The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  “You turned out to be a big softy,” I said.

  “No,” Meredith said. “Just a shopaholic.”

  I met the people who’d bought Gardner’s house. Their names were David and Irma, and they tore down the screen porch before they moved in because they really preferred the yard space.

  Claudia started dating someone—a contractor who had done some work on her house. He was ten years younger than she was, and had lots of nieces and nephews. He was wanting to start a family, and Claudia wasn’t sure if he was coming on too strong. But he’d brought her lemonade one night, and they’d sipped it on the porch. Things, she said, were looking up.

  We didn’t talk about Gardner much. Then, one day at the zoo, near the porcupine hut, I said, “I think there’s really no hope.” Maxie was asleep in the stroller, and that fact was suddenly seeming clear to me.

  “There has to be some hope,” she said.

  “It’s been over two months,” I said. “If he were going to call me, he’d have done it by now.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get your letter,” she said. “He seems to be bad with mail.”

  “No one’s that bad with mail,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s just waiting for the right moment.”

  Some kids were throwing popcorn at the porcupines, hoping they might come a little closer for a snack.

  “The right moment,” I said, my voice rising a little, “came and went. And I’m getting tired of spending my whole life waiting for men to come back to me.”

  “You’re not saying he’s anything like Dean.”

  “I’m just saying I wish I didn’t care.”

  “Then stop caring.”

  “I’m trying!” I almost shouted.

  Claudia shielded her face with her hands. “Okay,” she said.

  “You’re too cheerful about love to talk to,” I said. “You’re not heartbroken.”

  “Are you heartbroken?” she asked.

  “You know what I am?” I said. “I’m stupid.”

  We were at the elephants now. One of the babies had a bandage on its leg.

  “Clearly, he’s moved on,” I said. “So I’ll just have to move on, too.”

  “Okay,” Claudia said.

  And so it was decided. I was moving on. Again. Just as soon as I got home from the zoo.

  The truth was, I felt a little ashamed for fixating on Gardner. Happily Ever After seemed like a lot to expect out of life. I was lucky in about a thousand ways, and it seemed adolescent and a little selfish to think that I would never be happy without this one thing, this one person. I thought about all the people in the world who had it way worse than I did. I thought, in particular, about the girl from the plane crash, the one who had set all these changes in motion. I couldn’t even remember her name anymore. But I kept thinking about her face on my refrigerator, and how she had watched me for weeks before Dean took her with him the night he left. If she could talk to me now, I felt sure she’d tell me to be more grateful. For Maxie. For my shop. For good things like ice cream and hot showers and sunlight, but also even for things like traffic and mosquitoes and heartbreak. I knew if she were back on my fridge, gazing at me like she used to, she’d be telling me not to let one wrong thing ruin everything else.

  And then, one night, very late, there was a knock at my door. I went to the window in my pajamas to see who it was, hoping that it might be Gardner in the same way, when I was in sixth grade, I used to hope to bump into Patrick Swayze at the mall. In that impossible, crazy, expectant way that girls sometimes hope for love.

  And it turns out it was Gardner.

  I paused for a minute behind the door, trying to decide if I should go fix my hair or put on some lipstick. And just as I had decided that, yes, it was worth the extra time to go to my room and get a little gussied, my hand put itself on the doorknob.

  I opened the door. He was leaning into the doorframe, as if he might have tried to push through if I hadn’t answered. The collar on his blue oxford wasn’t buttoned, and he hadn’t shaved that day. My eyes lingered for a second on his neck, and his Adam’s apple, and the way the edge of that shirt collar was slightly frayed from rubbing against his five o’clock shadow.

  “Were you asleep?” he asked.

  I remembered that mouth. “No,” I said.

  He had an envelope in his hand. He held it out to me. It was my letter. “I just found this,” he said. Things seemed to move in slow motion. A moth batted itself against the porch light.

  And at that moment, Maxie woke up and started to cry.

  I took hold of his shirt and pulled him over the threshold, then let go to move toward Maxie’s room. “I’m sorry,” I said, nodding him toward the sofa.

  He waved me toward her room. “I’ll just hang out here.”

  It took about half an hour to get her back down, but given how badly I wanted to get back out to the living room, it should have taken far longer. When I came back out, Gardner had Dr. Blandon in his lap. The letter was on the coffee table.

  “How is it possible you just found that letter now?” I said. “It’s been months.”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” he said.

  I sat down across from him in a chair, crossed my arms over my chest, and said, “Let’s hear it.”

  “It got stuck in a catalog,” he said. “And then it wound up in a stack of mail that I forgot to bring back from my folks’ house when I left Dallas.”

  “When did you leave Dallas?” I asked.

  “A while back,” he said. “I sold this house, and then flipped the money to buy another one I had my eye on. So I came back and got to work.”

  “You’ve been in Houston all this time?”

  “Yep,” he said. “About six blocks away, actually.”

  “Why didn’t you come to see me?” I said.

  “I thought your old boyfriend was here.”

  “But he wasn’t!” I said.

  “But I didn’t know that.”

  “And you weren’t going to bother to find out?”

  Gardner looked around the room. “I just had the feeling he wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “You gave up on me too easily,” I said.

  “It looks like I did.”

  We stared at each other.

  “So.” Gardner continued with his story. “My dad has a knack for woodworking, and he came down last weekend to help me with some built-in bookshelves. And my mom sent down this stack of junk mail I’d forgotten up at their place—which I teased her about, because who saves junk mail?”

  I nodded.

  Gardner nodded. “And just now, I was about to throw the whole bag in the paper bin at the recycling center, when I dropped it, and everything fell out, and your letter landed on my shoe.”

  “My letter landed on your shoe?”

  “It did.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And so I read it,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And then I left that pile of recycling on the sidewalk and drove straight here,” he said.

  “From the recycling center?”

  He nodded. “I think I ran four stop signs, but it may have been five.”

  I moved over to sit next to him on the sofa. Dr. Blandon moved from Gardner’s lap to mine.

  “You ran stop signs to come find me?”

  “I did,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” I said.

  “I didn’t, either,” he said.

  “But here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  And that’s when he put his hand in my hair and pulled me into the kind of kiss you can only get from a man who’s run at least four stop signs to see you. And I was grateful. For all the things that had brought me to this moment, and for every single thing that would follow.

  For my mother,

  Deborah Inez Detering,

  who always loves me anyway

  Acknowledgments

  At St. John’s School in
Houston, where I spent kindergarten through twelfth grade, Juliet Emery, Shirley Greene, Peggy Paulus, Jane Eiffler, Dwight Raulston, Tony Sirignano, and John Zammito stand out in my memory for their encouragement.

  At Vassar College, Leslie Dick, Eamon Grennan, and Karen Robertson were all terrific mentors. And Beverly Coyle: my dear friend and champion. I will never forget the day she said, “Whatever it is that writers have, you have it.”

  At the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program, I was lucky to work with Rosellen Brown, Daniel Stern, Ellen Currie, Kathleen Cambor, and Mary Gaitskill, and to spend a weekend hanging out with Rick Moody.

  I am also grateful to the good friends and family who have helped me, encouraged me, and made me feel proud of myself: Nicole Holbert, Sam Nichols, Mike Maggart, Marion Carter, Philip Alter, Elizabeth Hughes-Salazar, Rebecca Wolff, Jebbie Scoggins, Faye Robeson, Herman and Mimi Detering, Edward Davis, Ingrid and Al Center, and Yetta Center. Thanks to Tom Gould for being a great reader, to Allison Schapker for her writing encouragement, to Lucy Chambers for her Cliffs Notes on the publishing industry, to Hillary Harmon for her publicity help, and to Emily Kemper for laughing so hard while she was reading the manuscript that at first I thought she was crying. I also want to thank Kathleen Woodberry for my fantastic website.

  Many thanks also to friends who helped me with child care, child rearing, and generally surviving motherhood: Donna Holloran, Dr. Caroline Long, and Mary and Jeff Harper. Special thanks to Katherine Weber for taking countless baby-advice phone calls. I am grateful to my mommy group, as well—in particular, Jenny Nelson, Andrea Campbell, and Erika Locke, for many hours of Deep Thoughts about motherhood. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Helen T. Vietor.

  And I don’t even know how to start to thank the folks who made this book happen. Fellow novelist Vanessa Del Fabbro so graciously offered to read this novel, and then passed it along. Helen Breitwieser, my agent, has completely turned my writing life around by representing me, and I am in absolute awe of her savvy in every possible realm. She is also so sharp and funny that I get at least one belly laugh every time I talk to her. Laura Ford, my editor, is the kind of miracle reader whose comments make you want to sprint to the manuscript and get back to work, and whose patience, cheerfulness, and smarts made this experience nothing short of blissful. Many thanks also to Brian McLendon, Kate Blum, and all the folks in publicity who have given this book such amazing support. I am so grateful to Libby McGuire, Kim Hovey, Gina Centrello, Amy Edelman, Janet Wygal, Jennifer Hershey, Lynn Buckley, Dana Blanchette, and everybody at Random House/Ballantine. They have brought a level of enthusiasm and support to this book that I never even dared to hope for. I may well be the luckiest person ever.

  And a special shout-out to my family. My sister Shelley Stein has been encouraging me to write since we were kids. In fact, she dared me to write this book. She is my most dogged supporter, and she waded through many drafts of this novel with mind-boggling tenacity and energy. Shelley’s husband, Matt Stein, has also been a great source of encouragement. My other sister, Lizzie Pannill, is my go-to girl for romantic comedies of every sort, and I am so grateful to her for her sharp editing eye, general enthusiasm, and style tips. My mother, Deborah Detering, has always had far more confidence in me than I’ve had in myself, and is the person I must call first thing every morning to get my sea legs for the day. And my dad, William Pannill, is a riveting storyteller and a great connoisseur of the written word as well as a fountain of inspirational stories about writers who triumphed over rejection.

  And last, I want to blow kisses to my own little family. My daughter, Anna, is the funniest, feistiest little three-year-old I know, and my baby son, Thomas, is a total dreamboat-in-the-making. They have both taught me more than I ever thought possible about love and how it works and why it matters. As has their daddy, Gordon. What can I say about you, Gordy? You’re a wonder. And I do thank my lucky stars for you—every single day.

  About the Author

  KATHERINE CENTER graduated from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize, and the University of Houston, where she received the Delores Welder Mitchell fellowship and earned an M.A. in fiction. A former fiction co-editor for the literary journal Gulf Coast, she has also worked as a freelance writer and a writing teacher. She lives with her husband and two young children in Houston.

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