And Then His Wife Called Me . . .

From insisting that I’ll be cold if I don’t take a jacket to reminding me that what looks too good to be true probably isn’t true, my mother has always been right.

So I’m waiting in line to board a bus from Denver International Airport to Boulder when I see a young man in a cycling suit. At first, it’s the visible structure of his muscle fibers when he passes his luggage to the bus driver that makes me stare. And his triceps! He’s tall, his facial bone structure is exquisite, and he doesn’t have a receding hairline like my last boyfriend had despite the fact that he was only eighteen (I think this begs the question of why I dated him more than the receding hairline does). At any rate, the cyclist’s semi-big nose doesn’t take away from the fact that even just looking at him is a delicacy.

He sits next to me on the bus of course. When I make extra room for him by swinging my legs to the other side of my bag, which I shove under the seat, he says, “Nice move! You must be a yogi!” And I say, “I am a yogi! And a runner too!” And he says he’s a professional triathlete coming to train in Boulder for the 2016 Olympics. And I say, “Oh wow!” He’s a graphic designer, and I’m a printmaker. We both want to live in a house with a tin roof. His name is Dan, which is my receding–hairline/ teenage ex-boyfriend’s name. And the bus hasn’t even moved before I’m convinced that the Universe has sent me the “right” Dan after confusing him with the first one. And that this Dan and I are going to lie in bed together one day listening to rain on our tin roof, and I’ll never have to date teenagers or sociopaths again.

How’s that for crazy?

The “right” Dan and I spend the next three days together. I show him the city, and we do things like share avocados, drink lots of water, wade in the creek, sketch, and talk about God and our pasts. He says he used to be a compulsive liar until he realized that lying really hurts people. “I used to tell people exactly what I thought they wanted to hear to get what I wanted,” he says.

He loves my feet despite their scars from surgery. “I wanted to be a surgeon before I decided to be a graphic designer,” he says. And he holds my ugly feet in his glorious hands and claims he’s happier than he’s been in a long time. I do a headstand and tumble over in the grass. When he kisses me for the first (and last) time, his semi–big nose doesn’t get in the way like I worried it would. We’re like the couple in that Nathalie Portman movie “Garden State.”

And then his wife calls me . . .

She pays his cell phone bill and has been tracking his calls. “He’ll tell you anything he thinks you want to hear to get what he wants,” she says.  “That’s how I ended up marrying him.” And down the drain goes my fantasy of a future of lying in bed under a tin roof with someone athletic and artistic who isn’t a sociopath and loves my feet  (I’m guessing he lied about loving my feet . . .).

I call my mom. “Well,” she says,”If it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.”