Nine Minutes in Heaven

by David Connor

  “That.” He gave me a second, third, and fourth. “And that, and that, and that. Something else, too.”

  “What about your conference?”

  “I ducked out early. I couldn’t stand being away from you one second more. I drove all night, and here I am, with a present.” He showed me again.

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “I’m the boss. What am I going to do, fire myself? Here. Take it.”

  “It was just Valentine’s Day a few weeks ago. You shouldn’t be buying me more gifts.” I kissed him, making five, and couldn’t wait to see what it was.

  “I can’t help it. Plus, I was hoping there might be a blizzard, so we can get snowed in all day, just like last time, except while it’s light outside.”

  I looked up at the sky, as we stood just outside under the blue and red Cost-Mart sign. “Not a cloud to be seen.”

  “Drat. Here.” Patrick opened my hand and put the small box in my palm. “Just so there are no more hair trimming accidents between us.”

  “Is that a clue?” I unzipped his jacket, untucked his shirt and went up it with my hand.

  “It is. You’re feeling randy.”

  “I am, and I never thought it would take body hair so long to grow.” It still felt prickly in spots, nowhere near as plush as it once was. “It’s coming in, though.”

  “Yup.”

  “Maybe Jefferson and Calvin can make it form a permanent G.”

  “Hmm. Supernatural follicular prestidigitation. Do we get magic powers on the other side?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, just in case we don’t…open the box.”

  “If you insist.” I hated to move my hand from Patrick’s body, but I did. Then, I had to take a step back to put on the necklace he’d given me. “It’s awesome. Come inside. Come in!” My excitement caused me to fumble several times while trying to unlock the huge double door that had locked itself behind me. “Good thing I had my key on this side of it. Come on.”

  “For more thankfulness on the inflatable mattress just outside the storeroom?” My back was to Patrick. He cupped my ass, one cheek in each hand. “Are we gonna love fuck?”

  I had nothing against the term “made love,” but I also liked to “love fuck.” It was a term I’d come up with the morning after we first had, still in a back and forth state of euphoria regarding the night Patrick and I had shared and panic over the way it had ended, with the proposal. When describing the whole thing to Rip, while we drove around plowing driveways and shoveling out mailboxes, “love fuck” was the phrase I’d thrown at him. When I’d shared the two-word idiom with Patrick, he said it back to me with such guttural sexiness, I knew it would stick forever.

  “We could,” I told him now. “But, sadly, other people will be here within the hour.”

  “Who needs an hour?”

  “Something else first.” Grinning ear to ear, I tugged on his arm and practically dragged him back to the jewelry section, stopping short, actually, as I was reminded of the whole “Will you marry me?” bit that had happened there.

  “Are you going to propose?” Patrick asked.

  “We did that already.” My chest tightened. “But, look.”

  There, on a rack beside the case, was a pendant similar to the one I had just opened, only with the letter G, instead of P, the letter I had on and would never take off. The ones in front of us were stainless steel, inexpensive but nice.

  “Would you wear it?” I asked. “If I buy it and leave the money for Carrie?”

  “Of course,” Patrick said.

  I took the necklace off the little hook, clasped it around his neck, and stole another taste of his lips.

  “I’m in your heart,” he said, “and you’re in mine, forever.”

  After several longer kisses that could have ended with us setting off the sprinklers with the heat we were creating, I started to worry about my superior showing up. Patrick had to head to the pharmacy, anyway, to go over everything he’d left his assistant to do before they opened for the day.

  “I don’t delegate well,” he said. “I’ll think of you all day.”

  “I’ll dream of you while I sleep.” I kissed the P hanging from around my neck, and then the man whose name it stood for. He did the same, and then, we parted.

  Twelve hours later, my phone in my hand, I was sitting on my sister’s couch.

  “Goose Tucker, will you marry me?”

  Waiting for my bro-ham to start grilling burgers on what turned out to be a spring day almost warm enough to fool us into thinking we could wear short sleeves, I was watching the video on Facebook for the ten thousandth time. All four of my friends on the site had liked it, and there were over a hundred likes, loves, wows, and even some “Ha-ha” laughing faces from Patrick’s. Those likely came because of the proposal’s setting and because we were both in pajamas.

  The rest of the forty-eight second video was a blur, since Patrick had let the phone continue to record while he’d jumped up and down. He’d also caught the moment his pajama pants had slid down to his ankles, another reason for the ha-ha faces, I presumed.

  “Goose!”

  My name echoed off the walls in my sister’s country chic living room.

  “Huh?” I’d jumped slightly, but her couch cushions protected me.

  “Carrie is talking to you.”

  It was now about eleven weeks after the proposal. I still hadn’t admitted my reluctance to wed to my fiancé and wondered if a comment below the video would make me a bigger jerk than I already was.

  I love you and think things are good the way they are. I meant to say no, or at least a wishy washy maybe…Frowny face.

  It would, for sure.

  Still staring at my iPhone screen, even though the Facebook video had reached its end, I saw my sister and Carrie’s reflections.

  “Hello!” My sister again.

  I looked up.

  “You left your engagement ring on the bathroom counter,” Carrie said, holding it out.

  “Oh.”

  “Put it on.” She passed it over.

  “Huh?”

  “Your ring, Goose. Before you lose it.” Shelby rolled her eyes.

  “Oh.” I slipped the quad-colored band onto the middle finger on my right hand.

  “That’s not where it goes.” Carrie followed my sister’s lead, though her nudge was gentler, despite being a foot taller, maybe a foot and a half with the afro.

  “Oh.” I left it there anyway.

  “I still wish you had woke me up.”

  I didn’t correct Carrie’s grammar.

  “I could have recorded the whole thing for you, start to finish.”

  “Get something to eat before you head off to rehearsal,” I said. “We’re eating soon, right?”

  My time clock was different than everyone else’s, because I worked nights. Rip and Shell had invited me for “an early dinner,” since they were both off from work that day. I’d shown up at two. Three hours later, I was starving.

  “Soon,” Shelby said. “Carrie doesn’t have to leave until six-thirty.”

  Carrie was in the last two weeks of rehearsal for her high school production of The King and I. Though she was playing Lun Tha, a male character one last time, she was still excited to be a part of the show. Her drama director encouraged her to try out for any role she wanted next year. Rag Time was the likely choice of show. Carrie told us all she would love to play Sarah. Her teacher told her she could definitely see her knocking the performance out of the park.

  “Mrs. Q is dope,” Carrie had declared when sharing that story. “She’s the only person I’ve told, other than you guys and my parents. Four and two…sixty-six percent…barely passing in terms of school, if I think about it like that. Either way, I’ll need the guts to be myself in front of everyone else, if I stand a chance of getting what I want.”

  I knew Carrie had the talent and the confidence to win everyone over. I’d assured her the rest
would come. Wearing a pink tank top currently, I also knew she would change back into “boy clothes” before heading for the school. Neither I nor Shelby and Rip were offering much in the line of advice, just support. The three of us were happy Carrie already felt comfortable enough to be her true self around the house. Her timeline for the rest was up to her.

  “Who wants cheese on their burgers?” Shelby asked.

  “Me. Definitely,” Carrie answered, before sprinting back upstairs.

  “Goose?”

  “Huh?”

  “What are you looking at?” Shelby took my phone. “Oh. It really is adorable. I’d marry him.”

  “Who’s my woman marrying?” Rip entered from the kitchen. He was wearing a Kiss the Cook apron and carrying a pair of tongs. The way he snatched the phone from Shelby was far more frisky than jealous.

  “You found me out,” she said, grabbing it back. “I’m running off with Idris Elba.”

  “Hell. Sign me up. I’m willing to share. The man’s perfection in pants.” Rip offered my sister a kiss. If there was a marriage out in the world to emulate, I figured it was theirs. Their broad smiles and silly giggles as they tickled one another, while Rip clicked the tongs near her nose and hummed the theme from Jaws, almost brought me out of my funk.

  “Fuck!” I jumped, though, when Justin Timberlake started singing at volume ten from up in Carrie’s room. “Can’t Stop the Feeling” was her go to song, she’d told us, whenever she was feeling bad or needed to pump herself up.

  “Shall we dance?” Rip’s John Travolta Staying Alive disco pose was ridiculous.

  “You go ahead,” I told him.

  “Oh.” He sat when my phone rang. “It’s the actual groom.” He passed it to me, but I let the call go to voicemail. “You aren’t still ghosting the man, are you?” Rip asked. “Ghosting…get it?”

  I was avoiding Patrick, not entirely, but far too often. “He’ll figure I’m sleeping. See?” I showed the text that came almost immediately, a gif of a sleeping baby goose, all tiny, fluffy, and yellow, followed by another incoming message, a dozen floating hearts.

  “Is he the opposite of Tom?” Rip leaned in. “Do you feel smothered?”

  “Not at all. I mean, Patrick is definitely all about grand gestures and big romantic scenes. Did I tell you he wrote our names in the snow a week or so after the big storm?”

  Shelby wrinkled the bridge of her nose. “That’s romantic?”

  “I’m pretty sure he used a stick.” The eye roll I gave her was payback. “It was huge. Took up most of his front yard. No one could drink that much water. It was my first night off work since we’d both said, ‘I love you.’”

  I left out everything after the song in my retelling. Shelby’s expression at the recollection was one of wistful awe. Rip asked again whether or not I felt like it was all a bit much.

  “I think I like the attention. Some of the plans he makes for us, if they’re not just wishes, I’m not sure I can…do. But in the moment, imagining I can, I love it. After the moment, that’s when I worry I might disappoint him, if I can’t fly with him to Giza to see the Great Pyramid, or if I’m not giving as good as I’m getting.” I regretted the phrase the moment it came out of my mouth. “Don’t.”

  Rip heeded my raised finger. “Starting a marriage with secrets and lies? Not good,” he said, adding a triple “Tsk, tsk, tsk” sound at the end.

  “Like yours about wanting to get in Idris Elba’s pants? That’s new to me, Bro-ham.”

  “Jealous I’m not interested in getting in yours?”

  “What’s going on?” Shelby asked, taking the space beside me on the sofa. “You’ve been moping around for weeks, avoiding my calls, too. You don’t want to marry Patrick, do you?”

  “He’s amazing.” I got up again to pace. “I would be the luckiest man on Earth to spend the rest of my life with him, but it all happened so fast. I wasn’t even thinking about us when the proposal happened.” I’d been over all this before. “I was thinking about Jefferson and Calvin.”

  “You do that a lot.”

  I glared at Rip.

  “Hey, don’t come for me, bro. They said the same thing. That’s what you told me the morning I picked you up in the snowplow. ‘Live your life, life, life.’” Rip did a spooky echo. “‘Don’t obsess about us, us, us.’”

  “You don’t even get how the whole thing works.”

  “The ghost thing? True that, Bro-ford. No clue. Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t.” I sat. “You had to be there.”

  “Why can’t we?” Shelby asked. “I wonder if this sort of thing runs in families…the ability to communicate with the other side.”

  “I’d bring you…if there was a way…if I ever get to go back. We could see Gramma and Grampa, and TJ.”

  “Our childhood dog,” Shelby said in response to Rip’s puzzled look.

  “And Max, the dog I had before Wilbur.”

  “I still don’t believe you had a dog with the same name as yours.”

  We’d been over that before, too. “He was already named at the shelter where I got him, Rip. Why confuse him, I figured.”

  “It confused you. Every time I said, ‘Gotta pee, Max?’ You said, ‘I think I do,’ and ran outside.”

  “My brother-in-law the standup comic. Ladies and gentlemen, Rip Dolensky. He’s here all week. I wish you could see it, Shell, and feel it.”

  “Was it scary?” she asked. “When you went back to the 1800s?”

  “Not really. Maybe because both Jefferson and Calvin, all of them, the Porters and the Smalls, too, they all seemed very much alive. It didn’t feel like The Walking Dead or Zombieland. I never once even thought of death or being dead that night. It’s hard to describe.”

  “Don’t tell me.” The smell of coal and lighter fluid teased me when Rip leaned closer. “You had to be there.”

  I set my jaw. “Yes. I’m not afraid of dying anymore, though. I’ll tell you that.”

  Shelby frowned. “Yeah, well, don’t be too eager, either. Back to your relationship with the living. Getting together with Patrick, it all happened very fast. You broke up with Tom—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Tom.” I leapt up, like a rocket. “I won’t.”

  “No.” Shelby tugged on my shirt sleeve until I sat back down beside her. “It’s just, you locked yourself away so long, and then, all at once, you were down south, where you met Patrick and Jefferson—”

  “I went the first time with Rip. He invited me.”

  “It’s all my fault, then?”

  “Nothing’s anyone’s fault,” I said. “I’m glad I went. The experience was…life changing, in so many ways.”

  “My point is, overnight, you went from recluse to practically a jetsetter.”

  “Oh yeah. Two trips out of the house and I’m a jetsetter, Shell.”

  “Other than back and forth to work, how many trips had you taken in, say, a year?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Point made.” Shelby’s smirk could have illustrated “gloat” in the dictionary. “A few weeks later, a marriage proposal. It’s a lot.”

  It was a lot, even forgetting the jetsetter angle. From feeling unlovable and untrusting, to giving my whole self to someone in what seemed like the blink of an eye, that was somewhat dizzying.

  “Even if psychic ability is not hereditary,” I said, “there are other things I sometimes fear I might have inherited from Mom or Dad. The cycle of violence and all that.”

  “Whoa.” My sister put up two hands as if shielding herself. “I’ve seen you scoop up a mouse to set it free outside and make a splint from a Popsicle stick for a daffodil broken by heavy snow.”

  I picked up Wilbur from the big, square ottoman in front of me and cuddled him. “It bloomed another six days.”

  “It did.” Shelby stroked his baby-soft head, and then my arm. “You don’t actually believe you have it in you to hit another human being, do you? Especially, not Patrick.”

&n
bsp; I stood. My voice shaky, I said, “I did hit someone once, and I still haven’t forgiven myself.”

  “Oh.” Shelby was looking anywhere but at me.

  “See. I’m awful. I’m terrible.”

  Wilbur woke up long enough to kiss me on the cheek. Then, he snuggled down and went back to sleep.

  “Who did you hit?” Rip asked.

  “Tom.”

  “Oh. That asshole.”

  “Yeah, well…” I looked out the window, at the top tips of the current year’s daffodil leaves just starting to sprout up out of the cold ground beside Rip and Shelby’s garage. The green reminded me of Patrick’s eyes. “I still did it.”

  “Why?” Now, Shelby looked at me.

  “Because, as I cowered in a corner, rubbing my eye where he’d just hit me, he told me a real man would fight back. He said that all the time, and finally, I took the bait.”

  “That doesn’t count.” Rip was becoming a hugger. He offered one then, from behind, just at my shoulders, because I had Wilbur against my chest. “The jerk had it coming. If I’d known what he was doing to you, I’d have hit him for you.”

  “That fight was the last straw for me, not that he’d hit me for the ten thousandth time, but that I punched him back. You know he tried to kiss me after that, like punching each other in the face was foreplay…was…was sexy.”

  “Sick fuck.” Rip was choking the tongs.

  “Stop that. Relax.”

  Once he noticed what I had, he stopped.

  “Anyway, I told him to get out. See, I never thought—no matter what—that I could be pushed to the point that my reaction would be to pummel someone. Never.”

  Rip waved it away. “He pushed you, bro.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “None of that makes you an abusive person.” Shelby brushed my arm again. Physical abuse was nothing new to me. Shelby and I had endured it all through childhood. It had taken us both quite a while to become comfortable touching one another or anyone else and even longer to accept it back.

  “Yeah, well…”

  “And Patrick is nothing like Tom,” Rip said. “Even if we didn’t know the extent of Tom’s shittiness, I could never stand the guy. He was arrogant and rude. Tell me Civil War reenactments and Renaissance Fairs are stupid,” Rip muttered.