I'm Waiting for My Man: Twenty-Six Dollars in my Hand
“… All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination …”
Atkinson, Kate. (2015). A God in Ruins. Little, Brown and Company.
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“Hmm?” mused Jamie at the young teenage girl standing before her. Emily certainly looked nice this afternoon. Jamie wondered if the girl had a date or something? Perhaps a big party she was attending. They certainly do grow up fast. It seemed only yesterday Jamie had been babysitting a little freckle-faced redhead in diapers. And now, little Emily was practically grown up, standing here looking so nice.
“Sorry, Emily,” Jamie finally replied, snapping herself of a wistful reverie. “Hutch is on his way. He was just going to run a few errands while I visited with my folks for bit. As usual, it looks like good ol' Hutch is late. Men, eh?”
Jamie grinned knowingly at the much younger girl. Emily smiled warmly in return, pleased that for once an older person had chosen to confide one of those knowing tidbits of adulthood with her, rather than resort to condescending aphorisms like, “You'll understand when you're older.”
“It looks like you're waiting on someone too,” Jamie continued to say. “Got a big date with a certain special someone?”
Emily blushed, smiled again, and stared at her boots for a moment before replying.
“A friend of mine set me up with a date,” she finally answered. “He's really good looking, popular guy. And everyone at school says we'd be perfect together …”
“Do I detect a 'but'?” Jamie gently nudged verbally.
“Well … maybe,” said Emily. “We're still only just getting to know one another. And I really do like him a lot so far. But … well … Ms. Smith, how do you know if a guy is really the one, y'know?”
Jamie stretched her thin, graceful neck to the sky and soaked up the oblique rays of sun for a moment. A pair of amorphous, flocculent clouds slowly billowed by high in the sky. She sighed a dreamy sigh and reflected for a moment on the right answer to give Emily.
“You might never know a guy is really the right one,” Jamie finally answered. “All men like to posture and show off a bit. So at first, you're never really getting to know the real him. He won't be deliberately deceptive. It's just his way of, I don't know … putting on a courtship display for you. It's flattering that he'll try that hard to impress you. But you have to be smart and be patient – wait a bit to meet the real him. The dumb and clumsy ones are easiest to spot. At the beginning they're all just clichés and cheesy come-ons. They're the easiest to weed out. The trouble is, some of the good guys will also try that approach. So you have to wait, be patient, learn to read between the lines and observe a guy's body language. He'll be telling you a lot of things in nonverbal ways. It's a balancing act though: you don't want to waste too much of your time just being used by some professional pick-up artist. But you've got to give a decent guy enough time to deplete his cache of macho puffery and fulsome sweet talk. It's just something they all need to do in order to work up the courage to talk to us.”
“Guys are so weird and complicated,” sighed Emily.
“I know,” agreed Jamie with a laugh. “Believe me: I'm glad I wasn't born a guy. But if you find the right person, the one that really 'clicks' with you, makes you laugh when you're sad, makes your happy moments better-than-happy, and just makes your heart soar in a way that no one else seems to understand … well, when that day finally comes it makes the whole long, arduous dance that came before it all suddenly seem worthwhile.”
“Is that how it is for you and Mr. Hutchinson?” Emily asked.
“Hutch drives me crazy,” grinned Jamie. “Like right now: he's late, as usual. But once he arrives, he'll say or do something that makes me forget I was ever irritated with him in the first place. You'll know a guy is right for you, Emily, when he knows you better than you know yourself. He'll pay attention to what you say and do, what you think and feel, what you hope and desire for in a quiet, understated way that shows he cares. And that's a lot more meaningful than anything he can ever say.”
“Talk is cheap?” asked Emily.
“You might say that,” replied Jamie. “Here's my ride now. I hope your date arrives soon, and I hope it goes well for you, Emily. Tell your folks I said hi!”
With that, Jamie walked towards the dark green sedan just pulling into her parent's driveway. She scowled theatrically at the driveway, exchanged a few curt words as she climbed into the passenger seat, but was smiling and laughing by the time the car finally pulled back out into the street and drove away.
“I hope I can have a life like that someday,” Emily said aloud, to no one but the birds.
A few feet away from her, a small, tarnished ring of corroded copper lay hidden in a patch of tall grass and dandelions. Inert but somehow more than inanimate, the artifact took no notice of Emily … for the moment.
⁂
Down the block, a once sparkling, emerald green, four-door sedan motored along – now covered with dust, dirt, and streaky water spots on the windows.
“We should really get the car washed,” Jamie said.
“Why?” laughed Max Hutchinson. “Might rain.”
“You know it's not going to rain anytime soon,” nagged Jamie. “You're just a cheapskate.”
“I'll wash it myself this weekend,” Max grinned.
“You won't,” sighed Jamie, with faux irritation. “You'll say you will, but come Saturday morning you'll find a million other things to occupy yourself with, and the car will never get washed …”
“… And eventually, it'll rain,” chuckled to himself.
“You stupid, crazy, difficult man!” grinned Jamie, leaning over to kiss Max on the cheek. “How did I ever manage without you?”
⁂
Upstairs in the Johnson family home, Kaitlyn paused briefly from her languid attempts to conquer polynomial functions and gazed out her window at the front lawn far below. Emily was still waiting eagerly for her date, checking and re-checking her hair and makeup in a gold-rimmed compact mirror. A dirty green car was driving away in a southerly direction. Kaitlyn frowned at the rapidly disappearing vehicle as a curious mixture of vertigo and queasy unrest washed over her. Something wasn't right … that car, it wasn't exactly evil or anything … but it wasn't really supposed to be there … it didn't belong, and just looking at it gave Kaitlyn an intense sensation of nervous alarm. Even if the people in that car weren't bad, there was something very much wrong about them – something that Kaitlyn instinctively feared might be contagious, and she released a long, slow sigh of relief when the car finally disappeared from view.
“Now if I can just get this dumb math homework finished, maybe mom will let me get back to my archaeological investigation of the front yard,” she said to herself, finally turning back towards a messy sheet of paper covered with pencil erasures and wrong answers.