Continued, Life A Love Story
Flo is sitting on the front porch waiting to have lunch with Teresa, who just called to say she’d be ten minutes late; the line at Uggabooga’s had been long.
Teresa said she had gotten Thanksgiving sandwiches; she hoped that was okay.
“Those are my favorite,” Flo had told her, just as she’d told Teresa that Uggabooga’s was her favorite restaurant.
It got its name from the owner, whose nickname came from the time he was just a little toddler and his parents called him that just to make him laugh.
Next thing you know his friends called him that, all the way up to college. His wife calls him Boog.
Across the street, in the house where two little girls live, Flo sees the front porch screen door bang open, and the smaller girl, who is maybe five years old, comes stomping out with a roller bag made for kids: a teddy bear on wheels with a zipper in his belly.
“And I am never coming back!” the girl says, over her shoulder. “I hate you!”
The girl bumps her suitcase down the steps, then sits on the bottom one, thinking.
She looks up the street, then down. She scratches her arm, inspecting the sky, where storm clouds have lowered, and now here comes a long and low rumble of thunder, sounding almost like a dog’s growl.
The girl rises and walks slowly to the end of the walkway, then turns around and goes back inside. Quickly.
Well, then.
Flo imagines the girl standing in the hallway, defeated, her mother coming down the stairs. She hopes for forgiveness all around.
When Flo was a little girl, she was very taken with her next-door neighbors, who were childless, and who always had time for Flo.
They liked to teach Flo things. The woman taught Flo how to whisk egg whites into meringue, and how to crank the handle of the ice cream maker.
The husband taught her how to read baseball scores in the newspaper and how to pitch a horseshoe.
Flo could come over to their house whenever she wanted, and she didn’t even have to knock.
She used to sit in the parlor, straight-backed in a big horsehair chair, and regard the light coming through the lace curtains.
She would pretend she was someone very important who had stopped by to visit, and in her experience important people shared interesting news of one kind or another.
One time she told them, “I ate some dog biscuits today.”
“What did you do that for?” the Mrs. asked.
Flo said, “I just wanted to taste them and also I was playing dog.”
“Well, that sounds perfectly reasonable,” the Mr. said.
Such an old, old memory, but Flo can feel again the rough texture of the chair beneath her, and she remembers how that room always smelled like toast to her. She supposed she was to those neighbors what Ruthie was to her, a pretend daughter, a nice fill-in for a wide hurt.
When Flo decided to run away, at age seven, she’d wanted to find a family like that one to live with all the time.
It couldn’t be her next-door neighbors; she had to be farther away than that so her parents could never find her.
She used a shoebox for a suitcase and put in a pair of underwear, a nightgown, her toothbrush and hairbrush, and some caramels twisted up in wax paper.
Her book of fairy tales wouldn’t fit, so she carried it separately.
She went out into the field behind her house and found a big rock and sat on it to consider things.
A horny toad sat motionless, having a beady-eyed look at her, and she thought about trying to catch him.
She liked to look at horny toads close up; they reminded her of when dinosaurs roamed, and she liked too the way their necks looked like old men’s necks, all stretched and tough and wrinkly.
But she didn’t try to catch him. She stared at her feet for a while and then she got up and went home.
Here comes Teresa, pulling up to the curb.
Flo can hardly wait to dig into her. Why, it’s been like a good old-fashioned soap opera, seeing what has happened with Teresa and speculating about what might happen.
Flo thinks that being curious about things is one of the pulls that makes people want to keep on moving forward, and she’s grateful to Teresa for her very own Days of Our Lives.