30. Aaron
CHAPTER THIRTY
AARON
“Come sit down, my boy,” Momma says, and I want to tell her that I’m thirty-four years old and not a boy. Instead, I drain the last of my milk, put the glass in the sink, and brush the cookie crumbs from my beard before I go sit down at the dining room table with her.
Yes, I’ve gone to my mother’s after work for cookies and milk. It’s not a crime, and it makes her happy. It makes me happy too, and I could definitely use a dose of joy in my life right now.
“Tell me why we haven’t seen Emma again,” Momma says.
“You know why, Momma,” I say.
“You broke up with her,” she says, not asking.
“Why do you think I broke up with her? She could have broken up with me. ”
Momma scoffs and adds a laugh to the end of it. “I highly doubt that, son.”
“Why?” I ask. “Plenty of women have broken up with me.”
“Yeah, but I saw the way she looked at you,” Momma says. “There was something there between you two.”
“Yeah.” I sigh in one of those long, drawn-out ways that I’ve been doing lately. “There was, Momma. But in the end, I think I frustrate her too much.”
“You?” she asks. “How is that even possible?”
I grin, because Momma’s always made me feel so good about myself. “There are people who don’t like me, Momma. You have to accept that fact.”
“I will not,” she says, with plenty of haughtiness in her tone. “You and Emma were so cute together.”
“You have to be more than cute together to stay together,” I say.
“You worked so well on that project together,” she says.
“Yeah, well, until we didn’t.”
“What does that mean?” she asks. “Aaron, you tell me right now what happened.”
I’ve been over it so many times in my head, I can recite it word for word. I give her the Cliff Notes version so that she won’t have to know everything. Then I say, “I’m just not good enough for her, Momma.”
“Oh, pish posh,” Momma says, and she actually gets up and stalks over to the kitchen sink. “You both—you and Thomas—have such a problem. I don’t know where you got it from. You’re a handsome man, Aaron, and any woman on this planet would be lucky to have you.”
“Thanks, Momma,” I say.
“You’re successful.” She starts washing dishes, something she does when she gets stressed and upset. “You own your own business—a thriving business, I might add. You don’t hurt for money. You can fix anything.”
“Okay, Momma,” I say, because if she gets going, I’ll never get her to stop.
“You deserve someone just as good as you are,” she says. “And she’s not better than you, son.”
I get up and go over to the sink, covering my mom’s sudsy hands with mine. “Okay, Momma,” I say.
She stalls and looks at me. “I don’t know why you don’t believe it.”
I take the glass from her and finish rinsing it. “I don’t know why either, Momma. It’s just how my brain works.”
“Our brains can play tricks on us, you know.”
“I know, Momma.” This is not the first time my mother has told me this. “What do you mean about Thomas? He doesn’t seem to have a self-esteem problem.”
“No, but he’s got some girlfriend issues right now too.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I say, feeling even worse about myself now for some reason. “Are you telling me Thomas is dating someone?”
Momma takes the glass back from me and starts rinsing it, even though I’ve already done it. “Where have you been the last few weeks?” she demands. “Yes, he started dating that woman who works down at the ice cream store.”
Where have I been the past few weeks? Brooding and sighing and missing Emma. That’s where I’ve been. “I haven’t been to the ice cream store since I was ten, Momma. Who is it?”
“Her name is Claire,” Momma says. “Or Clancy, or Kristen. I don’t know, something that starts with that hard-C sound.”
I still don’t know who it is, and I’m actually shocked that Thomas has met someone at all. He’s not exactly social, even with his own gender, and I’ve never known him to have a girlfriend in all thirty years of his life.
“Wow,” I say, genuinely dumbstruck. “Good for him.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to give him a few pointers,” Momma says. “I caught him trying to leave the house to go pick her up in his corgi sweats.”
“Oh boy,” I say with a chuckle. “I don’t know, Momma. Thomas and I don’t really talk about dating.”
“Well, you should .” She slaps the dishcloth against my chest. “And we need to figure out how you’re going to march next door to the flower shop, tell Emma you’re in love with her, and get her back into your life. Because I’m not dealing with this broody, middle-aged man anymore.”
“Middle-aged man?” I demand. “Momma, I am not middle-aged.”
“Well, you’re no spring chicken.” She marches away from me and back to the table, where she grabs a notebook from the center of it and starts scribbling something—surely ideas for how I’m going to win Emma back.
I look out the window above the sink, wondering what my options are. I can fake a text detailing an emergency at the store and rush out. I can be an adult and tell Momma I don’t want to talk about this and go home, but I don’t want to be at the store, and I certainly don’t want to be home by myself.
Emma used to come over every night after work. I’d make us fun dinners, we’d put on movies, and she’d lay in my arms on the couch. Everything in the world was quiet and still and perfect. She hasn’t been by in weeks now, and I feel like someone is turning me inside out one inch of skin at a time.
“Did you apologize for freezing at the park presentation?” Momma looks up, her eyebrows sky-high.
“Yes,” I say. “Several times.”
“So she was just mad for a few minutes,” Momma says. “You Stansfield men, you’re always blowing everything out of proportion.”
I sigh as I sink down into the chair where I ate my chocolate chip cookies and drank my milk. “If you knew this was a problem with my genes, Momma, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew,” she says, her voice growing in intensity. “Your dad did the same thing when we were dating and for the first several years of marriage, I’ll have you know.” She stabs the pen toward me like it’s my fault.
Maybe I did overreact. Maybe I let myself get too far in my head. Maybe my self-loathing took over too much.
With some distance from the situation and time without Emma, I know all of the above maybes are absolutely true. She had a bad few minutes, and so did I. And I hate that a half-hour of my life has caused so much misery for the past several weeks.
“I have to get her back,” I say.
“Yes, you do,” Momma says. “So how are you going to do that?”
I look up, hope streaming through me, but pure helplessness holding it at bay. “If I knew, Momma, I would have done it already.”
“Well, you’ve got the park announcement coming up,” she says matter-of-factly. “Maybe that would be a good time.”
My mouth drops open. “In front of other people?”
“Yes, Mister Stansfield,” she says. “Emma seems like she would enjoy that. She’d like to see you apologizing and begging for her hand back in front of a great many people.” She scribbles something down on the pad quickly. “You can buy a bunch of flowers from her shop to do it.”
She drops the pen like it’s a mic, and she leans back in her chair, a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“That’s it. That’s all you need. A few minutes with that mic on that stage in front of everyone in town declaring your undying love for the girl next door, with all of her flower arrangements around her. It’s perfect.”
“Momma,” I say, pure disbelief in my voice. “The park thing is five days away. I can’t plan that in five days.”
“Plan what?” Momma rips the paper off the pad and pushes it toward me. “I wrote down everything you need to say right there.”
I pick up the paper, but I can’t read any of the words. Momma’s penmanship is not that great, and she writes in cursive with a slant that makes it hard to read. I don’t have the attention span to do this right now, and I slap my palm down over the paper.
“I’m not just gonna get up in front of everything and read something that my mommy wrote.”
“It’ll be better than anything you can come up with,” she says, and she marches away from the table again. “I don’t care what you do, Aaron,” she says from the kitchen sink. “But the moping has to stop. And the best way to do that is to get that lovely girl back into your life. ”
“She’s not a girl, Momma,” I say wearily. “Just like I’m not a boy.”
I look down at the paper, my thoughts racing. How hard would it be to ask Jean for a few minutes before things begin? How hard would it be to send spies next door to Emma’s shop to buy up the flower arrangements she’s made? I have over two dozen employees at the hardware store, and even if Emma catches on that they all work there, they can simply say it’s their mother’s birthday or their grandparents’ anniversary or their girlfriend’s something.
How hard would it really be?
And a little voice in the back of my head starts screaming, growing louder and louder with every passing moment.
It won’t be that hard, Aaron. Just get it done.