Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [12]
“Nothing fancy.” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “Just a raised ranch.”
I immediately turned the wheel to the side of the road and threw on the brakes. I got out of the car, walked around to Peter, leaned down, and looked in at him. Blue eyes. Mustache. White hair. I looked up at the side of the road and saw the “Welcome to New York” sign. Peter and Cleo both just stared at me. Raised. Flicking. Ranch. The entire beige-infused psychic episode came flooding back to me with amazing clarity.
“You are my destiny,” I told him. I didn’t stop to think about how a fifty-year-old bachelor would take such a revelation. It just popped out. Peter continued to sit there. He didn’t get out of my car and run away down the Palisades. I returned to my side of the car and drove off (into the sunset). We have never looked back.
PETER’S MOTHER TOLD ME THAT HE WAS GAY. I GUESS THAT’S WHAT A mother tells herself after watching fifty years of her son’s failed relationships. Or she could have seen the destiny on the wall and was looking to scare me off. The reason might have been the location of our first Big Date: Africa, a marked upgrade from Peter’s usual helicopter ride over Manhattan. Or perhaps what troubled her was the fact that we didn’t bother to get married before we had Peik. Anyway, something about me threw her, and all the other people in Peter’s life, way off. They came just short of telling me I “trapped” him by getting pregnant. After all, a determined bachelor who had slunk away from three engagements—once, after the invitations had gone out—must have been tricked by a pretty determined hussy. I can see trapping a man with one pregnancy, but five? The man is obviously a willing participant. Even so, one of Peter’s past loves still describes him as the love of her life. Others continue to call and write or stop by his office to catch up with him. I get the feeling they all see him as the one that got away, and I’m pretty sure they’re on to something.
That being said, picture this: you’re walking down the halls of an ivy-covered institution of higher learning, or perhaps the robotics-parts aisle at the local Radio Shack. You see a man of average build, with shocking Einsteinian white hair and round tortoiseshell spectacles, from behind which peer magnified round blue eyes. There is a brushy mustache and a toothy grin. The man is dressed in vintage nutty-professor wear: tweed jacket, detached suede elbow patches, wrinkled chinos cuffed over Converse Jack Purcell sneakers. A carefully constructed, haphazard disheveled state. This man is the mad scientist right out of central casting. Now tell me, does your mind jump to “God, what a catch!”? Or do you think, “What the hell is the six-foot redhead in the sexy dress doing with him?” Well, in either case, it was—and is—love. Peter once told me that he had been waiting his entire life for me to come along. As the beige spirits predicted, I had no choice in the matter—he is my destiny.
THEN AGAIN, MRS. SHELTON MIGHT HAVE HAD A POINT. ONE DAY I was paging through the arts section of the newspaper and spotted a sure loser.
“Oh, look,” I told Peter, “another all-star-cast movie. Those never work. Something called The Women.”
“The Women?” he asked, looking up at me through his glasses. “That’s not new. It’s a remake of the 1939 classic starring Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, and Joan Fontaine.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, stunned by his offhanded remark, and not a little scared by the list of women—gay icons, each in her own way.
“How do you not?” he said, a small amount of disdain in his voice. I reflected on how his mother once told me he was “light on his feet.”
“He’s one of the boys, you know,” she imparted. “One of the boys.”
Well, thank God he’s also a pyromaniac, because his utter love of all things incendiary marks him as completely not gay. Whenever we travel through states where fireworks are legal, he stops at the roadside stands and stocks up. He keeps a stash in the basement of our country house and brings a few out