Once Upon a Time, There Was You Read Online Free PDF Page B

rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed with a vague sadness. A longing for a specific kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of shame. She knows it’s nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she never had.
    After Sadie buckles herself into her window seat, a man sits beside her. He’s overweight, round-faced and pink-cheeked, and making a mighty effort to suck in his gut. “How you doing?” he says, and immediately she knows he’ll buy her a drink. Most guys she sits by on an airplane will, so long as there’s no one else in the row with them. This plane is configured to have only two seats on one side, so Sadie’s got it made. After the flight attendant explains the many things the passengers should do to save themselves in the unlikely event of a crash (when what’s really unlikely is that anyone will survive), Sadie will make her request: “Hey, if I give you the money, would you buy me a drink?” Usually the guys just wave her money away and pay for the drink themselves. She lets them. The only bad part is if, later, they do things like ask her if she’d like to join them in the bathroom. In fantasies, the idea might intrigue her, especially if the guy is hot. The reality, though, would be something else. Sliding zippers down. The absurdlysmall space. How it would be to sit beside the guy afterward, his smell on her. The sad nothingness of an encounter like that.
    While people shuffle slowly down the aisle, shove their bags into the overhead, and take their seats, Sadie stares out the window. She thinks of her father putting his hand to her cheek before she got out of the car to go into the airport. She thinks of how, when they ate dinner one night, she asked if he’d ever consider moving to San Francisco. He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I don’t think so, Sadie.”
    They ate with their heads down for a while, the sound of their forks on the plates amplified in the sudden silence. Then, “Would you ever consider moving here?” he asked brightly, almost in a jokey way, and she said maybe. She said it as if she had never thought about it before, as if, having thought about it now, she might really do it. “May be! ” Then they both felt better.
    She thought of how she’d come upon him making her bed for her one morning, and she’d said, “Dad, I can do that!” and he’d held his hands up and said, “Okay, okay!” and then had made her bed the next day, too. Made her bed and placed her old stuffed animals on it, just so. She thought of how he was sitting in the kitchen before breakfast that morning, his head down, his hands clasped between his knees. He didn’t see her, and she tiptoed back upstairs, then came down again, making a lot of noise this time. She found him at the cupboard, digging out his cast-iron pan to make her his famous hash browns. “You want two slabs and two staring up to go with this?” he asked.
    Two slabs and two staring up . A line that the character of Grover, from Sesame Street , once used when he was a waiter ordering bacon and eggs over easy from Charlie, the short-order cook. John and Irene and seven-year-old Sadie had all been huddled together on the sofa and watching the show when Grover said that. Her parents had burst out laughing, and then explainedto Sadie what the terms meant. They were under a flannel quilt John’s aunt had made for him when he was a little boy, drinking hot chocolate. Outside, a blizzard that had canceled work and school dumped eighteen inches of snow on the ground.
    After dinner, Sadie and her parents went into the backyard and built three snowmen and a snow house for them to live in. Later, after they’d tucked Sadie in, she saw John grab Irene in the hallway and kiss her. And then they went to their own bedroom and she heard those sounds that at first she’d thought