Nick steps off the Max and puts his Baloramas on under the shade of the overpass. The sun is out full and across the street from him the Saturday Market is packed with people.
He looks at his watch. He’s early. He has time to walk around the labyrinth of vendors but he knows he isn’t in a haggling mood. He scans the lot and gets dizzy seeing so many people walking and running around. He closes his eyes behind the large black shades and listens for direction.
His ears lead him past the merchants, past the food carts, and to a large tent crowded with white plastic chairs and round wooden tables, each with an empty hole at its center. At the back of the tent is a low stage crowded with musicians, instruments, and sound equipment. A band. His ears have led him to the music.
The band is pretty good and they’re playing Country: Randy Travis. Nick listens to everything, but Country is one of his favorites. They’re playing “Diggin’ up Bones”, one of Nick’s favorites from Randy Travis. He hates waiting for people, but this isn’t too bad anymore.
He sits down on one of the chairs, finding the one out of every dozen that’s still mostly white, and as soon as he finds his place he sings along. “Diggin’ up bones, I’m diggin’ up bones. Exhumin’ things that’s better left alone. I’m resurrectin’ mem’rees of a love that’s come’n gone. Yeah I’m jus sittin alone, diggin’ up bones…”
On Saturdays, Nick went to the waterfront with his mom holding her books in one hand and Nick’s small hand in the other. They’d find a spot near a cherry tree and then let go of each other, leave each other to their hobbies.
His mom read a lot of novels, usually finishing two each weekend. On this Saturday, she was in between The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein and The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima. She was an intelligent woman, but a soft touch. She was addicted to love stories, especially the tragic ones.
When he was still of appropriate age, she would read him to sleep. And he would fall asleep easier when she did. It wasn’t boredom or the fact that his brain wasn’t developed enough to understand most of what she read aloud in her mostly monotone recitation; it was like she was reading poetry, stopping at the end of each line, even the ones without periods or commas. It wasn’t any of that. He felt at peace just to hear his mother speaking for a long time, and not to him or anyone else. Her odd lullaby, spoken in a low volume that crept around the room. It was soothing like white noise, calming like a Senator’s speech—the sound of it, not the content.
The last book she read to him was Love in the Time of Cholera. She had been reading it to him for days, an hour’s worth of pacifying pages each night. He was starting to sleep when he heard her voice stray from the usual singular tone. It cracked a bit. The once meaningless words stuttered and dripped. Her song interrupted by new notes. She cried as she read on.
He didn’t understand. He probably would have if he had ever listened actively. But boys are born one of two types: those that fall asleep to bedtime stories and those that fall asleep to lullabies.
Bedtime story boys grow up loving knowledge; the “power” of it. They’re the truth seekers. They collect the hard evidence of life and store them away like riches or weapons. There’s nothing they can’t explain or figure out. What they can’t, they destroy. These are the men who own, who rule.
Lullaby-ers are doomed from the start. They’re vulnerable to music, the sound of it and the irrationality of it. They live in the “powerlessness” of it. They grow up looking for the song in everything. They accept the elusiveness of things unexplainable. Life is but a note following a note, following a note, following a note. It’s up to you how the note’s played and on what instrument. And like all songs, there are a million ways to get to the end: a flourish, a fade, or a halt unexpected. Play as you please. Sing as you care to. Because after you hit the last note—silence.
Nick—an adult audiophile with libraries of CDs, tapes, and records—was of the latter. And though she was a mother he thought himself lucky to have, she didn’t sing. Because she couldn’t. So even as a boy, he made music out of what he was given. Music that he didn’t understand yet, but desired the way his friends desired BB guns and Transformers—their mothers must have read them bedtime stories.
He didn’t fall asleep that night. The next evening he simply told his mom that she didn’t need to tuck him in anymore. She didn’t seem surprised. She didn’t ask why. She did what most good mothers would have done. She kissed her little boy’s cheek. She understood.Years later, they started going to the waterfront on Saturdays and she read to herself while Nick set off in search of music in the park. Sometimes he’d find it literally, in the form of outdoor concerts or starving open-case street performers. Most of the time he ran around the grass, staying in his mother’s sight, and listened to the nature pinned between Downtown and the Willamette River
While his friends were home watching the weekly aired cartoon marathon, he was out here finding the lullaby he thought he’d lost that sleepless night his mother cried. He searched for it every Saturday and found other things instead. He found the river and its loud echo. He found the rhythm of grass. He found the secrets whispered among the leaves. And the trees’ long silence made him jump every time they snapped and crackled, as if they had just said something important and he had missed it.
It was here that he found her, one crowded Saturday morning. It was here that he lost her just weeks later. He didn’t know or understand till he was a few years older that he not only discovered his first love, one Saturday morning under a cherry tree, but that he also found the long-lost lullaby.
Pioneer Square- August 30th, 2004
It was hot, oppressively so. Nick was drenched in sweat. He smelled awful. He was miserable.
It was his first day at a new job; the fourth in two weeks. He wasn’t a bad employee. He just didn’t like the other jobs. Because they were shit jobs. But this one was different. All he had to do was stand in the middle of Pioneer Square Portland
Nick knew his way with a paintbrush and a canvas. His hands felt right around a pencil on paper. At home, he had piles of sketchbooks and stacks of drawings. He even had a few finished paintings. He knew he was good, but doubted he could make money.
That’s why Nick wasn’t majoring in anything “art” at Portland State
He had a few tattoos, two of them he did himself. There was something unexplainable about the craft that he was drawn to, something excitingly elusive. And there was the buzz of the needle; the soothing white noise. But at this point in his life, standing in the middle of a sun-baked, tourist crammed Square, it was what it sounded like: a dream.
He hated every job he took as soon as he started them. He worked as a bike messenger earlier in the summer and loved it, but he was only filling in for a guy who got injured crashing and then flipping over a parked police car. Nick found out from the other messengers that he was a drunk. He was a drunk but he had been with the company since its inception. So when the guy was healed enough to get on a bike, not more than a month after the “accident”, Nick was given the “you’re a great guy. If we ever need a fill-in or if a spot opens, we got your number!”
That was Nick’s summer. Spent scrolling the newspapers, calling up the companies, then starting and quickly leaving shit jobs. But he needed the money. He was going to school on loans but still needed the cash for everything else: food, clothes, food, art supplies, food, entertainment, food…
Summer was almost over and he needed this job. But it was miserable. He’d been standing there for over two hours. He was soaked. He smelled awful. And he had a headache from spinning around endlessly, handing fliers to people who were laughing at him. They were all laughing at him. That’s why it was easy to notice her.
She was staring at him, but she wasn’t laughing. In fact, she was crying, wiping her tears away while she attacked her large sketchbook with a thick black pencil, her leaking eyes bobbing up and down, from him to the paper.
She looked out of place, more so than he was. One sad girl in a Square filled with happy people. But that wasn’t why she stood out. He recognized her right away. He knew she was Audrey.
He walked up to her, abandoning his post carelessly. He figured it didn’t matter if he stopped handing out fliers for a while. The company gave him an outfit to wear and across his chest and back was the joint’s name in too flashy lettering.
He was stunned. He didn’t even know what was keeping his feet moving. The rest of him had seized up when he saw her.
Equally surprising was her reaction to his approach. Nothing. She kept on sketching, her head bobbing in continuum. She didn’t even speak when he stopped in front of her. She just raised a wet eyebrow and began correcting a mistake she made in the drawing, a mistake she caught now that he was closer to her.
“Are you sketching me?” He could’ve smacked himself. She gave no reply just a nod followed by a sniffle and a hand wiping fresh tears.
“Why are you sketching me?” he tried again.
She looked up towards where his head was, her hand still moving on the paper in her lap. Swift wet strokes.
“I wanted to draw something. I don’t know why I came here. All the tourists… Anyway, you stood out.”
Nick was amazed. She looked so heartbroken that it was making him hurt. He looked down at the sketch. It was good. It was as good as his sketches. But he already knew this. He already knew her.
Still he was impressed. ‘How can she separate her crying from her drawing?’ he thought. ‘How can she be so distraught and so determined?’
“Are you ok?” He asked, regretting as soon as he did. He didn’t expect an answer. She just sighed annoyed and kept drawing.
“Why are you crying?”
And at that, she stopped, resting the pencil between her palms, her held-together hands praying against her tear-tracked cheek.
“I’m crying because this is the last one I’ll ever do.” She pointed down at the drawing with her eyes.
“Why?” It was all he could think to ask.
She stood up, revealing a thick envelope where she was sitting. They stood toe to toe. Nick felt small; like he was a thousand feet away from her but she had zoomed in on him through binoculars.
“Because, Mr. Chicken, I’m off to kill myself.”
“Don’t do that!” He spoke too loud and people around them looked, but he was genuinely shocked and worried that she might leave—and leave for good.
She laughed. It was a wet nasally laugh; bittersweet.
“Are you going to save me, Mr. Chicken? Calm down. I’m being tragically dramatic.” She laughed again, this time not as loud or as long. She picked up the envelope behind her and stuck it between the last pages of the sketchbook. Then she tore the drawing out and handed it to Nick.
“I am dying today. Just not as a whole. But in pieces. You can keep that one.” She walked backwards away from him.
“My ex is a bastard and my father’s an asshole. Men are cocks with no hearts or spines.” She pointed to the piece of paper in Nick’s hands.
“But you’re ok, Mr. Chicken… It’s nice to meet a cock who cares.” And she turned her back and left.
He wanted to follow her. He screamed the words in his head. “I know you! I’ve known you for years!” He was shaking. It was hard to contain.
“I stole it! The drawing! I stole it!” People around him stared scared at him yelling at her, now seated in a bus at the other end of the Square.
“You know me! You know me!” He felt her leaving. He felt the invisible cord being pulled, stretched painfully. He felt it tearing. But he was smiling as he yelled, knowing she couldn’t hear him, wishing she could.
‘At this rate,’ he thought, ‘bumping into each other, randomly but so often. It’s like I’m getting constantly raped by fate. As soon as I start to forget you, coincidence catches me down an alley and mugs me for all I have. At this rate,’ he thought, “I’m in love with you!” He declared to everyone in the Square.
A lot stared. Some whispered to each other. Some even clapped. He didn’t notice any of them. As soon as the bus drove away and he could no longer see her colorful silhouette, all he could do was drop his head and gaze down at the drawing; the piece she let him keep. It was Nick, caught black and white, mid-spin. In his feathery hands were fliers reaching out to the crowd around him. The only cock who cared: Nick in a giant chicken suit.
During summer break from school, Nick worked for his uncle painting houses. He had marveled at the size of the estate as they drove up through its gates. But it wasn’t the first he’d seen and his wonder faded quickly into focus as he worked room to room on the expansive second floor.
A secret hobby of his, which his uncle was never to know about, was to wander into the rooms, the ones they weren’t hired to paint, and snoop around to see what kind of people lived there.
He was doing just that, having told the other guys that he was searching for the bathroom, when he stumbled into a wide open room that was decorated appropriately as a girl’s bedroom.
He scanned the items around him, noting the mix of childish effects and teen queen manifestations. He imagined the girl who lived there, giving her a background story and outlining in his head her possible affectations. He chuckled to himself as he walked from wall to wall, taking in everything he saw and adjusting his image of her. This image was quickly shattered infinitely when he reached her desk and saw what hung on the wall above it.
There were two, among many, drawings tacked onto the wall. One was a crayoned page of construction paper and the other was a framed and more sophisticated sketch. They were vastly different; in skill as well as age. The first was old, most likely drawn by her as a child. The second seemed recent. This he confirmed when he saw the pile of sketchbooks on the floor next to the desk. He flipped through the top ones, which he found were not filled and that some pages were dated that same year.
There is no way to describe how a fourteen year old boy with an overgrown heart can feel at a moment so emotionally complex. He felt like he had been molested by destiny, punched in the gut by fortune.
The drawings were different but they told the same story. It was one he remembered—remembered living. How could he forget? It was his first love.
His mother had just cracked open the spine of Cold Mountain
He dropped to his knees close to her and started telling her he was sorry and not to cry. But she wasn’t crying. She was giggling.
He helped her to her feet and they patted each other clean. When they decided they were sufficiently dirt-free, the little girl picked up her toy horse and continued to gallop it through the grass around her.
“Do all you girls like ponies?” Nick asked teasingly, but almost bullying.
“She’s not a pony!” The girl shot back. “She’s a mustang! Her name’s Princessa Esmeralda,” she exclaimed proudly. Nick scoffed.
“Mustangs are cars!” He exclaimed, equally proud that he was smarter than her.
“You’re a poop-head! Mustangs are horses. And cars too. The cars are called like the horses. Poop-head!”
This made Nick feel like the shortest and reddest nine-year old in all of Oregon
A week later, she was there again. This time, she was without her royal plastic equine. She also looked sad. And bored. He thought that maybe she might be sad with boredom. Or bored with sadness. He was nine. He was confused. He grabbed the apple that his mom was furiously imploring him to take and eat since he woke up late and missed breakfast. Then he walked over to her.
“Where’s the princess?”
“I lost her…”
“I’m sorry...”
She looked up at him and it happened. He had his first chest-seizing and stomach-emptying experience. What poets and the hopeless like to term “first sight”. It was her eyes; gigantic and beautifully hazel-ly bright.
He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He had no idea what to say. So he did what most nine year old boys would do in that situation. He offered her a cookie.
Except it wasn’t a cookie. It was an apple, and not the whole of it. He offered to share it with her. She accepted his offer. He was too young to realize it, but this was another “first” experience: his first smooth move.
And so they sat together, their feet touching each others, disappeared in the height of the green dancing grass. They held the apple between them, biting separately and, sometimes, simultaneously into their halves. Till all that remained was a thin core, a skinny wall between them. Then she did what most nine year old girls do in that situation. She placed a small peck on his apple-red cheek.
And Nick felt lucky. He saw his “first sight”, shared his first apple, and got his first kiss from a girl with enormous brown eyes, under a cherry tree between the quiet noisiness of Downtown and the loud noiselessness of the Willamette .
The memory made the drawings come alive and Nick almost forgot how long he had been “looking for the bathroom”. He had to get back to work, but oh how he wanted to stay. He wanted to stay there and wait for her to come home. He had found her, accidentally, after all these years that she had been lost.
Suddenly he heard footsteps outside the door and one of the guys’ voices calling for him. He couldn’t stay. But he needed to see her. He heard the footsteps getting louder. He didn’t have time to write her a note. So he did the only thing he thought would bring them back together.
He looked at the drawings: the cherry trees, the grass, the young couple in each one, the two apples separating them. He wondered which one she would miss more, then he took the crayon creation and threw it inside his shirt.
‘She’ll notice it right away. She has to! Then she’ll tell her dad. Her dad would call my uncle and my uncle will call me. Then I’d have to bring it back to her. It’s perfect!’
Nick thought his plan would work exactly and that they would meet again. He found out later that he was wrong. He waited for weeks, but his uncle never mentioned it. He never understood why it didn’t work.
As he walked lightly, stealthily out of the bedroom, he saw something on the door that he missed coming in. It wasn’t his fault. No one would have seen it from that angle. But it turned out to be as important to him as the piece of paper stuck between his shirt and his chest.
It was a sign. The frame was wooden and white. The background color was light blue. The font was a large script. It was pink. It read “Audrey’s Room”. Underneath it was another sentence. It was written in an aggressively threatening marker black. It read “Stay out!”
Elevator Car #1- September 27, 2007
Three years after the chicken suit coincidence in Pioneer Square
One of his first customers, first meaning before he hit triple digits, was a French-Canadian transplant from Vancouver, who was sad to be moving south, having just transferred to Berkeley. His tattoo was a memorable one for Nick. It was large, clothing the whole of his left upper arm. But it wasn’t the span or the complexity of the design. It wasn’t even its purpose: a memorial to his last gloomily doomed relationship. It was a word. A French word: sillage.
He usually never asked what these foreign phrases meant, but suggested to the customers that they proofread before they settled in inky permanence. But this word, sillage, was the only word to be needled within the sorrowful scene on his shoulder.
The guy tried to explain it to him as simply as possible, wincing through the hummingbird-fast stabbings. He explained it to him as “the smell leaving”. At this Nick politely said, “What?”
So the half naked French-Canuck tried again, “The word describes the smell, of something or someone, actually leaving, not the smell of leaving, but the smell going, walking away from you as its weightless fingers slip from the hands of your nose.” And at this Nick politely said, “Wow!”
Days later Nick still thought about that word. He didn’t know any French and was not one to look up something he didn’t know, unless it had to do with lyrics or fabled “lost” old recordings. So whenever he dropped a vinyl on his turntable, letting the cracked hollow songs flood his house, and thought about Pioneer Square
He wore a black tank because it was hot. Not because while he was getting dressed for a day of bike messenger-ing he had a revelation that the girl who had been serendipitously storming in and out of his life since he was nine, whose accidentally learned name he threaded into a Celtic knot on his shoulder, would be in elevator car #1 with him hours later. He was surprised as anyone would be when she was. And she was beautiful; made up and dressed up for job interviews.
He used to carry the drawing with him, folded into his pocket. He wished he had it with him in the elevator. It would have been a long deserved act of contrition—and, he hoped, reunion. Of course, he had wondered over the years why he was never caught. Maybe she didn’t care about it the way he had and still did. Maybe she knew and didn’t want to remember him—meet him again. “She kissed me!” he would yell over the drowning surround in his house. ‘But we were kids…’ he’d eventually concede. ‘But why the drawing? The sketch she made years later, framed on her wall?’ And he’d go on arguing with himself until the needle fell off and he was alone with silence, drowsiness, and the sillage of her voice.
He wanted to break out into song, like in a musical. He would confess everything melodically and she would reply in harmony and his old-young broken heart would be fixed. But he was as speechless and stunned frozen as a bag of baby carrots. He would have lost her again at the summit of their elevator climb, this time without any words to remember, or a voice to haunt him. But as the door slid close, she broke out into song.
Not exactly. It was a hum. There was no scratchy old-timey, calling the credit card company and being put on hold, music playing in the elevator car. He was confused but impressed; that she was humming in tune, and that she was confident enough to do so in front of a stranger—almost a stranger.
He didn’t realize that she was humming to him, until he saw her staring at his shoulder in his periphery. He turned his eyes to hers and made another realization. ‘I’ve waited so long to see those immensely hazel-ly things again.’
But she would leave him again. He felt the coming of each floor passing; the elevator climbing to reach the square lights’ heights. And all he would have was the meager parting gift of her humming; the muffled notes of her charmed instrument.
So he joined her. “Two drifters, off to see the world…” He sang to her. And she sang back, her voice cracking as she laughed. A doomed duet.
He wanted to tell her everything. But he didn’t have time, like he didn’t have time in her room so many years before. But he was older now, and smarter.
“I’m Nick.”
“I’m Audrey.” She pointed towards the tattoo, not knowing how right she was.
“I’m going to marry you Audrey.” He flirted.
“Hah! Why don’t we be friends first?” Her smile exploded the elevator wide open.
“I’ll take that for now…”
Nick didn’t have time, but now he would. This wasn’t the best place to revisit the past anyway. And he didn’t have the drawing to prove it. He had to meet her again. He had to get to know her as an adult. It scared him to think that he might be wrong about her; he might not love her after all. But he also knew that this shouldn’t have happened. ‘How long can you keep calling it random?’
‘Soon.’ He thought as they neared the end of their ride.
Portland’s Saturday Market- Sunday June 6, 2010
“My Huckleberry friend…”
“Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.” Nick doesn’t turn around, but he knows her from her perfume.
Audrey pulls a semi-white chair next to him and sits down. The band has stopped playing to take a short break and people are pushing through the wood and plastic, towards the food carts.
“You’re late.”
“You forgive me?” She reaches her arm around him in a hug, her fingers touching the tattoo under his shirtsleeve—touching herself. “That’s why you wanted to meet me here right? You forgive me?”
“No. I wanted to know if you forgive me.” He looks at her through his thick Baloramas. She can see his eyes half-pleading behind the translucent black veils.
“You’re forgiven. But don’t leave me like that again.” She brings her arm back and interlaces her fingers with his.
“I read something the other day, by a guy named John Green. It was really—true.”
Nick pulls off his shades and pockets them in his collar.
“You can love someone so much, but you can never love them as much as you can miss them,” she quotes with a faraway look.
“That’s pretty romantic.” Nick glides his thumb along hers.
“I thought so too. It was the way it was written. But then I thought about it some more and it’s actually pretty sad.” Her eyes keep looking outward and away.
“What does it mean?”
“Well it’s really romantic when you read it forwards. But when you read it backwards—it sounds more like a warning.”
“Because…”
“At first, it sounds like he’s saying that when you love someone a lot, you miss them more than you can imagine. But what if you don’t miss someone—as much as you think you should?” She turns away from the faraway and towards Nick looking understanding and confused at the same time.
“Then you don’t really love them so much?”
“It’s sad, isn’t it?” Nick nods at her question as the band reclaims the stage.
Inside Nick’s pocket, folded impossibly thin, is an old piece of construction paper. He intended to show it to her. Today. But it seems that she has other things on her mind and as much as he wants to return the drawing to her, he cares more that she doesn’t slip away from him.
He wonders, shortly, if she was talking about him; if it was he that wasn’t missed. But the loudness of the band and the stiffness of the cheap plastic he’s sitting on aren’t conducive to such thought. ‘Besides, she told me not to leave her again. That must mean she missed me.’ He notices that she still has that glazed-over look in her eyes and squeezes her hand to wake her.
“Let me buy you an elephant ear.” As soon as he says it, Audrey’s smile returns and she’s on her feet pulling Nick to the food carts.
Minutes later, they sit back down under the tent. The band is playing Willie Nelson’s “I Just Drove By.” They hold between them the fried dough, flat and wide, painted with Nutella and dripping sweet hazelnut tears.
“So, where’s Henry?”
“He’s in New York
Nick passes her a napkin and she laughs. Nick looks down and discovers it soaked with grease and melted Nutella.
“Sorry! Here’s a clean one.”
“Thanks… I missed you,” she says through the napkin. It was confirmation enough for Nick.
“So, you gonna start coming back to the shop? My books are a mess!”
“Hah! You should have finished college! I still can’t believe you were a semester and a half away from an Econ degree. I guess bookkeeping was only taught to upper seniors.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t go to art school! I mean you’re terrible at drawing but…”
Audrey wipes a Nutella’d napkin across Nick’s cheek. Nick retaliates with a napkin of his own.
“OK! OK! Armistice!” Audrey drops her napkin and picks up a clean one, waving it in the air.
“Agreed.”
Nick and Audrey calm down into their chairs and return their attention to the band. Nick feels the square paper under his pocket. ‘Henry and Chloe.’ He remembers. ‘This is enough—enough for now.’
He turns towards Audrey and discovers her humming along to the band. If he knew the words, he would sing along, start another duet, but he doesn’t. And so he surrenders to waiting again. ‘Soon,’ he reminds himself.
Between them the fried doughy chocolaty wall is a thin one, thinner than an apple core. But for Nick, for now, it feels wider than the Willamette and longer than the years he’s known her.
Three weeks after he first met then ran away from her, two weeks after he shared an apple and received his first kiss, and one week after he shared another apple and gave his first kiss, Nick pulled his mother all the way to the park, wishing he was older, taller, and could run faster.
A week before, before their parents collected them, she asked him if he wanted to be her boyfriend. He said yes.
With all the excitement and confused curiosity a little boy has room for in his small body he tugged his mom all the way to the park, letting go of her well before they reached her cherry tree, the one she read underneath. He had his own tree now, with his own girlfriend, who wasn’t there yet but would be any minute. So he sat—tried to sit still underneath their tree, rolling an apple in his small waiting hands.
And he waited. And waited. And wai—‘Where is she?!’ he screamed in his little head.
She never came. And he would never find out where she was. The place where he got his first kiss and his first girlfriend, would now also be where he first felt his little heart break.
Nick walked back to his mom’s tree after he gave up on waiting. It had been an hour and he accepted that he no longer had a girlfriend. He wanted to cry but was too confused to. He needed his mother.
He stopped at her feet, his head down, his arms hanging low at his sides. She was leaning back against the tree, her eyes scanning the pages of Cat’s Cradle. She didn’t notice him standing there, so he cleared his throat. As soon as she looked up from the paper fence in her hands, she knew what had happened.
“Where’s your friend?” She asked in that way that mothers ask, already knowing the answer but still sounding surprised and sympathetic.
“I lost her…” It was all he could think to say, remembering the way his first ex-girlfriend said the same words when she lost her Princessa Esmeralda.
“Oh, Nick…” His mother reached for his hand, then pulled him softly down next to her. She put an arm around him then flipped backwards through the book in her hand. When she found the page she was looking for she kissed the top of Nick’s head and pointed to a line.
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, ‘It might have been’.”
Nick looked at the words then up at his mom. He gave her the saddest look a little boy could give.
“Oh, Nick… Don’t be sad… You don’t have to worry.”
“Why not?” he said softly and hopelessly.
“Oh, my little Nick… because you’re definitely not a mouse… and you’re not yet a man.”
He was too young to know what he was feeling. He was too young to understand that this was a part of life, a ritual, a rite of passage all boys have to pass through. He didn’t know that little girls go through it too, though most times they play the part of the dumpers, the destroyers of boys’ hearts. And that little girls aren’t meant to be caught, like bubbles floating away in the open air.
He didn’t yet understand that people come and go. They find other things to do on a Saturday. And they’re allowed to do that; decide out of nowhere and go. He didn’t know that this Saturday was when Frank Carlisle decided to start a new tradition with his daughter Audrey.
This Saturday and each one after, for years, Frank took his daughter to the Saturday Market.
Photo1: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3060/2709199693_1d1328d480.jpg
Photo2: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3635/3416210824_8d0c02aeb4.jpg
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Photo4: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3603/3425741574_d154377c60.jpg
Photo5: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4006/4546829492_2c415b7144.jpg
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