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Unrequited

Posted on October 23, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

The aroma of the coffee before him was doing nothing to invite him to drink it. He just stared straight ahead like he was expecting a certain event to occur. He sat with both his forearms on the table, on either side of his cup of coffee and it was as if his arms were providing a landing strip for his eyes to follow because all extremities were pointed in one direction and the smell of a fresh brew was doing nothing to draw his attention away. The door to the diner opened wide and Martha Wallace shook her hair out as she stepped into the dry warmth. As if someone had turned a key in the back of the man with the coffee cup staring up at him he reached forward and brought the black, two sugars to his lips and got started on breakfast.

His name was Keenan McGraw and there were few things that he was more proud of than his ten gallon hat that his father gifted him when he turned eighteen. That was two and a half decades ago but he treated the hat with the same respect he had treated his old man, all the way until that day he fell face first in the horse manure and breathed his last from a massive coronary. Doctor Murphy said he was probably gone before he hit the turf so there was no chance of his having smelt what Patty had done.

All his life Keenan had heard that love was grand. The cowboys on the radio and the singers at the rodeo were always wailing on about broken hearts and beautiful women and he had heard someone say once that everybody loved a lover. Keenan suspected there had to be an ‘as long as’ or ‘but’ that carried that sentence forward. He was sure of it. In fact he was dead certain that somebody forgot the rest of it and decided that ‘Everybody loves a lover’ sounded dandy enough.

He had a couple of options for what the complete sentence must have sounded like:

Everybody loves a lover but everybody fears a fighter

or

Everybody loves a lover but they sure like keeping score

and of course his favourite

Everybody loves a lover as long as they are both of the ‘correct’ age.

Keenan and Martha were not of the correct age. In fact they were about as incorrectly aged as it was possible for one man and one young woman to be so that anything romantic between them would be deemed illegal in each and every one of the fifty states. Keenan couldn’t remember what he had done on his eighteenth birthday and Martha couldn’t wait for hers. It wasn’t just the nearly twenty-six years that separated them. It was the fact that the beautiful girl with the hair like golden silk didn’t even know he existed. If someone said the name Keenan McGraw in her presence, she would probably nod because of course she had heard of every man, woman and child in their town. Everybody had. She just wouldn’t be able to identify him in a police line-up, that’s all.

So he sat there, at the same table each day and waited for her to come in and get breakfast before she went to community college thirty miles from town. He watched her come in, and he tried to guess in the moments before she was fully through the door what she was wearing that day. The longer he played the game, the better he got at it. In all his experience watching her he had learnt a few things and they boggled his mind. He couldn’t understand for the life of himself, why two different pairs of jeans that were blue and denim could make such a difference in the way they accentuated a woman’s hind parts. He liked the Levi’s and he was not a fan of the Diesels. He liked that the Levi’s made her bottom look taut like a drum and he hated the way the Diesels hung off her. He had a sneaking suspicion that she preferred the Levi’s because she wore them less. He guessed she was preserving them for special occasions.

Sometimes she came in alone and sometimes she came in with Becky, Rebecca Newton, a loose-moralled young troublemaker if ever there was one. Today Rebecca was nowhere in sight and when Keenan raised his eyes in her direction, wondering if today would be the day he could tip his hat at her on his way out, he noticed the boy. He was dressed in that new-fangled fashion and his hair wasn’t neatly combed. He also appeared to have not shaved in two or three days. He took the seat next to Martha and when she had ordered her meal he placed a palm on the back of her head and he kissed her. On the lips. Keenan could tell from the mirror that Martha had her eyes closed. She was not being kissed against her wishes.

Keenan McGraw drained his coffee in a single swallow and he walked out of that diner. He didn’t tip his hat or even look in Martha’s direction.

Sure Keenan McGraw didn’t get to celebrate the feeling of being in love, but he understood, as he walked out that door, what heartbreak felt like. He finally got what all those cowboys and singers were on about all the time and it sank in that someone somewhere must always be heartbroken because the radio was always playing sad songs.

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