Free Once Upon a Time, There Was You by Elizabeth Berg

his kitchen table, finishing dinner. John made a chicken cacciatore of which he is not unreasonably proud (a generous pinch of cloves is the secret). At one point, Amy gestured to her own chin to let John know he had something on his, and he liked how natural the moment was between them. Amy pointed, he wiped it away: done. Say all you want to about the grand and glorious aspects of a heady romance—lengthy and poetic recitations of love, Sturm und Drang, kissing in the windswept rain—what John likes best are the small and undramatic moments that make for a kind of easy comfort, for a feeling of being grounded in a relationship. A feeling of being off duty . You show up on your first date with your best shoes on, hoping to get to a place where you keep your shoes off, is what he thinks.
    Amy takes a last bite and then folds her napkin beside her plate. “Thank you. That was delicious.”
    “You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”
    “May I have the recipe?”
    You may have the cook! pops into his brain, but he doesn’t say it, of course not, it’s much too soon for such pronouncements. “I’d be glad to give you the recipe,” he says.
    “Hey. Know what happened to me today?”
    He sits back and crosses his arms, smiles. “No. What happened to you today?”
    “Well, I decided to take the bus to work instead of driving? And I got on and I sat behind this woman who started crying. She was very quiet about it, just every now and then she would reach up and wipe away a tear. She had this kerchief on her head, this ratty old flowered kerchief, but it was clean and it was tied very neatly, you know. And she had her purse on her lap and she was holding on to it like it was hands. At first nobody else seemed to notice she was crying, but then everybody around her did. And it got very quiet. And then finally this man got up from the back of the bus, and he came up and sat next to her and put his arm around her, and he didn’t say a word, he just stared straight ahead with his arm around her and she kept crying but it was better now, you could tell, she kind of had a little smile even though she was still crying. And I don’t know if he even knew her! I think everybody was wondering the same thing: Does he even know her? I guess he must have known her; otherwise she probably would have leaped up and started screaming or something, but you never know! You just never know, it might have been someone whose heart went out to her because she was crying. And he decided he would comfort her. And she let him. And I think it was a kind of miracle. A living parable or something. Plus it was so interesting! I thought, I’m going to take the bus every day! This is great! And I also thought, See? This is all it is, people need each other . And it seems like we are always our best selves when we admit ourselves to each other, our needs. I think everybody around that woman felt like cheering, we all felt great because she felt better. Of course we didn’t cheer, that would have been … Well, that would have been like one of those movies where, when you see a scene like that, you just roll your eyes and want to walk out and get more popcorn. But anyway, nobody cheered, nobodyeven looked directly at this couple except for this one young woman who kind of had something wrong with her and she was just staring right at them and muttering to herself. But the whole thing made me think … Well, I got this overwhelming feeling of … I don’t know. We’re all one. We really are all one.”
    John leans forward. “I see the LSD in the red sauce is kicking in.”
    Amy flushes, puts her hand to the side of her face. “Oh, God, I talked too much, didn’t I? I always talk too much. I don’t mean to, but it’s like all these thoughts start bidding for placement— pick me, pick me! —and I don’t know what to pick, and so, you know, I pick them all and then I just talk too much. And then I can’t stop, I just keep going. As you