“But she’s your sister, and you know him a little, right? You don’t know Shelley and Sheldon at all.”
“So what do you want me to do? Go over there and ask Shelley if she’s going to break Sheldon’s heart after she goes away to college next year?”
He snaps his fingers. “I have an idea,” he says as he slides out of his seat. “All couples love telling their origin stories.” He goes over to them and sits.
After a few seconds, Shelley lights up and then Sheldon does too.
It’s only five minutes before he comes back over to me. “Everything you said about their first meeting was right,” he says, amazed and disbelieving at the same time. “Tell me againexactlywhat happened yesterday. Don’t leave anything out.”
I tell him again.
He asks a lot of questions about the old woman and the Little Free Library:
“You didn’t see her at first and then suddenly she was just there?” and
“You found a book about…ballroom dancing?” and
“When you looked back she was just gone?”
Strung together like that, his questions make me feel like I should’ve known something was up. But why would I think something was up?
He stares out across the cafeteria, thinking. After a while he laughs and shakes his head. “I think you got Zoltared,” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
“Did you ever see the movieBigwith Tom Hanks?” he asks.
“Was this movie made in the last twenty years?”
“It’s a classic,” he says. Martin is unapologetic about his ancient tastes. Along with old movies, he loves old songs, old books and clothing best left for old men. Today, for example, he’s wearing a ten-thousand-year-old tweed blazer with elbow patches.
“Just listen,” he says, “Bigis about this twelve-year-old kid. He’s at an amusement park trying to impress a girl by getting on one of the big-kid rides. The problem is he’s too short for it and they won’t let him on. He gets upset and takes off. Eventually he finds one of those old fortune-teller machines.”
“Lemme guess, the fortune-teller is named Zoltar?”
“Look who’s so smart,” he says. “Anyway, the kid puts a coin in and makes a wish to be big. Zoltar does his thing and a ticket comes out saying the kid’s wish will be granted. The kid’s about to take off when he realizes the machine was unplugged the whole time, so how could it spit out a ticket?”
“Then what happens?” I ask.
“The next morning when he wakes up he’s all grown up.”
We both sit there quietly for a minute. I connect the east and west tributaries in my mashed potatoes. After a while, the four-minute-warning bell rings. We head for the door.
“Martin,” I say, “magic isn’t real.”
“I know,” he says.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“I feel like you don’t,” I say.
I take one last look back at Shelley and Sheldon. Instead of a happy couple, all I see is Sheldon alone on the Ferris wheel, high over Santa Monica.
“Do you still have the ballroom dancing book?” he asks.
I realize that I never actually took it out of my backpack. I pull it out and flip through the pages, running my fingers over the diagrams. Am I supposed to teach myself how to dance?
