23. Jonah #3
They both froze. Jonah took a breath and realized where his help would come from. Looking around the room, he let his gaze fall on the old Italian man with dark eyes.
“Angelo,” he said. “How do you tell a woman you love her?”
“Me? I cook pasta fagioli and homemade bread. She’ll be yours forever.”
Pepper threw her head back and laughed at the irony of that.
A few residents murmured agreement. Margaret, bouncing Atlas, who currently sported a Pepto-pink skull cap, nodded sagely. “Cooking’s good, but you gotta be a good man. You gotta fill her gas tank when it’s at three-quarters and I’m not just talking about the car.”
They all laughed, but he looked down at Pepper, holding her gaze.
Then a woman in the back of the room Jonah had not noticed came out on a walker, one tiny step at a time. Her feathery hair was like a white halo and a striped cardigan hung over a bony frame. She lifted one hand from the walker frame.
“I waited for my Charles to ask me. He was scared. He was scared for two years. I waited. Then he was gone in the Vietnam War and I never got asked. My advice, since you’re looking for some, is don’t wait two years.
Don’t wait two minutes. Some of us did the waiting and we are here to tell you it’s not worth it. ”
The room was silent.
Jonah felt his throat close.
Virgil snapped his suspenders as he stood next to the woman in pink shoes. He took a few steps closer and cleared his throat.
“My Helen died eleven years ago in March. We were married fifty-three years. I am eighty-nine years old and I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anybody in this room because nobody has asked. The hardest thing about Helen being gone is not the missing her.”
“What is it, Virgil?” Pepper asked tenderly.
“The hardest thing is that I never got to be the kind of fool you are right now when I was your age. I got to be a husband. I got to be a partner. I got to be a man who knew what his wife took in her coffee for fifty-three years. But the fool part—the part where you walk into a room and your knees go weak—that part you only get once or twice in a life, son. Enjoy it.”
Jonah smiled. “My knees are gone. So’s my heart.”
“Then tell her what you came to say, son. We’ll listen.”
Pepper gazed up at him, her eyes damp. “So will I.”
Jonah grew very still and let his hands slide down Pepper’s arms so he could hold her fingers in his. He took a breath and forgot everyone but the beautiful woman in front of him.
“Pepper, I love you.”
Someone in the room made a whimpering sound.
“I have loved you since the day I met you and looked right into those brown eyes and knew what it meant to be lost. You are light and bright and alive and good and gorgeous and everything you do enchants me.”
She smiled, a flush deepening under her freckles.
“You told me in that driveway that I would change my mind. That I would wake up in five years and grieve something I wouldn’t even know I missed. You told me you’d been hurt, and it had happened before. You set me free because you thought that’s what I wanted. Am I right?”
She nodded imperceptibly but Jonah made a mental note to never tease his brilliant sister again.
“I am here to tell you I won’t hurt you.
I won’t leave you. I won’t…live my life without you, if I can help it.
I want you as you are, every inch, unchanged.
Just stay with me and let me…cook for you and bring you coffee and fill your gas tank and be a good man and not waste a minute of life on things that don’t matter.
We have each other and Atlas. We’re a family and a unit and we can be forever, I know we can. ”
“Jonah…”
“Will you at least try? Will you at least give me a chance? Will you let me show you that there is no version of life better than one with the two of us together with that boy…” He turned to Atlas.
She made a soft sound, fighting tears.
“I’m not asking you for anything today. I’m not asking you to marry me—not yet, anyway. I’m not asking you to move in. But I am asking you to let me love you and see where that takes us.”
“I know where it’s going to take us,” she whispered, a tear escaping.
He smiled. “So do I and that place? Is right where we belong. So what will it be, Pepper Broussard? Will you be my girlfriend, my best friend, and maybe love me someday?”
She closed her eyes. “I already do.”
“Oh!” Margaret let out a soft cry of joy.
Pink Shoes did a twirl.
Virgil, in the bowtie, clapped once, then twice, then started a slow clap that nobody joined because they were all crying.
And the little old white-haired woman pulled a handkerchief from her sweater sleeve and dabbed behind her glasses.
Jonah pulled Pepper closer and kissed her right on the lips to the utmost joy and entertainment of their audience. When he pulled back, Pepper said against his mouth, “You are a terrible dancer.”
“I’m aware.”
“But a really, really good man.” She leaned into him. “Plenty of time to teach you. C’mon, let’s dance with your son.”
He let her take him to Atlas, who, he hoped, would someday be their son. Someday soon.