His mother hadn’t lied to the principal: Michael did have a very scientific mind. At UPenn he’d majored in biochemistry and gone on for a master’s and a PhD. He went back home once a year, for Christmas, where each year his mother seemed to get smaller and grayer and more afraid. Whenever she would propose a visit to Pennsylvania, he’d tell her, This isn’t a very good time. Then he’d send her a check with a note: Buy yourself something nice.
He’d solved the problem of his mother, but he couldn’t solve the problem of his loneliness. Michael reasoned that no one had ever died from a lack of human contact. If he spent his life in a lab, developing vaccines, if the most he ever saw of other people was a scraping of their epithelial cells or a few milliliters of their blood, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
Then he’d met Tina, and everything had changed.
He’d been in the supermarket, buying his usuals—cold cereal, frozen pizzas, grab-and-go burritos—when he’d heard a voice saying, “Would you like to try a chickpea?”
He turned and saw a young woman with a shiny brown ponytail wearing a green apron, holding a tray full of small paper cups.
“Chickpea?” she was saying to a woman pushing a shopping cart. “No thank you,” said the woman. The man behind her just shook his head and hurried past, and the man behind him acted as if he didn’t see the ponytailed girl at all.
“Sir? Can I interest you in a chickpea?” She’d smiled right at him, and Michael had found himself helplessly smiling back. “They’re very high in fiber,” she said as he shifted his basket to his left hand and took one of the cups with his right. “Also, protein.”
He tipped the cup into his mouth. Then he started coughing. The chickpea had been dehydrated until it was the consistency of a pebble and dusted with some unpleasantly raw and fiery spice. While Michael spluttered, the woman sighed, set her tray down in the deli cooler, said, “Stay right there,” and hurried away, returning with a cup of water.
“They’re awful, aren’t they?”
“They’re not great,” Michael had wheezed.
“They’re my friend’s. She’s trying to get local stores to carry them, so I offered to help her hand out samples. I really want this to work out for her, but…” She’d looked down at the tray and sighed. “Well.” Then she’d brightened. “Anyhow. I owe you an apology. Can I buy you a coffee?” She had eyes the color of topaz, lightly tanned skin with rosy cheeks, a nice smile.
“Coffee,” he’d said. “Sure.”
After that, it had been easy. Tina made it easy. She’d asked him questions and filled in the silences when he didn’t know how to keep the conversation going; she touched him with her long-fingered, expressive hands, on his wrist and his arm and his shoulder, leaning close enough for him to smell her shampoo. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something compelling about her, some combination of the sound of her voice and the line of her throat when her head was thrown back in laughter, that made it impossible for him to stop staring, even though he knew it was rude, and that she’d probably think he was creepy. She had no preconceptions; no clue that he’d never really had friends, that his labmates avoided him, that he’d twice been called to his adviser’s office because female colleagues complained about him “lurking” in the parking structure or staring in ways that made them uncomfortable.
Tina did not know any of that. To her, he was just a guy who’d choked down a dehydrated chickpea and been a good sport about it; a single man of the right age with no obvious flaws.
When they’d finished their coffee, she’d looked him in the eyes and touched his arm. “My parents are having an anniversary party on Saturday night, and I have found myself dateless. Will you come?”
He’d said yes, of course, thinking, I’ll go with you to the moon if you want. And that was it. Tina had ushered him into her busy, bustling life, full of roommates and friends and sisters and brothers-in-law. The night of the anniversary party, Tina’s mother had taken his hands. “You’re quiet,” she’d pronounced, eyebrows arched in surprise. “It’s lovely.” There was line dancing and champagne and cake, and after that there was never anyone for him but Tina… and Tina, unlike Michael, was emphatically a dog person. She’d grown up with a mom and a dad, two older sisters and a younger brother, and a menagerie of cats and rabbits and goldfish and dogs. There’d been a poodle named Maisie when she was a baby; a pair of corgis, Wilbur and Maple, had been her girlhood companions; a beleaguered-looking bulldog named Flautus had arrived when she was sixteen. After college, she’d had a dog of her own, a little blue merle rat terrier named Wendell. Wendell had died the year before she met Michael. She kept a picture of Wendell in a frame on her dresser.
After they’d gotten married, Tina had wanted a dog immediately. But their first apartment hadn’t allowed pets. Then the babies had come, two of them in sixteen months, and neither of them had the energy to care for another living thing. Later, they’d decided. But then they found out that Chloe, their daughter, had allergies: wheat, nuts, dairy, and anything with fur, including the goldendoodle that the breeder swore was safe. After one night with Maltball in the house, Chloe had broken out in hives, and she’d been wheezing badly enough to need her rescue inhaler.
“It’s fine,” Tina had sighed as they’d driven home after returning the pup. She’d cut her hair short by then, in a bob that she’d tuck behind her ears, the better to display the diamond earrings he’d bought her as a wedding gift. “I never wanted a dog from a breeder, anyhow.”
Michael privately felt relieved, as he’d agreed. The kids, of course, had promised that they’d be responsible for the dog, in charge of the feedings and walkings and poop-scooping, but Michael knew how that went. He’d seen too many moms and dads whose kids had presumably made the same promise, up at six in the morning on the two-legged end of the leash. Besides, the puppy had nipped at his fingers with her small, sharp teeth. “Stop!” Michael had told it sternly, and imagined those teeth getting bigger and sharper, fastening on Chloe or Chris’s fingers instead of his.
The kids had grown up and gone to college. They’d moved out, moved back, and, finally, moved on for good. Maura Corcoran had died of congestive heart failure, at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. Before she’d slipped into her final coma, she’d emailed Michael a story about a woman in Delaware who’d found a deep-fried rat in her bucket of KFC. Be careful and PLEASE do not eat there. I love you and want you to be safe, she’d written.
Michael retired from UPenn, and Tina left her job at the day care center where she’d worked for thirty years. They sold the house on the Main Line and downsized to a condominium in the city, a spacious, sunny, two-bedroom in a high-rise with views of Washington Square Park to the west and the Ben Franklin Bridge and the Delaware River to the north.
Every morning, Tina and Michael would walk: everywhere from the Italian Market to Rittenhouse Square Park to the art museum with its famous steps. They would always choose a different route, but no matter which way they went on the way out, on their way home they would pass a pet supply store called Doggy Style, which had dogs on display in the window, dogs that you could adopt. “Hello, my name is NIBLET” (or Brody, or Wallace, or Sir James, or Eggs), the tag would read. “I am a shy but friendly girl from Alabama (or Virginia, or North Carolina, or Tennessee), looking for a FUR-ever home.” Tina would stand in front of the windows, reading the signs and cooing at the dogs. In her cropped leather jacket, with streaks of gray in her hair, she looked sophisticated and chic. Michael felt proud to be seen with her and lucky, so lucky, that she’d picked him to spend her life with. He wanted her to be happy. And so, for Tina’s sixty-fifth birthday, he’d gone to the pet shop to ask about the terrier mix in the window. “Hello, my name is LADY,” her sign had read.