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“I was trying to be spontaneous. Which I am not by nature. And I was keeping Deidre company, and honestly, I was practicing being brave.”
“What?” The surprise in his tone and on his face made her smile.
“I look at my older brothers and am in awe of them because they don’t seem to have the piece in their brain that says, ‘That’s not for you.’ They just do it,” Mary explained. “I have everything they have except, like you know, testicles.”
Halo laughed. “Do testicles, in particular, make a person think they can just do something?”
“I don’t know. In my mind? It helps, I guess. Anyway, I decided to see what I could do about my own mindset of ‘that’s not for me.’ I’m trying stuff out. And I created rules.”
“Like —”
“I can’t try it once and decide it’s not for me. Twenty things that I try at least twenty times.
“Twenty is a lot.”
“It is, especially when I don’t like something.”
“Why twenty? Random number you pulled from the air?”
“No. At the time I picked the number, I had been a responsible adult for twenty years. I figured that if I had the ability to make babies twenty years ago—and that’s one of the scariest things I can imagine. You know, being completely responsible for another human being. Well then, I could do something less scary, like stand-up comedy.”
“You are hilarious. Good comic timing. They loved you last night.” He stopped because Max had stopped. Max’s nose was chuffing, and Halo was hard-focused in that direction.
“That depends on the routine,” she said just above a whisper so as not to interrupt his concentration. “And it depends on the mood of the audience. I might be hysterical and have people peeing on themselves one night, and the next time I try —” She gave a thumbs down and a raspberry.
Max was focused back down the trail, and they were walking again. Mary could see where the trees would give way, and there was a broad expanse ahead of them. That must be the bog.
“I’m fascinated.” Halo was grinning. “You’ve made people pee themselves?”
“You’re so literal. Anyway, my big lesson with doing my schtick on the stage is that I need to appreciate a win. I don’t have to be perfect. I have to show up. That’s my mantra. Well,” she shrugged, “it’s what I’m trying to teach myself to do. Show up and give myself the opportunity. And grace.”
“These twenty things are breadth over depth.”
“Yes! At first, anyway.” Mary felt good out here. If she lived in Estonia, the forest they’d just passed through with the little Alice in Wonderland red mushrooms and huge grandfather evergreens would be a place she went on her days off. “When I find something where I want to dive deep, I’m up for that.”
“Okay, stand-up, that’s one. Give me another.”
“You mentioned singing with your daughter. I started voice lessons. I always wanted to be able to sing. And I did. I sang all the time. I just didn’t sing well, and the people around me weren’t appreciative that I kept searching for the right key.”
“I get where you’re going with this. In your mind, singing well was for someone else?”
This sounded to Mary’s ear like an advanced relationship discussion. She and Deidre had both somewhat tried the dating circuit. Mary had a libido, after all, and sometimes it felt good to be in someone’s arms. That meant she’d had first dates, lots of first dates. Some second dates. And third. The third was when she allowed for intimacy.
But on those dates, she was hitting up against that “she was too young to be so old” scenario.
The men in their late thirties—early forties were all divorced with kids. They were only available every other weekend. Their cash was low because of child support, so while Mary always paid her own way, she wanted to go do things that were a step above a fast-food budget, movies at the theater rather than on some guy's couch with microwaved popcorn.
All of them talked about light topics. None seemed to really want to get to know Mary as a human. Motherhood could be dehumanizing, and she really wanted to know what it felt like to have someone interested in hearing her story. What she was mulling and weighing.
This conversation—Halo’s unfeigned engagement and interest—was so foreign to her.
Mary stood there, looking into intelligent brown eyes that seemed to see her as three-dimensional—it felt amazing and a little overwhelming.
She could swear these were the tentative steps of something solid and long-lasting. Yeah, in books Mary had read and movies she’d seen, this kind of conversation was the kind you had that led to … more.
“Mary?”
“Yes?”
