One night, Mom admitted with a laugh, “He makes me feel 25 again.”
I told her I couldn’t wait to meet him.
I meant it.
Until I opened that door.
Marcus was attentive without hovering.
During dinner, Mom coughed after swallowing too quickly, and he quietly moved her water closer without interrupting her story.
He remembered she hated mushrooms and shifted the serving dish away without drawing attention to it.
“So,” Mom said, pointing her fork at him, “tell Jean about the tomatoes.”
Marcus groaned.
“Absolutely not.”
“You should see them, Jean.”
“They’re recovering, Ella.”
“They’re leaning sideways.”
“Toward sunlight,” he corrected.
Mom shook her head.
“You’re still checking on them tonight, aren’t you?”
Marcus shrugged.
“They’re unsupervised. I finally got ours to stop collapsing.”
My fork froze halfway to my mouth.
Ours.
“My wife used to grow tomatoes,” Marcus added. “She made it look insultingly easy.”
I looked at Mom.
She smiled.
“Marcus inherited her confidence.”
“Unfortunately, not her competence,” he said.
They laughed.
I didn’t.
Suddenly, I wasn’t having dinner with my mother’s new boyfriend.
I was sitting across from someone from my past.
Back then, I worked part-time at a small downtown bookstore.
Marcus was my manager.
I was also dating a man named Tyler.
At the time, I would have called Tyler protective.
He chose restaurants because I “took forever.”
He picked movies because I “always picked weird ones.”
He corrected my clothes before parties.
If I missed one call, he called three more times.
I didn’t recognize it as controlling behavior.
I simply learned to say:
“Whatever you want.”
One afternoon, Marcus was rearranging the front display.
He held up two books.
“Which one?”
I shrugged.
“Whatever.”
He stayed still.
“Which one, Jeannie?”
“Either.”
“I didn’t ask which one wouldn’t upset civilization.”
I laughed.
He raised the books again.
“What do you want?”
I studied them.
“The blue one.”
“Great.”
He put it in the window.
It should have meant nothing.
But Marcus kept doing it.
Coffee orders.
Work schedules.
Display signs.
Music.
“What do you think?”
“What do you want?”
“Which do you prefer?”
Tiny questions.
They seemed insignificant.
But slowly, I realized almost nobody else asked me them.
One afternoon, Tyler came into the store and criticized my sweater.
I immediately apologized.
Marcus was shelving books nearby.
He didn’t look at Tyler.
He looked at me.
“Do you like the sweater, Jean?”
Tyler laughed.
“Apparently somebody has to.”
I looked down at myself.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I do.”
Tyler and I broke up three months later.
But there was someone else from those years I remembered even more clearly.
Marcus’s wife.
She drew ridiculous cartoons on his lunch bags.
Marcus taped his favorites beside the register.
Every Thursday, he left work at exactly five.
“Regional meeting,” someone teased once.
Marcus grabbed his coat.
“Dinner with my wife.”
“The meeting’s important, Marcus.”
“They’ll survive.”
Then one Thursday, he didn’t leave.
He sat in his office staring at his phone.
The next week, he barely spoke.
A month later, Marcus left the bookstore.
His wife was sick.
He was going home to care for her.
I never saw him again.
Eventually, I heard she had died.
And now, 11 years later, he was sitting at my mother’s dinner table.
I couldn’t stop wondering whether Mom understood what she was getting into.
Marcus stayed until just after nine.
Mom stood at the door smiling as his car backed away.
Then she closed it and turned to me.
“Well?”
I watched through the window until his taillights vanished.
Mom’s smile faded when she saw my expression.
“Mom, before you get any closer to him, there’s something you need to know.”
She said nothing.
So I told her about the bookstore.
About Marcus.
About his wife.
About how deeply that marriage had seemed woven into who he was.
Mom listened without interrupting.
Finally, I said what had weighed on me all evening.
“You’ve spent your whole life coming second, Mom.”
Her eyebrows tightened.
“To bills. To work. To Dad when he was still around. To me.”
