Every person who’d been at that lunch texted me over the next couple of days to rave about Margo.
Every person but Margo.
With every message, her words about empty castles and broken puzzles tumbled through me. Her vital need to make independent strides. Her confident rejection of the elements I’d built into my life. Her painful refusal to hear how I felt about her. Her heartbreaking decision that I wasn’t worth her time.
I texted back to Mom and Dad that she’d enjoyed meeting them, too. To my brother that it wasn’t a serious relationship. To my sister—the only one to mention our Gaudete service—that I’d be happy to teach her to play handbells, too.
I took Parsley to a secluded stretch of beach, trying to clear my head. The tide was in, waves creeping high along the shore. Gulls soared overhead, screeching. Parsley ran ahead of me, sniffing at seaweed and straining in her eagerness to get me to run up the dunes with her. I’d left behind my earbuds, so I knew there weren’t any reckless ATVs cresting the sand this time, but I balked at the idea of indulging in that game anymore. Dr. Meyers had given her the all-clear. It was only my fear that kept Parsley reined in.
She wasn’t happy with my display of cowardice. Or maybe it was that I’d barely sung a word to her all week. Or maybe I wasn’t the only one who missed Margo.
Was my fear reining me in, too? Keeping me tied to my plans for the future, tied to this golden vision I had of making my life right here, walking these beaches, attending St. Luke’s, making music and making a family with someone stunningly like Margo?
No. My dreams grew out of years of my life. Years of therapy during my marriage as we tried to reconcile our desires, and after, as I reframed my life on my own. Years of coming to terms with the distance from my parents, and with my urge to be a dad, to build my own family with careful hands. My counselor had helped me see how I conceived of this hypothetical family as a do-over of my own disconnected and isolated childhood. Until now, I hadn’t thought of these goals as harmful to me.
As Parsley and I stared out at the water, I examined the part myself that had pigeonholed Margo. In so many ways, she was perfect—we shared values and interests, we fit together temperamentally and physically. She could so easily be the true partner I’d dreamed of. The family I craved.
If not for all the ways we didn’t fit.
It ached, how much I was in love with Margo. Not just infatuated with or lusting after her, but treacherously, deliriously in love with her.
And what were her dreams? We’d talked about her desire to travel, to try other jobs, to explore. She’d claimed Rockport couldn’t give her any of that. Maybe it was feeling out of step with her devout family, maybe it was the ways a small town can lock you into a version of yourself that’s based on the views of those around you. Her visions of city life. Whatever her reasons, it wasn’t my place to question them.
What I needed to know, though, was: could part of her journey include, someday, making a life with me?
I’d spend every hour since she walked away coming up with counter-arguments and pleas and gestures of faith I could make to show her that I didn’t intend to mold her into some preordained shape.
I didn’t. She was bright and free and beautiful and fierce just as she was.
I longed for her, just as she was.
But I also hadn’t reshaped any of my dreams to fit around her.
I patted my thigh to get Parsley moving back towards my truck. The emptiness of my life would have to wait until after rehearsal. Until she wasn’t standing in my workplace, taking my direction, but unwilling to take my love.
She was there, at least. Avoiding me by letting the Graces circle her for a detailed rehash of the previous Sunday’s performance. The Grace who was on the Church Council gave me one of her significant looks and mimed scrolling on a cellphone, so I stepped to the back doorway while the last of the ringers filed in.
Sure enough, there was an email setting up a meeting for the next Monday. Maybe I’d get the new music folders after all? But too many of my guesses lately left me crumbled in dust, so I didn’t know how much hope I should be mustering.
I didn’t know how much hope I ever would be able to muster.
I mounted my podium and called everyone to order, gladder than I’d ever been for my rehearsal schedules. Margo did everything with her usual confident grace, not missing a note, not flubbing a technique. Giving me no reason to speak directly to her. No reason to stare at the flash of pink that now nestled next to the orange streak in her hair. No reason to wonder if her hands trembled, even a little bit, within her bell ringer’s gloves.
No reason for any of that floating hope I couldn’t decide about.