Coming Home To You. M. K. Stelmack

a boy.

      “I have never seen so many trucks in all my days,” she said, “than I have since crossing into Manitoba about two weeks ago.”

      “Is that right?” Mel said, easing out of the parking lot. “You know, I’ve never been down East. What’s it like?” He tried to make it sound as if he’d been everywhere else but there. The fact was he’d not even made it to the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, three and a half hours east. He was probably the only healthy male adult in all of Spirit Lake who’d never got a passport. He’d wanted to travel when he was young, but he’d never had the time and money. Then when he had both, no one else could get away, and he didn’t see the point of experiencing new places alone. Or his friends or family wanted to go to a place that required flying, which terrified the socks off him. It was an irrational fear, but he figured everyone was entitled to one or two.

      “Canada,” Daphne said, producing sunglasses from a purse so large that it filled her lap, “is many books long.”

      “Oh,” he said. “How’s that?”

      She told him how she read while Fran drove, and that she read while Fran slept. She could categorize the provinces by the books she’d read. The Ontario pile—very high—the Manitoba and Saskatchewan piles—shorter—and the Alberta pile—unfinished.

      “I’m an English professor,” she explained. “Of nineteenth-century literature. Primarily Jane Austen, though I’m currently on sabbatical.” She dug again into her purse. “I’m currently reading this one. Well, again.”

      He glanced at the title. “Sense and Sensibility. I remember from the accident.” What he remembered was Daphne clutching the book to her nightgown, the hem riding up her bare legs as she’d scrambled to let Linda and Fran by.

      He concentrated on coming up with something bookish to say to someone who taught students better educated than him with his high school dropout status. Best to stick with questions. “I get the sense part but how’s that different from sensibility?”

      “Sensibility means feelings, emotions, especially if overwrought.”

      Overwrought. As in over-rot? Emotions gone bad. He’d go with that meaning. He didn’t want to ask for two definitions in a row, in case she came up with another word he didn’t know. “Sort of like Car and Driver,” Mel said.

      Her mouth pursed into a little O shape. He’d bet behind her sunglasses she was blinking in complete confusion. She probably wondered if he was making a bad joke, which he wasn’t. “The thing,” Mel stumbled on, “and then the person that gets the thing moving.”

      Yep, no argument about which of them was the brain. He might as well hurry up and finish.

      “I’m no book expert,” Mel continued, “but it happens often enough in life. We use reason to justify the way we feel. Or to get what we want.”

      “That pretty well describes every relationship.”

      “Don’t I know it,” Mel said and he surprised himself at how bitter and frustrated he sounded.

      Daphne tucked her hands under her thighs and looked out the passenger window at a city strip of grass and poplars.

      He hoped he hadn’t scared her. It would be a new record for him to have a woman leave him and another one afraid of him on the same day.

      “One more thing that came out wrong,” he said. “I just had a rough start to my day.”

      “You, too?”

      She had him there. “I guess we’ve both got stories to tell about this day.”

      “Oh. What’s yours?”

      He wasn’t about to say that he’d been dumped that very day. She’d see him for the loser he was—and her an attractive woman, a good bit younger and single from the looks of her bare ring finger. He had a little pride left.

      Then again, who better to talk to about his romantic troubles? Here was an intelligent, attractive, single woman, clearly passing through. He could pick up pointers from her without any of the usual awkwardness or expectations. She could speak sense to his sensibilities.

      “My girlfriend broke up with me.”

      Her grip on her book tightened. “Oh. That is quite the story.”

      “Not the first time I’ve told it, unfortunately.”

      “Oh.” She wrapped both hands around the book. “I’m sorry.”

      She sounded as if he’d announced a death close in the family. Ending things with Linda wasn’t anywhere as bad. He knew that for a fact. He was actually surprised at how little it hurt. Maybe getting dumped for the seventh time in a row automatically gave him the thick skin to take rejection. And the guts to finally fix whatever it was he was doing wrong.

      “I’m good, actually.” He pushed on. “But I was wondering if you could explain something to me,” he said, “seeing as how you’re a woman in the business of explaining sense and sensibility to people.”

      “I don’t claim to be an expert. Go on.”

      “My now ex said that she got the impression that I didn’t want her. That I just wanted anyone who’d take me. And that I shouldn’t settle.”

      “Yes.”

      “You agree, then?”

      “I don’t know her or you, so I can’t comment. But I agree with the part that you shouldn’t settle.”

      He hitched himself higher up in his seat. “I guess I’m wondering how to go about making a woman feel that she matters when...” He needed to proceed carefully. He’d already said plenty to Daphne that had come out wrong. “When showing how much she matters might scare her off, too.”

      “Why would a woman be scared off by hearing how much she was loved?”

      Well, now. He gunned the truck to merge onto the highway, ahead of a fast-approaching red sports car, which immediately switched lanes and started coming up on his left. “I guess she might feel she has to give back the same amount, and I wouldn’t expect her to.”

      “In other words, you’d settle.”

      “No. I—Well, I guess.”

      “Would you settle because you think no one can love you better than you can love them?”

      Mel slowed for the turnoff to Spirit Lake, an exit he’d made a thousand times and never while having such a conversation. “No. Not at all. I have requirements.” He realized that expecting them not to be drunks or druggies might prove Daphne’s point, so he hurried on. “I don’t believe I’m better at loving.”

      “But you may deliberately put yourself in situations where you will be because you secretly don’t think the women will love you.”

      He took the reprieve of a stoplight to consider her words. “I suppose there have been...situations that might’ve made me feel that I gave more love than I got. But it’s not as if I prevented any of the women from proving they could love better than me. So why would they assume I was settling?”

      Daphne feathered her fingers across the colored sticky notes sprouting from the top of her book. “Austen is often critical of how pride can impede or delay happiness. Both for men and women. I’m writing a book about how economics mold sensibilities in the Austen novels. I plan to devote a chapter to pride.”

      Writing a book about books. The last thing Mel had read were parts of the provincial safety codes, years back. The red light switched to green and Mel released the brake. “I still don’t think it’s pride.”

      “The lack of it, then?”

      Lack he could relate to. “Maybe so. What would you suggest I do?”

      “Do you want to reconcile with your girlfriend?”