her love story with Aaron wasn’t measuring up to her parents’. Nothing was evolving in their weird relationship. Aaron wouldn’t kiss her and she couldn’t tell her friends and so she felt like one-half of something stodgy.
But life knows when to throw in a plot twist. It is an idle but seasoned screenwriter, drinking beers alone and cultivating its archery.
That night, Aaron texts her: I think I am falling in love with you.
This resuscitates her dwindling obsession and infuses it with fresh vitality. Suddenly she feels it all over again. She stops him from going any further over text and says, I want to tell you how I feel in person.
They are in luck, because Marie is going out of town. Aaron doesn’t give Maggie much lead time. He tells her on a Thursday that Marie will be gone on Saturday. For two days she can’t concentrate on anything else.
The day of, he texts her and tells her to come by in a few hours, after his boys are in bed. Maggie gets dressed in the bedroom of her family home. She puts on a pair of jeans and a lightweight blue hoodie by Ruehl. She will mention the brand in the deposition, so you know she was proud of it. Tessa lent her the hoodie. They never had the brand Ruehl around Fargo; Tessa got it from the Cities. Getting dressed, picking out an outfit, Maggie is so nervous that she almost cancels. She doesn’t have a lot of clothes, so selecting the outfit doesn’t take long. She likes how she looks in the top. The subtle color.
She arrives at the driveway of the Knodel home. It’s strange to be here, the place where she has imagined him returning every evening, the point at which he becomes unknowable to her. It looks like what she expected—orderly and wholesome. But also remarkable, because it’s his.
Before she gets out and knocks—Should she knock? Should she text and say she’s outside? But she is not supposed to text first—she looks around. She absorbs her surroundings as much as her nerves will permit her. Her car on the curb feels like an imposition, although she was invited. She finally calls to tell him she is outside and the garage door opens and all the lights come on. To see these parts of his private home life up close feels like a crime against the universe.
On the phone he tells her to pull into the garage. She shakes as she does so, worrying that she’ll hit the side or fuck up somehow.
Suddenly he opens the door. There is her teacher standing at his garage door at night. He’s wearing a blue Spamalot T-shirt and jeans. She doesn’t think the outfit is cute. She doesn’t know what she was expecting. She didn’t expect him to wear his school dress pants and shirt. But this is weird. He looks sloppy. He isn’t ripped or anything so the T-shirt looks like it’s in awkward pain, sagging there. She wonders if he spent as much time as she did, choosing an outfit. She gets out of the car.
Hi, he says. He doesn’t seem nervous.
She can barely speak. She doesn’t know what she feels. It isn’t glee. It feels like falling.
He leads her down into the finished basement, which has an entertainment zone and a bedroom. He says his two children are sleeping upstairs and asks if she would like a tour of the house.
Upstairs, she knows, there will be another lady’s shaving cream and magnifying mirrors.
Maggie says, No thank you.
In the basement it’s terribly cold. He suggests they watch a film. She would rather talk. She feels she needs time to absorb the reality of what’s happening. That this carpet is his carpet, their carpet, and his kids play down here and they watch Ice Age as a family. Mostly, though, it’s very cold so Maggie asks for a blanket.
He selects one from a closet. Everything is well arranged. She feels as though she’s at the home of a friend whose parents have more money than hers.
She sits on the couch and he sits beside her. He’s already selected a movie—Dan in Real Life. Aaron tells Maggie it reminds him of her, how he feels about her and how much he wants to be with her. She wonders whether he saw it with his wife, whether they barely discussed it, or they laughed and ate rocky road ice cream. The film is about a widower and advice columnist,