Track 2 Birthday
Track 2
Birthday
Maggie and Jason
If every birthday had been painful for Maggie since her parents had passed, this milestone felt particularly crippling. Not wanting to cause a scene or dampen Jason’s thirtieth, she kept her sorrow to herself. Or so she thought.
“What’s wrong?” Jason asked her while she was making herself busy in his parents’ kitchen for the fifth time that day. She avoided his eyes, but he knew what was wrong anyway. He had always been in tune with her every emotion. Her mother used to say that if Maggie was cut, Jason would bleed. He didn’t wait for an answer.
“I miss them too. I’m so sorry, Mags.” He wrapped his arms around her, but she quickly broke away.
“It’s not only that.”
He knew again.
“I’m your family, Maggie. And my family is your family. That’s not going to change.”
Jason was that friend who let you talk about the same thing seven thousand million times. This was the seven thousand millionth and one.
“For now, we are family. But one day you will meet someone and fall crazy in love, and I will be that girl that used to live behind you. I will lose a whole other family.”
“That will never happen.”
“It will. You’re a good catch. No woman will stand for this”—she motioned to the space between them—“even after we stop sleeping together.”
“Well, what if I already fell for that girl twenty years ago?”
“Stop.” She smiled, gently shoving him away.
“I’m serious. You’re my family, Maggie, and you’re my girl.”
“For the time being.” She dramatically sighed, teasing him now. She hated being vulnerable, always had. Being adopted didn’t help, and her parents’ deaths compounded her fear of walking without a map. She did everything she could to protect what was left of her resilience, which for her meant keeping everything as it was.
“How long till your sister mentions fixing you up with that woman from her office again, or till Jennifer Alexander asks you to sing karaoke again? Next time it will be ‘ Voulez-vous coucher avec moi. ’?” She laughed, quoting the ’70s Patti LaBelle hit that they used to sing all the time as kids until they learned what it meant.
He grabbed her hand to lead her to the dining room. “C’mon, let’s tell them!”
“What are we going to tell them? That we’re sleeping together? That’s just…icky,” she laughed.
“We can sing it—in French!”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, let’s tell them that we’re trying things out—romantically. That we are now girlfriend and boyfriend.”
He blushed when he said it.
“Please. They’ll have the wedding venue booked by morning.”
Jason stopped in his tracks. “That’s fair. At least come inside and stop hiding in the kitchen.”
She agreed, and somewhere between opening presents and blowing out the candles on their shared birthday cake, Jason quietly reminded Maggie of their childhood pact. In a minute, she was out the door, headed to the willow tree in the backyard of her old house. She sold it after her parents had passed, and she moved back to the apartment on top of the record store. Even though the letters had been her big idea at the time, she had totally forgotten about them.
Maggie hopped the fence as easily as she had at twelve and proudly hightailed it up the trunk while the new owners, frequent patrons of the record store, waved from the kitchen window and Jason laughed from below.
“Are you coming?” she hollered, gloating a little bit.
“Just bring it down,” he said.
“No can do.” She rattled the ancient Ziploc bag.
He gave up and followed her. Why should today be any different?
“Should we say anything, or just open them?” Maggie asked, handing Jason his envelope.
“I don’t know. How about ‘Happy birthday, Maggie’? Whatever it says in here, I could not be happier with how things have turned out.”
He corrected himself, realizing that both her parents were gone. “How we have turned out, I mean.”
“Me too.” She leaned over and kissed him quickly on the lips.
“You go first,” she instructed him.
“No, you go first!” he countered.
“Odds or evens?”
He couldn’t help but laugh. “Odds.”
“Once, twice, three, shoot,” they sang in unison.
Jason held out three fingers and Maggie two. Maggie took the loss like a champ and began.
“Dear Old Maggie,”
“Old Maggie! That’s harsh,” she scolded her thirteen-year-old self before continuing.
“Happy thirtieth birthday! Congrats on being the Ohio State Lip Syncing champion six years in a row.”
“Is that even a thing?” Jason asked.
“I don’t think so, but it should be!”
Maggie continued:
“You live back over the record store with your husband, Justin Bieber.”
They both laughed.
“…and your twins. A boy and a girl. Joplin and Jagger.”
“Hmm. Those names are in now,” she bragged.
“A trendsetter married to a pop star!”
“You run the store while your parents help care for the twins and we all still spend birthdays with Jason and his family.”
She looked up and smiled at him.
“Finally—I thought you forgot about me.”
“Never!”
Maggie’s face dropped as she looked at the next line.
“What?” Jason asked. “What? Tell me, you have me married to one of those Spice Girls, Orange Spice, and now you’re uncontrollably jealous?”
“It’s Ginger Spice,” said Maggie. “When it comes to music, you may be the most clueless millennial on the planet…with a girlfriend who owns a record store, no less.”
“Oooh. You’re my girlfriend now? Is that an official confirmation?” He reached over and tickled her around her waist.
“Please, Jason, you know I’m your girlfriend.”
Maggie began folding her letter away, but Jason wasn’t having it.
“No way, Maggie. Read the rest.”
She opened it back up.
“…and we all still spend birthdays with Jason and his family, and my birth mother, who I found when I was twenty and who is pretty great.”
“Wow,” said Jason. “You never even talk about your birth mother; do you think about her?”
Maggie took a deep cleansing breath before admitting, “Lately, every day.”
“Lately, every day?” Jason questioned, scooting closer, putting his arm around her. “Maybe you should talk about it. Or do something about it.”
“Maybe.” She took a beat, wiggling out from under his arm. “Read yours!” she said, while folding her letter back up, signaling a hard stop to the conversation. So Jason did as he was told.
“Dear Jason—”
“Yours is better already,” she interrupted with a smile.
“Congrats on being the youngest baseball player signed to the majors.”
Maggie smirked. Jason didn’t even make varsity ball in high school. He smiled, too, and proudly noted, “At least I was confident!”
His letter went on to talk about being captain of the debate team, which he had been, and going to his dad’s alma mater, Ohio State, for undergrad, which he did. And one thing that gave Maggie pause.
“There are pins covering your map!”
One wall of Jason’s childhood bedroom was covered in a map of the world. He had a constant itch to travel and discover new places, a sharp contrast to Maggie, who had little interest in venturing beyond Chagrin Falls. Aside from his travels his junior year abroad, Jason had yet to pin many spots. Her thoughts on the matter were interrupted by Jason’s seventeen-year-old postscript.
“P.S. I will be married to my best friend in the world, Maggie May Wheeler, and we will raise our family over Maggie May Records so they will grow up to be as cool as their mom.”
“Oh my God, Jason. That is the cutest thing!”
She wiggled back under his arm.
“We should do it,” he said, just above a whisper.
“Do what?” she asked.
“We should get engaged.”
She slid back out, faced him.
“Stop kidding around.”
“I’m not! Hear me out. If we come out as dating, my whole family, and possibly the entire town, will obsess over us getting married, like we’ve talked about. This way we cut them off at the chase! We can be engaged in peace without everyone speculating where it’s going.”
Maggie laughed. “A long engagement—it’s actually not a terrible idea.”
Jason spun around and reached down into the crag of the tree. He pulled out a Mad Libs filled with every expletive they had known at twelve, a purple Princess Diana Beanie Baby they had been convinced would be worth a small fortune one day (it wasn’t), and a mixed bag of plastic figurines from McDonald’s Happy Meals. He felt around in the dark to the corners until his hand grazed upon what he was looking for. He held it up like a prize, a small jewelry box that she immediately recognized.
“Remember these?”
“Of course I do. Our mood rings.”
Jason fumbled with the box and took one out. He got down on one knee, took a deep breath, and with a nervous expression asked:
“Maggie, I can’t imagine loving anyone more than I love you. Will you marry me?”
He slipped one of the mood rings on her finger and gave her an encouraging smile.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was kind of hoping for a Ring Pop!”
He placed both hands on her face and looked into her eyes.
“Maggie, I’m completely serious.”
“Jason. You can’t ask me to marry you because you predicted it when you were thirteen…or because it’s easier than telling your family we’ve been sleeping together!”
“That’s not why,” he insisted. “It’s always been you, and I want us to be family—officially and forever.”
His first attempt to take charge of the direction of their lives was certainly a humdinger. She loved Jason—of course she did—and couldn’t imagine life without him and his family. But they had said they were boyfriend and girlfriend for the first time only minutes ago. Now he was proposing! This was a leap she hadn’t anticipated, and she wasn’t much of a leaper.
“Give me a minute,” she said, as sweetly as she could. Jason’s face turned beet red. She hurried her thoughts, out of empathy for his obvious embarrassment. It turned out to be true that if Jason was cut, Maggie would bleed too.
“How about we secretly get engaged to be engaged?” she suggested.
“Until I can get you a proper diamond?”
“Well, that would be nice, but I need a little time to figure some things out before announcing it to the world.”
Now he looked dejected. She couldn’t take it and blurted out the softest thing that came to mind.
“I want to find my birth mother first,” she said, quickly realizing it was the truth. “It feels like a puzzle piece that’s missing. I can’t get married with a piece of me missing!” She smiled at him, hoping he would understand and smile back.
He did.
“I get it,” he said. “You want to know where you come from before you decide where you’re going.”
The conversation had taken some unpredictable twists and turns, but Jason looked visibly relieved. Maggie wondered if he had perhaps gone further than he’d meant to and welcomed the delay to give them both a bit more time to process the idea. She opened the jewelry box and wiggled the other ring onto Jason’s pinky to seal the engaged-to-be-engaged deal. They both looked down at their fingers and did their best to assess the color in the dark.
“Mine’s green!” Maggie exclaimed.
“Mine looks green too. I’ll google it unless you remember.”
“I only remember that blackest black was down and depressed and darkest blue was love.”
Jason pulled out his phone and searched.
“This is nice—green is calm, comfortable, and content!”
“I love that for us,” Maggie gushed.
“Me too.”
And they sat up in the willow tree in silence for a good long while. Contemplative, calm, comfortable, and content.