “Well now.” The old man glanced at his watch. “Patrick’s gone out with a friend to practice his music. I don’t expect him back anytime soon.”

  “But isn’t that his car out front?” I didn’t mean for the words to come out in the accusing tone that they did, but if Patrick was hiding upstairs—if his grandfather was lying to me—I had to find out.

  Mr. Connor went to the front window and looked out into the driveway. “That it is,” he said, nodding. “He must have walked. Jax doesn’t live very far from here.”

  “Oh.” I gulped, feeling like a jerk yet again. What kind of person accuses a sweet old man of lying to her face? A person like me, apparently. “Right. I’ll get going then. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  “Quite all right,” Mr. Connor said, shuffling toward the kitchen. “You haven’t disturbed me at all. Actually, I’m glad you came by. I was just about to put the kettle on. Would you stay for a cup of tea?”

  “Oh, no. Really. Thanks. I should go.”

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Connor said, “Earl Grey or orange pekoe?” Clearly he didn’t have his hearing aid in, again. “Now, I hope you don’t take honey, because I’m afraid we’re all out. But I keep a bag of butter cookies hidden in the vegetable crisper where Patrick won’t see them. He’s always worrying about my cholesterol, but I only have one every now and then.”

  “I—” I started, meaning to make my excuses in a much louder voice, but then I stopped myself. After all, what was the harm in having a cup of tea with Patrick’s grandfather? It wasn’t like I had anything important to do at home by myself, except for obsessing over how nervous I was about my driving test the next day, and how anxious I was about what I was going to say to Patrick when I finally did track him down. “I love butter cookies,” I finished, instead. “And Earl Grey is great, if you’ve got it.” I took off my boots, hung up Patrick’s coat in the closet, and dumped the bag with the Nikes near the stairs before following Mr. Connor into the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, over a steaming cup of Earl Grey, Mr. Connor cleared his throat. “Now,” he said, sliding the plate of cold, store-bought butter cookies toward me and lowering himself carefully onto a kitchen chair, “Elyse. I’m sure you can tell me. What is a subwoofer?”

  “Umm . . .” I stalled, caught by surprise. I’d been figuring we might talk about the weather, or else swap stories about people we knew who had diseases. Wasn’t that what old people liked to do?

  “It sounds like something to do with a submarine, or something about a dog,” Patrick’s grandfather went on, “but that can’t be right.”

  “It’s a music thing,” I said. “A kind of speaker, I think.”

  He slapped the table. “That would be it. The names young people think up these days.” He shook his head. “Subwoofer. That’s what Patrick and Jax were working on. For a get-together. Testing the subwoofer. It’s got something to do with a little song he’s been rehearsing, about a girl with brown eyes.” I gulped and sat up straighter. His song was about Dina—Dina and her big brown eyes. I tried not to let the pain I was feeling show on my face. “You see, he thinks I’ve always got my hearing aid switched off.” The old man pulled on one earlobe. “But I don’t miss much.”

  “Mr. Connor?” I asked, leaning forward. I had to find out what was going on.

  “Oh. Frank. Call me Frank.”

  “Okay. Frank?” I felt weird saying it. “Can I ask you something? Is Patrick nice to everyone?”

  “Well. I suppose. . . .”

  “I don’t mean just nice. But, you know, really nice? Over-the-top nice? He shoveled my driveway twice this week. And he bought me those raccoon-proof straps, plus a new phone even though it was my fault the old phone broke in the first place. And that’s barely the beginning of the list. There were the free driving lessons, and he baked me cookies, and brought my groceries home, plus he fixed my furnace and our broken wardrobe.”

  “Well. If he’s been doing all that, that would explain it,” Frank said.

  “Explain what?”

  “Why he’s been singing in the shower the last few weeks. Patrick’s like his grandmother. My late wife, Jeannie. You’ve never seen anyone who got a kick out of helping others the way she did. Buy her jewelry or take her out to a fancy restaurant and she’d thank you kindly, but give her a bake sale to plan, a Girl Scout troop to lead, or a stray cat to nurse back to health and then you’d see her in her element. Her face would light up. Her whole outlook would change. But then, that’s all of us in some ways, I suppose,” he said philosophically, blowing on his tea to cool it. “Everyone needs to be needed. Even an old man like me.”

  I squeezed my mug, letting the warmth seep into my fingers. Everyone needs to be needed. I’d never thought about it quite that way before.

  “Now, take Patrick for example,” Frank went on. “When my wife died, I lost my rudder for a while there. Who wouldn’t, after fifty-five years of marriage? But I’ve got some get-up-and-go in me yet. I could shovel the driveway and get my own meals. I do, sometimes, but other times, I let Patrick look after me. Do you know why?” he asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I let him go on. “First of all, because I like the company. You get old like me, you don’t want to be alone watching Jeopardy! all day. For one thing, you start to see repeats, so you know all the answers, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is the quiet in the house. Just the length of the days. But I also like having Patrick here because Patrick likes to be here. There’s something to be said for doing everything yourself—being independent. Losing that independence is the hardest thing about old age—but then again, sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone else is to accept whatever it is they’ve got to offer you.” He reached for a butter cookie and bit in, letting the crumbs fall to his plate. “Some of his music is dreadful and loud, mind you,” he added. “Even when I haven’t got my hearing aid in. B
ut that’s a small price to pay.”

  I reached for another cookie, wondering what to make of all that. So, Patrick liked helping people. But what did that make me? Just some desperate, helpless, driving-impaired charity case he’d decided to take on? Because if that was what he thought of me, I didn’t care if I ever saw him again.

  “He’s just like Jeannie. It’s uncanny, really. I don’t think I ever saw my wife so happy as the time, early on in our marriage, when I fell off the roof and broke both my legs.” Patrick’s grandfather actually laughed at the memory. “For once, I had no choice but to let her wait on me hand and foot. But I got better at letting her do things for me as the years went on. You see those pictures over there?” He pointed at the far wall where three small landscapes were hanging, side by side. One was a painting of a lake. Another was a tree in front of a sunset, and the third was a field with a windmill in it.

  “Jeannie picked those out in a gift shop one time when we traveled out west. Gave them to me for my birthday. Do you notice anything about them?”

  I stood up and walked toward the paintings. They were each in a heavy gold-edged frame but, besides that, there was nothing especially remarkable about them. It was the kind of art you usually saw in badly decorated waiting rooms, or old peoples’ houses. In fact, I could remember my grandmother having some practically identical paintings in her hallway.

  “They’re really nice,” I lied, not wanting to hurt Mr. Connor’s feelings.

  “They are, aren’t they? But they’re crooked. That’s what I can’t help but see. Jeannie hung them up herself. I was a cabinetmaker before I retired, so I know about making things level. But she bought me those and snuck them home in her suitcase. She hung them up the night before my birthday to surprise me, and she was so proud of herself, I’ve never had the heart to straighten them. So they’ve just stayed there. For, oh, I don’t know. The last fifteen years. Crooked.”

  He looked fondly at the cheesy, misaligned landscapes and I followed his gaze. Now that he mentioned it, I could see it clearly. The one on the left-hand side was almost a full inch higher up on the wall than the other two. And the middle one tilted slightly to the right. You’d have to really love somebody, I thought, to put up with fifteen years of pretending you didn’t notice something like that.

  Which reminded me . . . I slid a hand into my pocket and pulled out the pendant, putting it on the table in front of him. I sat down again. “I almost forgot. I found this,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to bring it over.” He took the necklace and laid the pendant in the palm of his hand. “I thought it might be yours. Or, I mean, Jeannie’s.”

  “Well. I’ll be.” Patrick’s grandfather squinted at it more closely.

  “There’s an inscription on the back,” I said, in case he’d forgotten or the writing would be too small for him to see. “It says, ‘MBW took AC 23-03-1917.’”

  “Where did you find this?” he asked.

  “Our attic. My mom found it between some floorboards, and then the first time I was over here, I noticed your wife was wearing one just like it in your wedding photo.”

  “MBW. Mabel Beth Wain. That was my mother. And AC. Arthur Connor. My father.”

  So that explained the dates. It belonged to Patrick’s great-grandmother. It really was nearly a hundred years old.

  “My father gave this to my mother on the occasion of their engagement. When she took him to be her husband. Jeannie wore it on our wedding day. I’m sure you’ve heard of the tradition. What is it now? Something gold, something blue . . .”

  “Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.” I helped him out. I’d watched enough romantic comedies with my mother to know.

  “That’s it. This was three of the four. Old, blue, and borrowed. She was supposed to give it back to my mother after the wedding, but she lost it. Jeannie felt just awful about that, I remember.”

  “How do you think it got into our attic?”

  “We were married in that house. Did Patrick tell you that?” I shook my head. “My father built it, and Jeannie and I lived there until my parents died, at which time we sold it and moved back to the old house. We had our wedding service right out there, in the backyard, under the blossoming Japanese cherry tree.”

  So there was a blossoming Japanese cherry. But it was a tree, not a shrub, and it was in our backyard, not Patrick’s front garden. And I hadn’t crushed it into a pile of twigs with the car!

  I glanced over at Mr. Connor as he gently twirled the chain around his pockmarked hand. I pictured Patrick’s grandmother Jeannie in her lace wedding gown, descending our staircase to meet him, reaching out for his hand to steady herself in her high heels. I saw Mr. Connor looking at her, the way he was looking at the pendant now—with tender, bleary eyes—as they were about to embark on a lifetime together.

  “Thank you,” he said, closing his hand around it. “I didn’t imagine I’d ever see this again.”

  “No,” I said, putting my cup in the sink and clearing away both our cookie plates. “Thank you.” Although, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was thanking him for . . . the tea maybe, or the cookies, or just for spending the time, sitting there talking with me. “I should get going,” I said, glancing at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. “I have my driving test tomorrow. When Patrick gets home, could you tell him I was here?” I asked.

  “Absolutely, I’ll do that,” Frank said, pushing himself up from his chair. “I’m not good for much these days, but I can pass along a message.” And that was when I noticed the jar, sitting in the corner beside the refrigerator.

  “Hey,” I said anxiously. “Would it be all right if I changed my mind . . . about those pickles?”

  Mr. Connor’s face lit up. And I don’t think it was my imagination: He stood just a little taller. “I think that would be just fine,” he answered. I walked over and picked up the jar. It must have weighed twenty pounds. What the hell was I going to do with twenty pounds of dill pickles? “If you slice those, you can put them on a roast beef sandwich,” Patrick’s grandfather said, as if reading my mind. “Or you can chop them up. Put them in a tuna salad. Jeannie used to do that.”

  “Mmmmm,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I hugged the enormous jar to my chest. Pickles and tuna? It sounded disgusting. But then again, it barely mattered. I stepped out into the snow with Mr. Connor’s words echoing in my head: Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is to accept whatever it is they’ve got to offer you.

  I knew now exactly what I needed to do to make things right.

  Chapter 17

  I spent that evening covered in a fine dust of flour and icing sugar. I started with the pinwheel cookies, rolling the dough into a log and putting it in the fridge to chill, then moved on to the black-and-white cheesecake. Once I had it in the oven, I was ready to tackle my new, top secret project. I just got the layers baked before I collapsed into bed, waking early the next morning to do the decorating. Thankfully, I’d taken the entire day off work and school for my driving test, which was that afternoon.

  By the time I was done icing and packing everything into Tupperware containers, I was exhausted again but, in a way, it was a good thing. My baking frenzy successfully kept my mind off the test, not to mention the fact that it was Valentine’s Day—exactly one year to the day I’d had my heart broken into a million pieces. In fact, I barely had time to think about either one of those things until my mom called me from the poolside guest services phone to remind me my aunt Sarah would be there to pick me up for my road test at one thirty—like I could have forgotten.

  “You ready, sweetie?” she asked. Somewhere in the background, a live band was playing a bad cover of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The lead singer had a thick, Spanish accent.

  “Sure,” I sighed. “Why not?” I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  And it turned out I wasn’t even lying. In a way, I thought—while I sat outside Dina’s house that night in the car, wo
rking up the nerve to go in—things had come full circle. Here it was, Valentine’s Day again. And I was about to get my heart broken, again. Dina and Patrick liked each other. I was certain. Tonight would be the night he’d tell her, through song. And I had stupidly let myself fall for Patrick. So, yet again, I was about to lose the guy I loved to my best friend. But there was a difference this time, and it was a big one. This time, I was losing him to somebody who truly deserved him. I turned the keys, pulling them out of the ignition with a small sniff.

  Plus, I hadn’t come out of the experience empty-handed. Thanks to Patrick, I was a licensed driver. With the exception of saying I’d parked an “eensy bit too close to the curb,” the examiner had given me a perfect score.

  That hadn’t changed the fact that I was a nervous wreck driving by myself for the first time, of course, or the fact that it turned out I had zero sense of direction. By the time I actually managed to find Dina’s place—which I’d been to a bunch of times on the bus before—it was 8:30. The party had started over an hour ago. I headed up the walkway, carrying my cardboard box of stuffed pandas with Tupperware containers of black and white snacks balanced precariously on top. I could hear the bass from the music vibrating through the walls. Patrick and Jax had obviously done a good job with the subwoofer.

  The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open with my foot. For a party dedicated to a cuddly endangered species, I was surprised to be able to report: What I found inside was decidedly un-lame. Guys and girls (most of whom I recognized from school) were clustered in groups—the guys looking more put-together than usual, all dressed in black, while the girls were in different, cute, black and white outfits. I suddenly felt way too casual in my plain black pants (usually part of my Goodman’s Gifts & Stationery uniform) and tight white T-shirt. The living room—where most people seemed to be—was decorated with black and white helium balloons and white streamers that looked kind of cool and sophisticated with the lights turned down low.