Alex felt so doped up with painkillers and anxiety-reducing drugs that when they wheeled him into the operating room, he couldn’t worry, had he wanted to. The one thing he recalled was asking if his wife had been notified. A familiar voice whispered, “I’m here, honey. I’m here,” but too much was going on to make sense of anything.

He saw bright lights and people in blue scrubs. Someone told him to count backwards from ten. He reached nine when a new calmness allowed him to block out the image of a car racing through a red light straight toward him.

It seemed only minutes had passed, and he was awake in a hospital bed, wrapped in a morphine quilt. He tried recalling what he had heard a doctor tell him — broken bones, a concussion, a heart attack. With the cloud lifting, one thought consumed him: he had to assure Jane he survived.

In an area sectioned off by white curtains and populated by buzzing and beeping machines, a smiling nurse put a telephone to his face: “Your wife made me promise to let you speak to her as soon as you came to.”

He heard Jane’s voice and knew, although she hadn’t been in the car, she had suffered almost as much as he.

“Alex, Alex, are you all right? I love you, honey.”

He wanted to joke, his way of dealing with emotion. He wanted to tell her not to cash in his life insurance just yet. But he could only force a gurgling sound he hoped sounded like, “27,” her lucky number.

He knew it would make her smile.

The nurse took the phone and said something about him still under morphine, everything went fine, she’d be able to see him soon.

Now Jane, the woman he had loved for what seemed his whole life, was sitting by his bed, holding his hand. He was tethered to a machine blinking numbers like an out-of-control slot machine. His throat burned, and his mouth felt desert dry; he could barely gather the strength to squeeze her hand. Still, seeing Jane trying her best to smile allowed him to relax.

“Twenty-seven,” she said.

By the end of their first week of classes, they shared breakfast at the Union every morning and dinner in the evening.  A few weeks later, he mentioned that his roommate had dropped out, and no one had been assigned to his dorm room.  She moved in, and they remained inseparable.  Without ever really dating, they discussed marriage after graduation.

Although their relationship seemed ideal, one thought tugged at the back of Arlan’s mind soon after Diana’s parents visited.   Her mother was — there was no polite way of saying this — fat.  Grotesquely so.  He recalled hearing that if you want to know what a young woman would be like when she got older, look at her mother. 

Arlan tried ignoring such an obviously shallow concept.  He loved Diana for who she was, not what she might look like in twenty-five years.  Still, he noticed that her rear end was flabbier than he thought when not packed into tight-fitting jeans.

Diana had loved how he absentmindedly caressed her legs as they lay in bed reading, but lately his touch seemed different when he reached the meatier parts of her thighs.  At his urging, they began running mornings and avoiding late-night pizzas.  She understood.   She had seen the look on his face when she introduced him to her mother.  Although they talked about nearly everything, neither dared approach this one topic.

As the term ended, and they planned to move back home for the summer, they shared how difficult it would be to separate.  But down deep, Arlan felt ready for the break.  When his parents arrived to drive him home, Diana noticed how much he resembled his father, except that Arlan’s dad was as bald as a doorknob. 

She, too, felt ready for summer break.

Passion Contents