Stories: All-New Tales - By Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio Page 0,117

sculpture defiling the buffet. “But I’m feeling a bit tired this evening, and I think I’ll pass on your kind invitation.” And I swept off to bed, my dowdy sister in tow.

My plan was to keep Arthur at arm’s length for another half day or so, and then gradually let him win me over again through much hard work and flattery. But at breakfast the next morning, I could see I’d made a tactical error. Arthur ignored me completely and began doting on Yvonne as if she were some rare bird he’d been hoping to spot for years. By midmorning, they were heading to the onboard casino together; by late afternoon, they’d signed up for a ballroom dancing lesson. And I was left sitting on my deck chair, stewing in my fury, watching the waves pass me by.

TRUTH BE TOLD, THIS is not the first time Yvonne and I have found ourselves in a situation like this. When I first met my late husband Stephen—I was twenty-one at the time, and Yvonne was twenty—he was already dating Yvonne. She and I were both working in our father’s bakery, which I thought was a pleasant enough thing to do while I was waiting to find a husband. But it wasn’t enough for Yvonne, and she’d started taking classes at a local college. She wanted to become a librarian—like you need to go to school to learn how to say “shhh.” Well, none of us knew anything about it till later, but apparently there was a young man who rode the bus at the same time as Yvonne, and the two of them used to look at each other over the tops of their books as they rode. And one or the other of them would smile a little, and then they’d get all embarrassed and look away. Quite a romance, wasn’t it, all that reading and looking away—Casablanca it was not. Finally, after a year of this—yes, it took a full year for one of those ninnies to make a move—the young man moved over to sit next to Yvonne and say hello. They became inseparable after that, riding the bus together and talking about books. The young man’s name was Stephen, and he was a poet. At least, that’s what he said; the truth was, he was an accountant with ambitions to be a poet.

Anyway, she brought him home one night to have dinner with Mother and Father and me, and you could have knocked me over with a feather. Here I’d been flirting with every man who came into the bakery, while mousy little Yvonne bent her head over her books, and she’d found a man all by herself.

So Yvonne brings this man home, this shy, gawky man who spent a year trying to get up the courage to say hello, and we all sat in the parlor and looked at him. And I’ll tell you, he was handsome. He had these big eyes, like a doe, and his legs were so long, they stretched way out to the center of the room. But I watched him and Yvonne watching each other, two little mice peeping out of their holes, and I thought this boy needs a woman who will turn him into something. Someone lively and bold, not timid like Yvonne. I looked at their future together, and I saw a lifetime of quiet nights, sitting side by side, waiting to see which one of them would gather the courage to say, “Would you like milk in your tea?” Reading books together—that’s exactly the kind of thing they would have done. It made me want to yawn. This Stephen, he needed a woman who could teach him how to have fun, a woman who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Stephen and I were meant to be together, I could see it right away. Didn’t we deserve some happiness? And what would Yvonne do with a man like that, anyway? Yvonne had her studies, her solitary pursuits. She was always happiest on her own. And so, for the sake of us all, I set out to save Stephen from Yvonne.

It was harder than I expected. He had become quite enamored of her, for reasons I never could quite imagine. I tried all the more subtle forms of flirtation—never were more gloves dropped in a young man’s path, never were a young lady’s shoulders more often proclaimed to be chilly—but they went right over his head. And then one