say good-bye already.”
Dave laughed and they headed in the direction of the coffee shop.
“It wouldn’t have been a good-bye, just a ‘be right back.’”
“Well, yeah,” Gretchen said, and already Dave could hear that
little warble in her tone that meant she was about to make a joke.
“But I have huge abandonment issues.”
“Have you ever in your life successfully lied?”
“God, am I really that bad?”
“There are worse things to be bad at,” Dave said.
“Like what?” Gretchen responded, faking disbelief.
“What if you were really bad at eating?” Dave opened the coffee
shop door and let Gretchen pass through. “Say you had really bad
aim with forks. You would be hungry all the time, plus imagine all
the scarring.”
“But, Dave, I have so many jokes that I’ve missed out on delivering
well. Do you know how much emotional scarring that’s left behind? I
may seem normal to you, but my soul is completely wrecked.”
As they talked, they kept doing the eye-contact dance. Their eyes
flitted around the room, at each other’s foreheads or lips or feet. How
did anyone maintain eye contact throughout a conversation?
They ordered hot chocolates and took them back to the bench. On
the walk there, Dave discovered that she had a tattoo on the back of
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her neck. He caught a glimpse of it when she swept her hair over one
shoulder right before they sat down.
“What’s your tattoo say?”
Gretchen took a sip from her hot chocolate and self-consciously
brushed her hair back to cover her neck. “It’s from a book. It says, ‘a
little better than you found it.’”
“What’s it mean?”
“Well, it’s part of a longer quote, this really beautiful passage about
how the best you can ever do is to leave the world a little better than
you found it. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Invent a new toaster or
reach out a helping hand; just, you know, leave it a little better than
you found it.”
Dave noticed that their knees were touching. Amazing what kind
of warmth could come from such slight contact. “What book is it?”
“Timbuktu by Paul Auster,” she said. “I know it’s weird to say or even think this, but that book has made me who I am. Not entirely,
obviously. It didn’t help me at soccer, or make me so good at telling
jokes with a straight face. But certain lines felt like they were thoughts I’d had my whole life that just hadn’t taken shape yet until I read
them. ‘A little better than you found it’ is how I see everything now.
Not just the world, but everything. People, too. I want people I know
to be a little better off than when I found them. God, that sounds
pretentious, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds like kindness to me,” Dave said.
“Well, thanks. My ex always thought it was stupid. He hated
116 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES
the tattoo.” She popped the lid off her hot chocolate and scooped a
fingerful of whipped cream. “Want some?”
“Sure,” Dave said. He hesitated. “It’s okay if I dip my finger in?”
“I insist.” Gretchen smiled, holding out the cup toward him.
“Why’d your ex hate the tattoo?”
“If I had to guess, it’s because he doesn’t care about other people.”
She popped the lid back on. “That’s not true. He cares about some
people. I’m just bitter—legitimately this time.”
“Can I ask why?”
“He cheated on me,” she said, not really sounding all that bitter, as
if the statement had lost its heartbreak. Dave wasn’t sure if he should
ask more, but a couple of the homeless guys walked by the bench just
then, saying hi to Dave and asking for change. Dave gave them the
two singles that he had loose in his pocket.
“Those guys knew your name,” Gretchen said, following their slow
retreat back to the other side of the harbor.
“Like I said, I come here often.” He put his finished drink on the
ground, trying to ignore how it felt to have her look at him. Their
knees were still touching.
“I’ve only really been here a couple of times,” Gretchen said,
looking out at the boats docked in the harbor. “My family wanted
to check out the aquarium when we first moved here but never got
around to it.”
“You’ve never been to the famed Morro Bay Aquarium? That’s a
travesty.” He stood up, grabbing their empty cups and tossing them
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in a nearby trash can. “Come on, you’re missing out on easily the
thirty-second best aquarium in the western hemisphere . . . or at least
the thirty-second best aquarium of the West Coast.”
“What about the bench? What if it loves you back and misses you
terribly when you’re gone?”
“It’ll have plenty of warm, fuzzy memories of your butt to hold it
over until I come back,” he said without