Your Cheesy Bookstore Romance Pt. 5

“You still think about them a lot, don’t you?” Lilly asked her brother.

“Not so much. Just sometimes … I just thought of the way she used to look at me when no one else would.”

And there was nothing else to say. It had all been said a dozen dozen times; everything that could be wrung out of it had been years before. A child leaves your life, and she’s gone.

Twelve years before, Gryphon had fallen madly in love with a beautiful girl, the first beautiful girl to ever pay attention to him. She had subsequently become pregnant. And he was thrilled. So he proposed, riding the high of first love. And so they planned the wedding: big, everyone they knew, and extravagant, as big and elaborate as anyone could plan in three months, before she started to show too much.

Then one day she changed her mind about the size and about the date.

“I want it small now, private, just you and me. it’ll be so much more romantic. Just us. Just you and me.” He’d smiled and laid his hand on her stomach. “And baby bean.” And so he’d agreed; whatever she said sounded pretty good to him. She could suggest they make their wedding cake out of dirt and old syringes and eat it in a compost heap and he’d agree to it.

They got a small apartment and started to put a nursery together. So gradually that he could never tell when it started, she began to seem withdrawn, to even avoid him sometimes; it was attributed to hormones. One night, however, she came home from her mother’s beaming and carrying bags loaded with Chinese food, as she had when they were dating, and a renewed warmth in her eyes. They made love that night as they hadn’t in months, since before the wedding even. He thought she was so fantastically beautiful pregnant, so sexy. She compared herself to large sea creatures, but he fawned over her like never before. To see her heavy with the child they’d created together, the child who would be both of them together, intermingled, as he saw them forever, made him lightheaded. His friends laughed at him, but he just smiled back. “Someday you’ll know,” he said.

He cried when Joy was born. “Who do you think she looks more like?” he’d ask anyone, beaming. They just smiled back. He cut back his classes from full to part time and got a job at the library. He arranged everything so he had his afternoons free and Saturdays off. She worked mornings and afternoons, and Joy stayed with one grandmother or the other from 8 a.m. till Gryphon got back from classes at lunchtime. He hadn’t seen his own mother so happy in years. But after a few months something changed; he couldn’t place what precisely, but his mother looked at him a little differently, watching him somehow, for something.

“Why is she looking at me like that?” he asked Lilly.

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch her.” But Lilly saw nothing out of the ordinary.



“Somebody’s got to say something,” Lilly said to their mom one morning.

“Say what exactly? That woman is his life, like it or not. And he’s never been so happy as when he’s with Joy,” Katherine replied. Lilly just brushed her fingers lightly over Joy’s forehead. She didn’t know what to tell him either.