If Things Happen for A Reason

“Which is exactly what I did,” he said.

“Which is exactly what you did,” she said.

She might never have met him. She might have turned around and gone back to that shop and tried on the blue dress. She might have bought it and worn it to a swing dance class where she would have met a man named Tom, who would take her dancing every Friday for three years and finally marry her and never take her dancing again. She might have given birth to three green-eyed children who couldn’t spell but could sing, and she might have been happy, or at least believed herself to be. Or she might have put the blue dress right out of her head, and gone back to thinking about archival techniques and the exam that she had next week and she would probably have stopped well before the marked intersection, her thoughts not being the kind to get lost in, and she might have seen the man in the torn blue jeans and the red leather jacket pass in front of her, might have seen him without ever really seeing him and only seconds later he would be gone forever and her life would unspool as it would, and she could go through her whole life thinking there must be someone out there for me somewhere.

He began to leave small bowls of uncooked rice around the house. He hummed under his breath, a song she couldn’t quite make out. And for several days in a row she woke with a piece of thread tied around her ring finger. She said yes because she couldn’t say no, and it seemed that if she was still unsure, then he was sure enough for the both of them. “We were meant to grow old together,” he said. She decided that if he could believe, then she could believe with him, and she said yes because it was the only thing to say.

Her dress was old, borrowed, and blue. They went back to the shop on Main Street but the dream dress was gone. He bought her a pair of silver earrings and that was her something new. He wore a dark suit that she had never seen before and a tie with an embossed pattern that looked like wheels within wheels. Their friends all thought it was a lark. Their parents wouldn’t be told until it was all over. Nobody thought to buy flowers. And there were no pictures. In the days after his death it would be that loss that she would return to over and over. She would have liked to have been able to look at his face from that day once more.

These are the things she said and can never take back:

You’re irresponsible.

You always take the last egg.

You never think of me.

She’d been amazed when he actually sold one of his sculptures. It was to a fellow artist, someone with a studio on the same floor as his. This artist painted enormous canvases that sold for sums of money that seemed obscene to her. She didn’t understand anything about art, obviously. After they’d been living together for several months she’d been amazed to learn that he could draw, could actually draw things that you could recognize. He’d done a series of sketches of her for her birthday, done them without her even realizing he was doing them, and when she opened her eyes that morning they had been tacked all over the wall by their bed. I didn’t know you could draw, she thought but didn’t say. She also didn’t ask why he didn’t just make art like that all the time because she knew she would offend him. ” I didn’t know I could look like that,” was all she said.