Shrugging, I say, “I don’t know. Believe me, I’m not a sentimental guy. I don’t hold onto anything. But I guess I wasn’t quite ready to throw them away.”
“That’s kind of … romantic,” she says, head tilted as her lips lift in one corner.
“I don’t know about romantic,” I say, reaching for the bouquet of blue hydrangeas I’d picked up on the way here.
“Blue hydrangeas?” she asks, bringing the flowers under her nose. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
I smirk. “There’s this little flower shop over by Ma’s place. And every time I passed it these last few weeks, I saw hydrangeas in the window. They were usually white or pink or purple, but today they were blue. And this girl I know once told me to always stop for blue hydrangeas.”
Maritza’s perfect teeth drag along her lower lip and her eyes are lit, glassy almost, but the smile forming on her face tells me this is a good thing.
“I never stopped thinking about you, Maritza,” I say. “Not once. And I didn’t realize what that meant until it was too late to tell you.”
“I’m sorry I wouldn’t listen to you,” she says, exhaling. “Your brother was just so convincing … and I’d been trying for months to make sense of everything and then he came along and filled in the missing blanks and I was so sure I had it all figured out, I was so sure you were this horrible person who went around hurting people and not thinking twice.”
Skimming my palm along my jaw, I blow a hard breath between my lips. “Yeah, well. I’m not perfect, Maritza. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of. I’ve taken the low road way more than I probably should have, but there’s something about finding the girl of your dreams and then watching your life flash before your eyes that does something to a man.”
“The girl of your dreams?” She laughs.
“It’s cliché, I know.” And it’s not really a phrase that’s ever been in my vocabulary until I met her. “I don’t know how else to describe you other than you’re everything I never knew I wanted, everything I never knew was possible to have.”
Reaching into the box, I retrieve the burnt letter Rachael had given back to me after Maritza refused to read it.
“Here,” I say.
Our eyes catch and she hesitates before taking the folded paper from my hands and gazing over the faded, smudged ink.
Dear Maritza,
I almost died today.
And I don’t say that because I want your sympathy or I want you to worry about me. I say it because in those deafening seconds when I thought it was the end for me, I found myself thinking about one person and one person only.
You.
Something happens to a man when he’s on the brink of death, and truth be told, it’s as cliché as it is profound. You look back on your life, namely your regrets, and you realize you only had one shot—and either you made the most of it or you didn’t.
It’s that simple.
I haven’t even touched thirty and sure I’ve served my country, but what else have I done? Pissed away the best years of my life on women and beer? Walking around with a chip on my shoulder because my life didn’t go the way I thought it would?
Like I said, I almost died today. And in a way, I did die because I’m not the man I once was.
For the first time in my life, I’ve realized what I truly want and that’s meaning. I want a girl to miss and a girl that misses me. I want the corny letters and care packages. I want to come home and wrap my arms around you, swinging you around in a gymnasium around all the other guys reuniting with their family. I want to get to know you. I want to make you smile and do ridiculous things together. I want to push your limits and I want you to push mine. I want to get in fights with you and I want to have crazy makeup sex when they’re over.
There are so many more constellations I want to show you, Maritza.
Just months ago, I lost myself in your smile and I found myself in your kiss. You were the one. I was just too afraid to say it. If only I’d told you sooner, maybe you’d be mine right now.
I guess what I’m trying to say is … wait for me.
Yours,
Isaiah
P.S. I could never hate you.
When she’s finished, she folds the letter and presses it against her chest, staring at me with through glassy, squinted eyes.
“You knew me all of nine days …” her voice is broken, tapering into nothing.
“I spent more time with you in those nine days than I’ve spent with any other woman in my adult life,” I say. “Well, aside from Cassie.”
“Who’s Cassie?”
“We dated all through high school,” I explain, rubbing my hands together. I don’t talk about her and I can’t remember the last time I said her name out loud, but I promised myself that if Maritza gave me another chance, I’d tell her anything she ever wanted to know, bullshit-free. No filter. “Summer after senior year, she showed up with this positive pregnancy stick in her hand. We were both scared shitless. Within a couple of weeks, I’d gone down to the nearest Army recruiter and enlisted myself.”
“Oh my God. That’s a little extreme.”
I shrug. “It was either that or working minimum wage jobs to support us, hoping someday maybe we could go to college if the stars aligned. Plus, I was just a kid. An eighteen-year-old kid who didn’t know anything about anything. I was terrified and I just wanted to do right by her.”
“That’s really sweet.”
“Yeah, well. I came back from basic training, wanting to surprise her. Ending up getting a bit of a surprise myself,” I say, rubbing my lips together as I pause. I can still picture this clear as day. “Walked in on Cassie and Ian in bed together. Damn near murdered him that day and had Cassie not been there, shrieking and pregnant, I just might have. But I let him go. And Cassie confessed that they’d had a thing for quite some time—the better part of our senior year, actually. And not only that, but she said the baby was his and that she’d lied about how far along she was so I wouldn’t know.”
“Jesus.” She cups her hand over her mouth. “So you were betrayed not only by the girl you loved but your twin brother.”
I shrug. “I expected that sort of thing from Ian. He was always chasing after everything I had, wanting everything I wanted. He was so jealous of me it drove him to do stupid shit all the time. It was like his life mission was to see how many times he could get me in trouble with our parents. He once pretended to be me and showed up at my work acting crazy and yelling at customers just to get me fired, and it almost fucking worked.”
“Is he mental? Who does that?”
Rolling my eyes, I continue, “You know, he’d done so much shit to me over the years, and all I wanted to do was get him really good. So when we were seventeen, I stole my dad’s car and parked it in some gas station parking lot a couple of miles from our house. When I got home, I dumped the car keys in Ian’s room and waited for Dad to get up for work. Well, my little plan worked at first. Dad blamed Ian for the missing car and I told Dad I saw a dented-up Buick like his parked at the Conoco down the street. Anyway, long story short, I guess Dad had been late for work a few times when Mom had been sick and he was on his last write-up. His boss said if he was late again, he was fired, no questions asked.”