Right at my bathroom window.
Right at me. In my old blue bathrobe with my eleven gray hairs.
She smiled. And waved.
I let go of the curtain like it had burned me.
My name is Janet Morrison. I’ve lived on Willowbrook Lane in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, for fourteen years.
I’m a dental office manager. I’ve worked at the same practice for nineteen years. I know every patient’s name and which ones lie about flossing. It’s not a glamorous job. But I’m good at it, and the dentists would fall apart without me, and they know it.
Irvin is a high school chemistry teacher. He’s taught at Westfield High for twenty-one years. He’s tall and thin and a little stooped from years of leaning over lab tables. He has big glasses and a gentle face and a laugh that comes out in surprised little bursts, like a car that won’t quite start.
The kids at school call him Mr. Morrison to his face and “Professor Beaker” behind his back. He knows. He thinks it’s hilarious. He has a coffee mug that says PROFESSOR BEAKER that a student gave him in 2009, and he drinks out of it every day.
He’s not handsome. Not the way men in movies are handsome. He’s goofy and awkward and he wears socks with sandals in the summer and he tells chemistry jokes that only he understands.
I’ve loved him since I was thirty.
We met at a wedding. My cousin’s. He was a friend of the groom. He spilled red wine on my dress during the toast and was so horrified that he spent the whole reception trying to get the stain out with club soda and salt. He explained the chemistry the whole time. Something about tannins and sodium.
The stain never came out. But by the end of the night, I didn’t care.
We got married a year later. We had our daughter, Maddie, two years after that. She’s sixteen now. She’s smarter than both of us and she knows it, and she rolls her eyes at everything we say, and I’d die for her without thinking twice.
