Chapter 28 Holly
Ma, this is weird.”
Aidan is propped on the phone screen in the corner of my bedroom, and I’m grilling him about which jeans I should wear for my date tonight. I’ve tried on two pairs, twice each.
“Is it any weirder than my son setting me up?” I ask, teasing.
Aidan’s semester has ended, but he stayed in Athens to play a couple of paying gigs and apartment hunt for next fall.
I wish he were here to offer in-person advice, but I can’t exactly be mad that he’s earning good money while also finding a place to live.
I glance out my bedroom window toward Joel and Peter’s darkened house, silently cursing them for choosing this particular stretch of time to take Aunt Edna on a Norwegian fjord cruise.
Joel can always be depended on for brutally honest fashion judgments.
Aidan sighs, resigned. “Okay, go with the flared ones. But they both look great—you’re beautiful, Ma.
” I watch as he pushes shaggy bangs from his eyes, wondering whether it’s still my responsibility to arrange (and pay for?) my son’s haircuts, now that he’s technically an adult.
“But it doesn’t even matter,” he says, “because that Pridmore guy is super into you—as he should be. You’re awesome. ”
“See,” I exclaim. “I knew there was a reason I kept you.”
We joke about this sometimes. What else can we do?
Aidan was near the end of seventh grade the day he walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge to grab a bottle of chocolate milk, and asked me point-blank: “Did you ever think about having an abortion?”
I was glad that he knew what an abortion was, and also relieved that he had the courage to ask. His candor felt like a solid indication that he trusted me, that he could talk about difficult things with me, be vulnerable. Basically, all the things I never had with my own parents.
I had hoped the day would eventually come when I could explain my choice to bring him into the world. But still, I wasn’t prepared.
“Honestly, yes,” I told him, sinking into a chair at the kitchen table. I considered it.
“So, I was unplanned,” he replied, taking the top off the milk and chugging. I wondered where he’d heard that term: “unplanned.” Strange coming from a barely adolescent boy.
“Well, I wasn’t much of a planner back then. I couldn’t even find space in my life to do laundry,” I explained, standing up to take a glass from the shelf, and then handing it to him. “So, technically, you were unplanned. But I think you’re really asking whether you were a mistake.”
“Were you using protection?” he asked me, pouring milk into the glass and not daring to look at me directly.
“You weren’t a mistake, Aidan,” I answered, deciding not to go into the details of sloppy, drunk teenage sex.
That was a conversation for another time.
I took hold of his arm, gave it a light squeeze, and then my mouth formed the most truthful words I have ever uttered: “You are precisely the opposite of a mistake, every single day.”
He didn’t reply, but he did look at me and nodded. And that was that. We never spoke of it seriously again. But Aidan did start to joke regularly about how cool it was that I decided to “keep” him, and so I started to joke about it, too.
“Don’t lie to me,” Aidan says now from my phone screen, “You didn’t keep me for the unsolicited compliments. It was always my excellent coffee-making skills.”
“I almost forgot about your coffee.” I laugh, sitting at the edge of the bed to strap on my wedge heels. “It’s been so long.”
“I’ll be home to make it for you soon,” he tells me. “In the meantime, have fun on your date.” We say our goodbyes and I reach across to hang up the phone, just as Aidan calls out, “And don’t forget to use protection!”
Cheeky bastard, I think, smiling in spite of myself. He can pay for his own haircuts.
I do love Atlanta, I find myself musing, several hours later.
I love this vibrant, young, diverse city that has become my adoptive home.
I love the way the azaleas flame pink in March and the maples blaze red in October.
I love the quirky little neighborhoods, where flower shops and bookstores crop up at random intersections, and where purple-haired women with a dozen piercings serve biscuits and grits in shabby diners.
I even love the grimy blue seats in our radically inadequate metro system, and the twelve lanes of clogged highways that pulse through the center of downtown.
I love my city, almost all the time. Except at seven thirty on a Saturday night, when I’m on a first date, and we’re trying to get a table for two at a trendy restaurant.
Since it was my idea to just “pop in” to Deer and Dove for our date, I had no room to complain when we were politely informed of our two-hour wait.
I was getting hangry, and after we tried unsuccessfully to walk into three other nearby places, I was about to suggest that we give up and go to the Chili’s at the mostly demolished North DeKalb Mall—site of filming for many postapocalyptic and dystopian films. That’s when Hugh suggested that he could make something simple at his place, but we’d need to do a quick grocery run—which is how we ended up at Your DeKalb Farmers Market, where my first date with the esteemed Professor Hugh Pridmore isn’t going exactly as planned.
My stomach is growling fiercely, and my fingertips are so frozen that they’re tingling, which makes it impossible to determine the ripeness of mangoes.
This is the one simple task that I took on when we walked into this freezing-cold place to execute plan B: pick out two mangoes from the mountains of fruits and vegetables surrounding me.
This place is an Atlanta treasure, where the unusual scent of seafood and bleach and pungent fruits somehow entices, where an entire wall of spices and seasonings rises above rows and rows of fresh produce from around the world, and where for some reason the temperature always hovers just barely above the freezing point.
Even though I’m not much of a cook, I come here occasionally to pick up a bag of their house-made ravioli or a pint of fresh pesto.
In a pinch, I’ve even rushed over to buy flowers for the club—they always have an excellent selection for dirt cheap.
My hands too numb to function, I abandon any attempt at testing ripeness and grab a couple of mangoes from the top of the pile. I’m clutching a huge, firm mango in each hand when Hugh shows up beside me, carrying a basket with basmati rice, cilantro, and a large squash or melon I don’t recognize.
“It’s a bit nippy in here,” he says, taking the mangoes from my icy fingers to put in his basket. “Christ, your hands are cold,” he exclaims. “You have actual goose bumps.”
We both look at my bare arms below a whisper-thin silk tank.
I was aiming for dressy casual: a bright summer patterned top with spaghetti straps, the jeans Aidan helped me choose, and wedge heels.
Hugh looks damn near perfect in dark-wash denim and a white linen button-down. He also looks a tad warmer than me.
He places the basket on the floor, wraps his hands around mine, and begins rubbing vigorously. I watch, mesmerized, inspecting his oval nails and clean cuticles, feeling the pads of his fingers press against my palms.
“Is this helping at all?” he asks, smiling so wide that those adorable thin lines take shape around his eyes.
I simply nod in response, because I’d be embarrassed to share how very much his touch is warming me, and in how many unexpected places.
He releases my hands, then lets his own hand fall tentatively to the small of my back, gently urging me toward the exit.
We amble along a long row of produce, and even though I’m starving, I can’t help moving slowly, with Hugh walking so close beside me that I can feel the heat radiating from him, warming my bare skin.
Or maybe it’s the peppers. They are a marvel: dried and fresh, Thai, habanero, scotch bonnet, chipotle.
Piles of peppers squeeze between banana flowers and hunks of fresh ginger bigger than my hand.
“Have you ever tried granadilla?” he asks, touching my upper arm to guide me toward an adjacent aisle filled with fruits. I savor the feel of his touch on my skin.
Fingers still resting on my arm, he lifts a smooth orange fruit with small yellow spots from a precarious pile, and presses it into my hand.
“Will I sound painfully uncultured if I admit to you I’ve never even seen one?” I ask, studying the way our hands look against its bright flesh.
“Not at all,” he replies, smiling. “You simply sound like someone who hasn’t had the opportunity to travel to Bolivia.”
“Yet,” I say.
“Yet,” he repeats, and then he takes the fruit from my hand and places it gingerly in the basket. “In the meantime,” he says, “we’ll break open the granadilla when we get to my place—prepare you for your journey.”
I can’t resist letting my mind wander as we head toward the cashier bays, envisioning all the places I could go with Hugh, if he were to invite me along.
I know I’ll never live abroad, but it’s not impossible to conceive of traveling a bit, now that Aidan is mostly self-sufficient.
After all, I have months and months of accrued vacation time.
I envision myself in a flowy yellow sundress, wandering an outdoor market while Hugh gives a talk or teaches a class or whatever he does in all those places he goes.
I’d fill my basket with fruits for us to try together, bring them back to our apartment or hotel, wait impatiently for his return.
Hugh presses his hand against my back again, this time less tentative, as he guides me through a sea of Atlanta residents from every corner of the world.
They crowd around us, on the damp concrete floors, carts piled high with produce, fish, meat, cheeses, pastries, and dried goods, most of the jostling shoppers bundled up in jackets and gloves, even on a Saturday in June.