A few weeks later, a shabby old van pulled into the driveway at Suzanne’s house in Santa Cruz. It was the rainy season in California’s South Bay, drizzling for days now with no sign of stopping, and the rain muffled the sound of the van’s rattling engine.
Suzanne wouldn’t have heard the van anyway. She was lost in thought, as she had been ever since the rain had started. Cooped up indoors, she’d been running her love affair with Frank Howard over and over again in her head. She loved the man; that much was a given. But it was becoming increasingly clear she did not understand him. His moods and promises. The way he’d snap at her one moment, then want to make love the next. It had been a few weeks since she’d seen him and with each phone call he seemed to have grown more and more distant.
Out in the driveway the van’s engine shut off. The door opened slowly. The man paused for a moment and leaned on the door.
In his left hand he held a cardboard box, about the length of a rifle.
Upstairs in her bedroom, Suzanne picked up the phone, then put it down again in its cradle. She needed to tell Frank that she needed him—here in California, where their future life would be. She felt that Nancy had lost him already. There were no reasons she could think of to drag things out.
She knew that she could be handling her love affair better. The guilt trips she’d taken to laying on Frank had all been counterproductive. She hoped that Frank knew she hadn’t meant her threats. She would never tell Nancy about the affair. She just didn’t know how else to push him. One way or another, Frank would have to pull the trigger on his divorce. All she’d been trying to do was help. But now she wondered if what she’d been doing had been pushing Frank further away.
She’d call him now and apologize for the way she’d been acting. If she had been pushing him, she’d take responsibility for it—own her actions while making Frank see how worn out she was from all this time spent apart from her lover.
“I love you, baby,” she’d say, and tell him about the things she’d do to him the next time they met. But before she could do that, she heard the doorbell ringing downstairs.
“One moment!” she called out, and peeked out the window. The driver was there, rain drizzling off his baseball cap, holding the cardboard box, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Downstairs, she opened the door.
“From Mr. Frank Howard,” the driver said.
“Yes?” said Suzanne.
The driver shifted his weight again, looked down at the ground, and back up at Suzanne. He seemed to be stoned or hungover, in which case it must have been a party for the ages.
“You’ll have to sign here,” the man said finally.
He took out a pocket-sized clipboard and handed Suzanne a pen.
Suzanne watched the van drive away, holding the cardboard box close to her chest. For a moment she had the strange sensation that something inside the package was ticking, but, no, it was only the beating of her own heart. Inside the house, she opened the box and read the card it contained:
“Babe,” Frank had written. “You have to know I love you and that I’m doing everything I can as fast as I can to be with my California girl always.”
It was just what Suzanne had been needing to hear. The fact that Frank had known it had to be proof that he really did love her. And, of course, the expensive bouquet of flowers that the box contained was beautiful.