Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

you,” she said, “but I’d rather drive two hours to have dinner with somebody who really interested me than walk down the block to have dinner with somebody I don’t care about.” She told him she’d drive in to the city to meet him. He said okay. She hadn’t even mentioned her own two children at this point.
    She arranged for Pete and Sally to have sleepovers with friends that night. She bought a new dress, red, with a pleat up the back. Claire had gone out on plenty of blind dates by this time, but none whose prospect left her feeling so excited. All week long she’d thought about his voice on the other end of the phone.
    He had chosen a little Brazilian restaurant in a part of town she’d never been. Always before this when Claire went into Boston it was to take her kids to the science museum or bring Sally to the ballet. The restaurants she knew were all the kind you’d bring children to. Here the menu was printed in Portuguese and there was percussion music playing and oilcloth on the tables and the smell of spices Claire had never cooked with. She had arrived early, regretting her choice of dress once she saw what the rest of the mostly foreign-looking clientele were wearing. She went to the ladies room and washed off her makeup, put her pearl earrings back in her purse, mussed up her hair.
    When she came out again she saw him. She knew from his freckles he couldn’t be Brazilian even before she heard his soft Alabama accent asking the waitress if she had a quieter table. He wasn’t a handsome man exactly, by conventional standards, but she maintains that she fell in love with him the moment she saw him. Later he admitted to Claire that he felt that way himself. “It was so plain, you were so ready to be loved,” he said. “You looked like an orphan. I just wanted to put my arms around you and take you away.”
    Not that he did. He was very formal with her that night. He got up from the table when she approached him. He shook her hand. Before they sat down she asked him whether he thought her car was all right parked where it was. Her station wagon looked as if it had pulled up at the end of a long and hair-raising car chase, with the front end up over the curb and the rear pointed out into traffic. She had been so distracted when she got to the restaurant she hadn’t even noticed.
    “So,” he said with a regretful smile, looking out onto the street in the direction of her messy station wagon, with its Isoccer bumper sticker and the tumble of empty juice boxes and school papers in the back. “How old are your kids?”
    For twelve years Claire’s children had been the central focus of her life. She could talk for twenty minutes about the pros and cons of circumcision or the desirable number of years between children before it would suddenly occur to her—hearing the sound of her own voice—that the woman she used to be before children had virtually disappeared. To Mickey she was that woman again. Or a new one she barely recognized.
    Mickey told her that first night that he didn’t get involved with women who had children; it violated his sense of romance. “The worst thing that could happen would be for you and me to fall in love,” he said. “Because we couldn’t be together”—not together the way Mickey liked anyway—“and it would break both our hearts.” By the time he said this it was also plain that there was some powerful pull between the two of them. When they danced she didn’t have to keep her eyes open or think about how to move. She didn’t even notice when the music stopped.
    “Now that’s one heck of an interesting place for a person to have a birthmark,” he said. He had noticed a tiny mole between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. No doubt he had also noticed that her eyes were moist.
    “Back then you were like someone dying of thirst after days of traveling across a desert in a hundred-and-ten-degree heat, and I was just the first person who offered