All that Glitters

[Steven Hunley]

Author's note: What matters to someone is not who or how your first love was. As interesting as it may be, it's the story of an immature love affair. What matters most is your last love, the love of your life. No other loves can hold a candle to her. I'm lucky to have found her. Some never do.




All that Glitters

“It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.
© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP


“Every relationship has its ups and downs.”

“And right now, Babygirl, ours is definitely on an upswing.”

“It’s good we finally have a day free and can enjoy each other and relax.”

I nodded my head with typical schoolboy enthusiasm.

It was a lazy, wet Sunday, and we were still in our jammies-me in my Hugh Hefner’s, and Babygirl in my favorite Pirate Girl outfit with pink Chrysanthemums, even though it was almost lunch. It’s not that I prefer my woman to look like an adolescent from Pirates of the Caribbean, but rather that the silk kimono jammies clung to her voluptuous figure in all the right places, igniting my passion. I like being stimulated by more than good Java from Jakarta. An afternoon spent on Rainy Day Schedule is perfect for doing nothing. On this serene day, there was a light drizzle, a little grey, nothing too ominous, just enough clouds to create an intimate mood.

She was fooling around with the remotes. She couldn’t make heads or tails of them, convinced they were consorting against her. I was reading “The Fox” by D. H. Lawrence.

We’d been battling with the ‘smart’ Vizio television for months, and it was the same old story. Four remotes were doing one job, and you didn’t have a clue how to find what you wanted between all the buttons and bells and whistles. Remotes and smart TVs are latent monsters you hold in your hand. You think you command them, but they’re untamed and ready to command you the moment you take your eyes away. It’s Pearl Harbor all over again; Japan’s manufacturing giants getting even, with their 21st century factories producing secret medieval Ninja revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Naturally, we were still in bed.

“How about lunch? I can make pasta with tomato bisque and garlic bread.”

“Yay!” she replied, like her daughter, the cheerleader. “We can eat it here in bed and watch Netflix.”

I liked this idea. Netflix might be good, but even if we didn’t find anything to watch, we were already in bed. The playground was reserved for two. The Jungle Jim was greased with Kama Sutra Oil for hot monkey love.

A few minutes later we were enjoying the warm symphony of creamy flavors from the exquisite mixture of cheesy pasta and tomato bisque. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we hear the ominous gravely sound of a crunch, accompanied by a wide-eyed look from coconut, brown-eyed Barbara. She is clearly alarmed.


“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

“Yeah, what was it?”

“I have no idea!” she whimpered pathetically, and hurriedly stuffed her pale artistic finger with its square-tipped French manicured nail in her Maupassant mouth and inspected the pearly premises. Nothing there! What in hell was that anyway?

She swallowed, gingerly mind you, and gave her delicious foodstuff another try.

In went another spoonful, and a second piece of something crunched against her gold-covered molar. This sound was way out of place, as substantial as the crunch of gravel. No doubt about it! How could there be a crunch accompanying this creamy tomato bisque poured over Butoni raviolis, all soft and delicious and warm?

Once again, into her sensual mouth went her pale artistic fingers, the ones that can play three octaves at a time on her polished black-lacquered, baby grand piano. Oh, they can do more than that, believe me! The woman is a force of nature in her cushioned playground of satin comforters, down pillows, and essences of fragrant flowers. She can match any rhythm I give her and beat it, twice over.

Out those fingers came, with a shard half the size of a French-tipped pinky nail.

“What’s that?”

She held it up to the light. “Steven, it’s…it’s… glass!! How could glass be in our pasta?”

I give her a look. The universe is impartial, and when it comes to unexplained phenomenon, so am I. When the planets came into alignment, when the dinosaurs sprang into existence, when mankind climbed down from the trees, the universe blinked with neutrality… but not as neutral as me. Not with these dispassionate icy blue eyes. Barb gazes towards me, looking for succor, but the bread box is empty.

Barb’s brown eyes narrow into inscrutable Japanese slits. You could see her wheels turning 100 miles per hour. “Yes, how could glass get into anyone’s pasta?” I asked myself the same question, as my mind began racing and my heart began pounding like a big bass drum.


To be continued...

©StevenHunley2016

https://youtu.be/ZYpPKw-XktM As Time Goes By --Dooley Wilson

[Steven Hunley]

“You made it. What the hell happened?”

Casual-like, I saunter to the dining room table and assume a pose. “I made it same as usual. But let’s go look.”

I walked to the kitchen, but my legs felt like Jell-O, opened the dishwasher, and there was the crystal bowl I’d heated the tomato bisque in. No chips, no cracks. Damn, that bowl was all good! Checked the colander I drained the raviolis in. Good, too. I remembered we had put a cup of stoneware away one day and it fell off the shelf and smashed on the counter. But that was over a month ago and it was stoneware. This was clear glass! Stab me, anyway. I was running out of ideas.

“I can’t imagine how that got into the food,” I muttered.

“Neither can I. I’m puzzled.”

Pregnant pause, ready to birth an innuendo any second.

“Seriously puzzled, Steven.”

I feign an upbeat posture.

“Let’s think about this a while. Something will dawn on us.” Simpering smile. Pause.

“In the meantime, have you found a good movie yet?”

Gentle touch on her shoulder. She pulls back, like I’m a leper, like I’m from Molokai or somethin’.

We rocket looks back and forth, in no mood to add up the collateral damage. It’s up for grabs who will take all. She decides to stall for time and gather her wits.

“No, not yet.”

She says this all focused, but what I don’t see is that’s she’s distracted at the same time.

She’s doing the “Barbara,” a synonym for multi-tasking. I have no clue about this multi-tasking poo-poo, because I can’t multi-task. My train of thought gets derailed too easily doing one task. But she can answer the Blue Tooth®, look up a date in her little red book, search for her slim silver ball-point pen, make an appointment, check her mascara, all the while motoring down the Fifteen South at sixty-five miles per hour, while searching for 50’s music on Sirius Radio. So right now, right here in bed, all comfortable and all, she can appear to be struggling with the remote when at the same time a whole ****-load of information is rocketing from one side of her brain to the other and careening off the corners. She’s adding up the information, weighing it, evaluating it, and the music her wheels are grinding sounds like this:

“That’s an awfully cold look. It’s a dispassionate look, like he’s examining a microbe. Is it the look of a psychopath who premeditated my murder by grinding glass into my food for months and just got caught by missing a shard? Is my stomach full of glass??”

Then, like her daughter, Nicole, who loves a good puzzle, my brilliant woman is about to play Sherlock Homes and put me in the pokey for life. Oh my God, she is convinced that she has pieced together the puzzle and I know I am done for!

“He makes all our food, all our food. From the bagel and cream cheese and yogurt and coffee in the morning, to the peanut butter sandwiches and fruit and Diet Snapple in the afternoon. Then he makes dinner, and that could be anything."

Anything.

Two women died on his watch. He described the first one as an ‘accident’. That was his word for it- ‘accident’. The second was ‘Pneumonia’. ‘Pneumonia’, he says. Within twenty-four hours of diagnosis. That’s two of his women, two of them down, two of them gone! Dead!

As a young man, he yearned to be a magician, a fricken magician. All magicians have secrets and besides, he’s the most guarded man on the face of the Earth and never lets me in on his thinking. I have to pry thoughts out of him, like pulling teeth.

I have a beautiful home, an existence as luxurious as life can be, a comfortable life-style. I have a thriving practice doing what I love for a living. I can’t figure it. I’m the woman he wants to marry, his confidante, his lover and best friend, not a target.

Hey, wait a minute.

Could that be what it is? I’m his latest victim, a target! Mom always called me a ‘patsy”, a ‘soft-touch’. I remember when I asked my dad what a ‘patsy’ was, he said. “It’s like you, an ingénue. You look sophisticated, but you’re naïve, as naïve as they come. You’re not even dry behind the ears yet. YOU need to grow up and not be such a romantic and let people take advantage of you.”

And that’s when I was youngster. My mom said the same thing when I was a mature adult.

What’s that all about? Two gone on his watch, never to return, that’s what it’s all about. I remember him saying he liked the movie ‘Meet Joe Black’ too. He has some kind of rotten theme steaming here and I don’t like the smell.”

That’s what reality looked like from her side of the fence. I’m in a different world completely. The book I’m reading has caught my attention and won’t let go. I’m Zombied-out.

And not just any book, but “The Fox” by D. H. Lawrence. It’s right in front of me and when she looks at my face, I’m reading. It’s almost the end and some dude, some soldier-dude wants to do the horizontal bop with some girl, but she don’t wanna, on accounta her lesbian lover wouldn’t care for the idea. They live on a farm way out in Berkshire. And the soldier guy is chopping down a tree. And the guy really wants the mousey girl for some reason, and to get her he’s about to make the tree fall down on the Foxy one! Smash her flat! Wow, these Englishmen have weird ways to off people. Too many trees in Sherwood Forest and not enough guns.

Only an American would say that. It’s sick, but whoa! I’m flabbergasted! Nothing like this ever happened in D H’s novels before! So my attention is fixed on the pages like white on rice. I’m not in San Diego anymore; I’m in Berkshire.

And right there, right then, at that very cosmic second, when I was in the midst of Berkshire Poppies, all the evidence was compiled and tabulated in her brain and she’s come up with a conclusion.

She’ll have none of it, and she’s about to do something about it. Her ojos narrow.

“Steven, look at me.”

I continued to read, thousands of merry old miles away in Berkshire. My head was on vacation from the trials and tribulations of everyday life.

“Steven. Look…at…me.”

I looked up. What could she want that was more important than D. H. Lawrence?

“Put on your shoes and socks. We’re going down to the police station.

Pause.

I could hear the iron door of the jailhouse slam shut in my face. I’ve heard some cockamamie suggestions in my time, but this one takes the Don Rickles award!

The woman is F****** serious.

I decide to be careful, I mean super careful, what I say back.

I KNOW what she’s thinking.

Oh, it is becoming crystal clear EXACTLY what is at stake. Innocent or not, I have to step carefully here; I might trip myself up with my nervous, stammering, Ralph Kramden-style hummana hummana words and land on an anti-Steven-personnel mine.

I even wrote a story about Barb called “The Dangerous Type. “ She thought I was writing about her tongue-in-cheek, but I was serious as a heart attack. The thing with Barb is, she’s so smart, she can make even an innocent man feel guilty, so I say,

“Police station? Honey…why would we want to do that?” I affected my gentle, benign, winsome, countenance, and touched her tenderly. But she shrugged my hand away with an inimitable toss of her head and dramatic flip of her curls.

“Two dead women down and one to go,” she muttered under her breath, and shuttered. I don’t like it when she whispers asides under her breath. Too Shakespearian for me, too damned dramatic. The situation was dramatic enough.


©StevenHunley2015

To be continued...

[Steven Hunley]

I’m scared to death at the direction her thoughts are going. I plead innocence!

Although the facts are true, they don’t add up to what she’s concluded. But, by their very nature, when you look at the facts from her perspective, they appear like premeditated homicide. This lazy afternoon is taking on a film-noir quality, with plenty of smoke, too many shadows and not enough bright spots. Like oatmeal, the plot begins to thicken. And because Barb is so damned articulate, anyone she tells this to is bound to believe her, even the sheriffs, and the horses they rode in on, and now that we’re riding that direction….even a judge. Something has to be done.

It was crunch time in my noggin. I sprang up like Thompson’s gazelle and redashed to the kitchen. There must be something I missed. Please dear GOD, PLEASE.

Throwing the latest copy of Vanity Fair on the kitchen counter, I sprinted to the spice cabinet and grabbed the bottle of Italian spices I got from the ninety-nine cent store. Maybe the Chinese are trying to poison us. We Yankees know they don’t like us.

“Wait a minute. It’s the North Koreans that don’t like us, not the Chinese. What am I thinking?”

I’ve become unzipped, unbuttoned, unglued. My train of thought is derailing.

I’m not looking through the bottle like I did the first time, not any more, not me. By now I’m popping off the cap with a butter knife, nervously pouring the contents out, sifting through the fine pieces of Italian herbs as they fall through the air like drunken acrobats and pile up on Mark Zuckerberg’s face. Then I poke through them gingerly one more time, just to make sure, like a soldier using a bayonet to detect an anti-personnel mine.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. As the Mayans conceived it, zero.

“I need to prove my innocence. I have to defend myself. Oh geez, Barbara is always telling me defensiveness is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for a relationship. This just gets worse and worse.

The package of Butoni pasta is next. Now Barb is off the leather couch and standing on the other side of the counter, glaring. Out from the cupboard flies the cutting board, landing on a patch of direct sunlight on the counter after filtering through the pines and eucalyptus. Outside is calm, lyrical, relaxed, like a Sunday. Inside is somber, morbid, edgy, like a…crime scene.

There was still ice frosting the clear plastic package of Raviolis so I put it aside to melt. You couldn’t tell what was ice or chips or glass or what. While it defrosted, I took out the colander we drain the noodles in, and poured the soup through. Nothing caught there either.

Have to think. Have to think.

I couldn’t imagine how glass could be in the package. I’ve seen people make spaghetti, and I don’t remember glass being used. After it melts, I dismember the ravioli with a fork into itsy bitsy pieces. Then I rinse the bag out in the colander and look for debris. Fragments, slivers, chards, anything glass-like. But no.

What to do? What to do?

This fight or flight activity is flooding my noggin with serotonin syrup. Right now, she doesn’t care if I live or die. She wants the truth, and will accept nothing less. Her eyes, usually bright and sunny and open wide, are narrowed into concrete slits, real defensive, like the Siegfried Line. She’s readying for a fight.

I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore.

Where exactly is she coming from? ****. I’m lying to myself. I know the answer and her precise direction. It was that “two down and one to go” bit.

OK, let’s face facts. I never did come to grips about the first one. She was everything I imagined I wanted in a girl. I had three years of college under my belt and she had over a year of bedroom experience under her garter. I was the college boy playing to her surfer girl. I was shy and she was bold. It was a terminal case of opposites attract.

That was Kristina.

The hippies were newly invented, and every day was dubbed one of the “Strange Days” of Jim Morrison, during the ‘Season of the Witch’ predicted by Donovan. I sometimes wonder why the relationships lasted as long as it did. Neither of us was mature enough to be loyal. When caught, the scene was played out with all the necessary drama. Break ups were staged often and conveniently, moderately seasoned with dramatics.

We always had our ‘reasons’. “Reasons” are what you label your infidelities. And if we could be true to each other, it was in spirit only. When she needed distance, she’d pick a fight purposely, knowing I’d blow my top and give her a reason to escape. In running head games, both of us thought we were masters.

It had been an off and on relationship from the start. Both of us wanted what the other one possessed. She was as daring and spontaneous as I was conservative and studied. We had a sterling connection that couldn’t be denied, but it was tarnished by immature indiscretions. You can understand why a partner commits an indiscretion; after all, you’re in the same boat. But you can never forget. I’d say I understood and I did. But I could never really forgive. I remember how she cried on the beach near Venus Point in Tahiti the night before we left, predicting what would happen when we returned, the same dead routine of parties, complete with plots and subplots disguised as romance. I was under the impression I loved her, even though I had a back-up in the wings. I was as twisted as Rotelli, an expounder of pretzel logic.

When you start fooling yourself, it’s the worst kind of deceit. Drugs had definitely addled my brain. I was attempting a repair in our relationship, but had a back-up just in case it didn’t work.

The night Kristina died she’d made a bath and caught herself on fire while I was out with the ‘other woman’. I’d bought her this nightgown from Penny’s that morning. It was polyester and cotton, gold and brown stripes. She’d been taking candle-light baths since we’d been back and putting fragrant herbs like lavender in the water. I took off earlier that evening on some ridiculous pretext for a midnight rendezvous. After it was consummated I went home. When I opened the door the first thing I noticed was an acrid smell. There were a few matches and a match box scattered on the floor in the dining room. To my right, my old bed room, and a dark shape lying on the floor.

It was Kristina lying on her back. Not a move. Not a sound, only the smell of death camp hovering in the air, the smell of a fire that may smolder, but never goes out.

Half of her long blond hair was short, singed, black as coal. The face I’d seen carved by Beauty was distorted. I knelt down and put my head on her chest to check for her heartbeat. Cold, hard, like granite. She wasn’t breathing right. I wasn’t thinking right. Things didn’t make sense. Small pink bubbles gushed from her lips. She couldn’t breathe!

I took a great breath and pressed my lips to hers. It was like trying to blow up a rock. Something was wrong. I needed help. I needed time. I sprung up and ran to the kitchen and called 911.

The Firemen and medical techs knew at once she was dead and had been for hours. The police showed up and talked to me for a while. We found the candles and the matches and saw she’d tried to wrap herself up in the red paisley Indian tablecloth we got from Cost Less Imports. We’d used it to cover the couch to hide imperfections and add color. When it didn’t work to stifle the flames, she ran to the bathroom to get under the shower, but collapsed in the doorway.

After some time of nosing around, one of the detectives put a card in my hand and told me to call if I needed anything. He told me to expect a call from homicide, because that’s how they did things, but they didn’t see any need for it now. I remember holding the card and watching them pull away. The sun was coming up in the east over North Park, just a few blocks away, and gave the chrome on their squad cars a golden luster. It was cold that January and had been raining on and off, but now it was crystal clear. The house never felt so empty.


To be continued....

©StevenHunley2016

https://youtu.be/EItka8KXeq0 Head Games- Foreigner

[Danik 2016]

A very entertaining thriller, with a dinosaurian dosis of humour. The descriptions remind me somehow of comic strips technique. I don´t want to introduce spoilers but I strongly suspect that the real "criminal" is the tomato juice producer!

[108 fountains]

I like this. Mostly I like the originality of the plot. (I'd be willing to bet that a real-life experience was the inspiration.) Your writing is, as usual, impeccable. The last half of the latest installment seems like it might have gone off track a little bit, but maybe not - you have emphasized the “two down and one to go.” Still, until then, the story seemed generally light-hearted, but that part was awfully dark. Next installment, I expect we'll learn what happened to number two. The trick will be to make them both really relevant to the present situation.
But in any case, I am enjoying both the quality of writing and the story. I hope we don't have to wait too long for the next chapter.

[Steven Hunley]

I went back in to find our Afghan, Mahmood. He’d been hiding in the back bedroom. Our huge friendly dog was huddled up into a pathetic ball, scared out of his wits. He must have seen everything.

Me? I was numb, a feeling you get when you’re hit in the head. Life just f*cked me a good one.

Should have been there to stop it.

We had a first love, but we didn’t have trust. She always had a plan of escape. I had a back-up instead, a female insurance policy with benefits, something a man like me needed to make sure he wasn’t left behind holding the bag.

The plan blew up in a puff of smoke. Didn’t find her charred form until two in the morning.

When the smoke clears, the illusion is gone, and you realize you’ve been selling yourself a bill of goods. Even worse, you’ve been selling them to her. Your love was never real, never solid, only a flimsy curtain to reflect the illusion of love you wanted to project.

Should have been not screwing around when we were supposed to be getting back together. Talk about burning bridges. You can’t undo a death or attempt repairs after someone is gone. Death is the ultimate one-way trip. I feel guilty about it now, even though I don’t look it. One truth about the guilty is that we carry it well. We get used to the awful weight. Sometimes we even look innocent. You learn an innocent look by observing children. That bothers me. There are a million things in life that bother me.

The smell of burning hair bothered me. Sanding the floor down past the burn marks of the room I grew up in bothered me. Selling the house, because I could never go back without re-living the pain, bothers me like perpetual ache. It’s an injury that never heals. I should have been able to give Grandma’s house to her grandkids. My past decisions are ghosts that return to haunt me, and not just every Halloween.

Is this a plea of innocence? Who am I kidding? I deserve haunting. Now the house I grew up in is a haunted house.

Now I look back at the past and don’t judge myself so harshly. We were irresponsible kids too young to be playing house. But I’m still getting over it. I grow, I learn. Barb helps with that.

That was the first one. The second one was different. There was no affair, not with a woman anyway.

When I discovered I could manufacture my own family to make up for the one I lost, I hooked onto the idea with a vengeance. My relationship with Deb was cemented the moment she became the mother of my children. Our relationship was hinged upon that fact. But the hinge was stronger than the material it was supposed to keep together. Never mind that our steely relationship strands were gossamer. Never mind that when I caught her with dope in her purse, I accepted it. Never mind I joined in the fun. Thought I could raise a family successfully and get loaded whenever I wanted to with no toxic consequences, and lied to myself again. Mister Deception deceives himself and digs his own grave future.

How deep must a man dig before he discovers the truth? If he finds it, can he ever be objective? The narcissist can’t. He’s too busy polishing a mirror where only the surface matters. For all he cares, the primal layers beneath can be rotten, as long as they’re out of sight. He forgets their imperfections warp the surface, eventually so much, that it adds distortion, and the big head of a fun house mirror. The balloon head reflects his tiny sense of self. In reality he wants everyone to love him, because deep down he loathes himself. He’s paid admission to life’s fun house with a costly ticket, the nonacceptance of his imperfections.

Our relationship was like Othello and Desdemona. She was attracted to my stories of faraway places; I was attracted to her youth and vitality, her humor and good looks. She kidded around a lot and admitted that at first she thought I was an arrogant bastard. She was fun to be with. At first it was an innocent mating game. But then Desdemona started chipping on the sly until Othello caught her. But Othello doesn’t strangle her *ss. Instead, he joins in the festivities and gives it a try. After all, she’s busy making him a family to make up for the one he’s lost.

At the start it’s innocent fun, like cuddled up and watching black and white After the Thin Man 30’s films on rainy Saturday afternoons.

Then there was the day I got home from work on my birthday, the bleakest, coldest, day in San Diego’s recorded history, and found the house empty.
Same dopey story, different ends.

To be continued...


©StevenHunley2016

[Steven Hunley]

The years go by; your habits grow with repeated doses of fun, and your lives spiral down the drain of their own accord. Your children suffer. You don’t have to hit kids to abuse them, ignoring is just as bad. You look like you’re there, but it’s only your body that’s present. Good judgment, true participation with your family, is out with the trash. You’re a Daddy in name only. She’s a Mommy in name only. Emotional immaturity was the name of the game, but hedonism was the idol we worshiped.

You let things slide, let them rot through inattention. You work your way up the decaying ladder to Slacker Supreme, rung by rung, inattention by inattention. Finally you grow tired of ‘the program’, your endless circuits of return trips on the Methadone Train where the system is made to make money and keep you tied to the tracks. She fears getting off so you leave her behind, telling yourself you’ll be better help to her when you’re clean. After a while your dose is so low your male comrade patients in the dosing line make jokes about the color being light pink. You couldn’t even taste it, but psychologically you needed it.

It was an edge; and even if it was merely psychological, you needed that edge to live.

To this day I question my pretzel logic. I didn’t have time for all that pep-talk therapeutic bull sh*t, even though it took months to detox. Time meant nothing. I may have been distancing. In her way, she was distancing too, retreating into a drug world, a ghost living on the edge of the deadly substances that sustained her, a pale hologram of her previous self. And that vital self was the innocent girl I’d originally fallen in love with, the one with classic Greek beauty and pure ingénue spirit. I have nothing more to say about this, it’s too depressing.

Either way I didn’t take care of business. Self-loathing eats you up from the inside out. So while I was safe at Compton High School, my family was left open to predators of all sorts: drugs, gangs, boredom, and stagnation, to name a few. My eldest daughter found herself choosing partners that mirrored what she saw as a child. They would abuse her in much the same way her parents abused themselves. None of my children were allowed to be at the top of their game.

The evil beasts that prowled Compton disguised themselves as men, and took a toll on my family. They harmed their well-being while I stood by- oblivious to their dangers, lost in a personal fight, with the drug, with myself? I couldn’t tell which.

Through my inattention I allowed a bacterium to strangle away her last breath. After all the cards were dealt, we came up short. Only our wonderful kids survive.

Heroin is dishonest, lies that it can give you something for nothing, and turns your life inside out in the process. But it’s not the worst. No matter what junkies say, survivor’s guilt is the hardest monkey to kick.

God, it’s hard when you live in the past. I lagged years on turning my life around. Now is what matters and now is what’s f*ucked up. I finally find a woman who’s worthy and she suspects I’m trying to murder her. This can’t be happening, but like a bad dream, it is. I’ve messed up my past but refuse to mess up my future.

This new life is not going to be wasted. Barb’s love is the key to my future. We only have a limited time on Earth. It’s time to make the most of it. I’ll never give up her love, it’s too precious.

“What I need is divine intervention,” I whisper, fall to my knees, fold my hands, and cast my eyes at the popcorn ceiling. A thought appears like a divinity.

“If this has happened now, it may have happened before.”

I get up and give Barb a look

“Babygirl, Ask the God of Google, if anything like this has happened before.”

Barb retreats into the bedroom. I stay planted in the living room like Gibraltar and look out the window. This is the third day in a row it’s rained. The storm is still brewing as if it can’t make up its mind to either come or go. All this uncertainty is a typhoon to my mind. Do I or do I not get kicked out of Heaven?

Now that real love has shown up I hate myself for becoming a magician who believed love was more appearance than reality. I hear Barb tapping away on the touch screen. She’s doing it with her French-tipped Maupassant nails with exquisite pale artistic fingers.

After a while, a while where I’m holding my breath, she comes back out to the Land of the Dead. There’s a smile on her mug.

“Nestlé’s had a recall, a big recall of raviolis in Lean Cuisine foods. Nearly half a million.”

“But it’s Butoni!” I shout, and sprint to the kitchen.

I’m reading the details on the bag like a mad man, and after a few seconds I know everything about calories, fat, protein, weights, ingredients, and percents of everything, and all of everything else under the sun, and am alarmed it adds up to nothing, until I read the last line. It’s that teeny tiny one way down at the bottom. See it?

“Made by Nestlé’s Inc.”

And suddenly, like lightning, it’s all smiles, true smiles, all around. Black clouds part and tranquility envelops the day. Goodness returns to the family. It reminds me of a book I never read.

“All is Quiet on the Western Front.”

After Barb cried on the phone to Nestlé’s, they sent us a check for fifty bucks. They suggested we send them the glass shard. After they analyzed it and confirmed it was theirs, they sent another check for two hundred a week later. This was after she sobbed and moaned on the phone that their product had caused her exquisite pain and morbid suffering because of what happened. She’d falsely accused her significant other of murder.

What can I say? It was true.

But I’m not getting kicked out of Heaven, and that’s a plus. My Babygirl is always a plus, because when she puts one and one together she always gets three. In her world, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. And for me? I’ve discovered that if you live long enough and discover love, no matter how late, you can improve your life quality and maybe even find forgiveness.

©StevenHunley2016