Free The One Who Got Away: A Novel by Bethany Bloom Page A

she also imagined that, if she were a man, she would enjoy plunging
into her own manliness—her own stink—from time to time. If she were a man, she
would grow a beard every now and then.
    Certainly, this was how Henry
felt. She had asked him once, “What is it about you mountain guys? You guys
don’t believe in deodorant? Antiperspirant?” Her father and most of the men she
knew were the same way. Smelled the same way.
    “Ach,” Henry had said, “I don’t
know what kind of toxins and poisons are in that. I’m not smearing it on myself
every day. Besides, I smell nice.”
    “Not always.”
    “Well, I guess you’ll learn to
love it because this is the way I smell.” And he squeezed her around the waist
and kissed her hard, with closed lips, on the mouth.
    But Paul, he showered two or
three times a day. Always before work. Often, at work. And then at the gym,
where he often went after work. He got haircuts twice a month, on alternating
Mondays from the same barber.
    Henry said he cut his hair twice
a year, whether he needed it or not, and he did it himself. All he needed, he
said, was a set of clippers and a number two guard, which he could run all over
his face and his head “I’m a simple man with simple needs,” Henry would say.
    And then Olivine remembered how
she and Henry had attended a birthday party for her dad’s dearest friend,
Charlie. Charlie had a broad, Yosemite Sam moustache that covered his front
teeth when he talked. He had an easy laugh and eyes that glistened. Charlie had
been teaching downhill skiing to ten-year-olds for decades, and he rode his bicycle
everywhere he went, all year long, his skis strapped to his back. Another
simple man with simple needs, Olivine thought.
    When they had arrived at the
party, Charlie locked Olivine into a hug, smashing her face against his
tropical print shirt. When he finally released her, he held her by her elbows
and looked into her eyes and smiled.
    “How are you doing, Charlie?” Olivine
had asked.
    “Olivine, I’m having the time of
my life.” This had been his stock response ever since she could remember.
    “You’re always having the time of
your life,” she said, as she always did.
    And Charlie replied, as he always
did. “It’s not hard to have the time of your life when you have the heart of a
five-year-old.”
    “That is true,” Olivine said as
she pulled Henry toward her, one arm looped around his waist. “Charlie, I want
you to meet Henry. He also has the heart of a five-year=old. In fact, I was
just telling him this today. Not so poetically, maybe.”
    “Yeah. Not so poetically.” Henry
laughed. “She told me I was immature.”
    They laughed together, and
Charlie said, “Tomato, tom-ah-to.”
    But she knew, too, that Henry
wasn’t always having the time of his life. Sometimes, she caught him looking at
her while she was doing something ordinary: folding laundry or making sandwiches
or hiking alongside him, and there was a flash of sorrow, just until she saw
him watching her. And then the smile returned.
    She asked him about it from time
to time: “Is there something I should know?” or “Are you sad?” And he would
say, “Ah, we all get sad, but you make it all go away. That’s why I can’t get
enough of you.”
    And Olivine reflected on Charlie.
A man she loved like a second father. Even as a child, growing up with Charlie
coming and going from her parent’s house, she wondered what it would be like to
marry someone like him. Charlie didn’t have children and, to the rest of the
world, his wife seemed cold. Intimidating to adults; scary for kids. She rarely
left her front yard, and she would spend hours upon hours tending to her garden
in the summer. Olivine remembered how she always wore a pink baseball cap and
pink gardening gloves, and how she was always popping up from the yard to tell
the kids in the neighborhood to make sure they stayed away from the bushes in
her side yard during their games of hide and