Boom. He`d said it. There had been no warning.
She had been at the shopping mall with her best friend when she ran into her former boyfriend. He dropped the bombshell.
”I`m getting married,” he said offhandedly.
Stay cool, she told herself, although she could feel red rising in her face. She summoned up a plastic grin. Then a nervous twitch spread over her face-which royally irked her because he spotted it and raised a puzzled eyebrow.
She composed herself quickly. Inhaling deeply, deeply, she mustered her energy and uttered, in a cordial voice that would have made Emily Post proud: ”Congratulations.”
And, continuing in the same manner-but for a newly acquired stutter-she added, ”I`m so ha-happy for you.”
”I just knew you would be,” he gushed. ”You`d love her.”
Moments later, they parted, wishing each other well.
After she tripped over her own feet-twice-her friend sympathetically suggested they take a break.
”The thing is,” she told her friend over coffee, ”he didn`t play by the rules.”
The dating rules, that is-rules to the game she thought she had taught him so well.
Didn`t he know, she raved, that he was supposed to pine for her forever?
It didn`t matter that she wasn`t crazy about him. In fact, she really never liked him all that much, even after two years of dating.
But that was the rule: She could take him or leave him, but he would worship her. Forever.
Or at least until he was dead.
So she`d love this fiance, this usurper, would she? She knew the soon-to- be Mrs. Right didn`t even appreciate her romantic acquisition.
His chagrined formerly significant other pulled a small notebook from her pocket. ”Really,” she told her friend, ”there was really nothing bad about him.” She would tally her former boyfriend`s strengths as proof.
As she stared at the blank lines, she bit her upper lip and said softly,
”Well, he`s not the sort of guy who can be summed up on paper.”
”Right,” her friend said without hint of a smirk. ”What do you say we put our heads together and try to remember some of his less-than-stellar qualities?”
Thinking. Thinking. She tapped her machanical pencil on the table. A piece of its lead fell out. She got a better grip on it. But the pencil, born to the role of relationship doomsayer, began to move across the paper. And as the ceremonial words ”Is there anyone here. ..” rang in her ears, she looked down and saw that she had written ”I object.”
Then other words began to fill the page. Thoughtless. Jerk. Cheap. Brain- dead. Bad hair.
She shook her head. Bad hair? Who had she become? Vidal Sassoon?
The next Saturday evening, sitting alone, her litany continued: ”What have I done? I`m too picky. Too hasty. He was perfect, except for that hair. How could I have ended our relationship?”
Again, her friend was there to remind her how she always had complained that he was a mama`s boy.
”Yeah,” she told her friend, ”but my mother tells me a man will treat his partner as well as he treats his mother.
”I missed all the right signals,” she lamented. ”Now he`s going forward, and I`m standing still.”
On the day of his wedding, she meditated again on what might have been.
Two weeks after the wedding, she received a postcard from Hawaii. From him.
”Mom, my new wife and I are all having a wonderful time on our honeymoon,” the postcard read.
His mom, him and her. Ah, what could have been.
