Pepper shook her head, half-laughing, half-frightened. “Jonah?—”
“Hush.”
He twirled her—badly. She went around once under his arm with the involuntary grace of a person who had been twirled by men who knew what they were doing, and she came back to him with a tentative smile.
“Seriously. What are you doing?”
“I’m dancing.”
“There’s no music.”
“I’m dancing around the fact that I don’t know what to say or how to say it.”
“Oh, please,” Angelo said. “Just tell her you love her and get on with it, son.”
They both froze. Jonah took a breath and realized where his help would come from. Looking around the room, he let his gaze fall on the old Italian man with dark eyes.
“Angelo,” he said. “How do you tell a woman you love her?”
“Me? I cook pasta fagioli and homemade bread. She’ll be yours forever.”
Pepper threw her head back and laughed at the irony of that.
A few residents murmured agreement. Margaret, bouncing Atlas, who currently sported a Pepto-pink skull cap, nodded sagely. “Cooking’s good, but you gotta be a good man. You gotta fill her gas tank when it’s at three-quarters and I’m not just talking about the car.”
They all laughed, but he looked down at Pepper, holding her gaze.
Then a woman in the back of the room Jonah had not noticed came out on a walker, one tiny step at a time. Her feathery hair was like a white halo and a striped cardigan hung over a bony frame. She lifted one hand from the walker frame.
“I waited for my Charles to ask me. He was scared. He was scared for two years. I waited. Then he was gone in the Vietnam War and I never got asked. My advice, since you’re looking for some, is don’t wait two years. Don’t wait two minutes. Some of us did the waiting and we are here to tell you it’s not worth it.”
The room was silent.
Jonah felt his throat close.
Virgil snapped his suspenders as he stood next to the woman in pink shoes. He took a few steps closer and cleared his throat.
“My Helen died eleven years ago in March. We were married fifty-three years. I am eighty-nine years old and I’m going to tell you something I haven’t told anybody in this room because nobody has asked. The hardest thing about Helen being gone is not the missing her.”
“What is it, Virgil?” Pepper asked tenderly.
“The hardest thing is that I never got to be the kind of fool you are right now when I was your age. I got to be a husband. I got to be a partner. I got to be a man who knew what his wife took in her coffee for fifty-three years. But the fool part—the part where you walk into a room and your knees go weak—that part you only get once or twice in a life, son. Enjoy it.”
Jonah smiled. “My knees are gone. So’s my heart.”
“Then tell her what you came to say, son. We’ll listen.”
Pepper gazed up at him, her eyes damp. “So will I.”
Jonah grew very still and let his hands slide down Pepper’s arms so he could hold her fingers in his. He took a breath and forgot everyone but the beautiful woman in front of him.
“Pepper, I love you.”
Someone in the room made a whimpering sound.
“I have loved you since the day I met you and looked right into those brown eyes and knew what it meant to be lost. You are light and bright and alive and good and gorgeous and everything you do enchants me.”
She smiled, a flush deepening under her freckles.
