What a dream. A man who actually looked for responsibilities.
But now that he said it, Pauline could see what he was talking about. Carlos didn’t relax into a chair; he sat up straight, fiddled a bit with the silverware, glanced around the room. He wasn’t quite fidgeting, but she could see the energy in him, like he was just waiting for the chance to jump up and do something.
A lot of women probably would find that crazy-making.
Pauline, though...Pauline had spent her entire marriage trying to motivate Gary into wanting to expend more energy than it took to sit on the couch and watch TV. With very little success. The idea of a man who’d be out ahead, looking for something to do on his own...
“So you’ve been married to your job all these years?” she asked tentatively.
Carlos laughed and nodded. “Never took the time to look around for a woman to settle down with. I felt like it’d be doing her a disservice, anyway, since I spent so much time at the office. No one wants a partner who can’t ignore an emergency email at eleven PM.”
True enough. That might be going a bit too far down the other side of the road to responsibility.
“What about you?” His eyes were penetrating.
“Oh—I was married.” Pauline waved a hand, as if she could dismiss the whole thing as though it had never happened at all. “It was a mistake. We were twenty, we’d been dating for four years and we thought that that meant that getting married was inevitable. Turned out we wanted totally different things from life.”
“Oh?”
Pauline hesitated. Talking about kids on the first date was usually a bad idea. It could send a man running for the hills, make him think that you were trying to latch onto him as a potential dad as fast as possible.
On the other hand, they were both past the age of having kids, weren’t they? Besides, so what if it did spook Carlos? It wasn’t like he was sticking around for the long haul no matter what. She had nothing to lose here, really.
So she steeled herself and said steadily, “I wanted a family. Very badly. But Gary didn’t. He put me off for years and years by saying that it wasn’t the right time, that we were too young, that we had to wait until he got a better job...but eventually it became clear that he just didn’t want to raise a child. So we got divorced. By then I was thirty, and there weren’t any other men around here whom I could see myself raising kids with at all.”
Put that way, it sounded pathetically bleak. And as though Pauline just couldn’t get it together...which was true, she supposed. She’d been a complete doormat in her twenties, hesitantly trying to steer Gary in the direction of what she wanted, and totally folding whenever he put her off.
“You didn’t think about moving somewhere else?” Carlos asked tentatively. “A bigger town or a city?”
Pauline shook her head, semi-regretfully. “I could never live in a city. I need the countryside. And I grew up here by Glacier, I love it more than anything. I tried to live elsewhere for a bit—I was in Missoula for a year when I was thirty-two—but I hated it, and I missed home so much. So I came back here, and—” she shrugged, “—here I am.”
“Are your p
arents here? Your family?”
“My parents passed away a couple of years ago,” Pauline told him. “My mother had cancer, and my father just—wouldn’t take care of himself after she died. He had a heart attack a year later.”
It had been a slow, sad decline, and it had taken all of Pauline’s time and energy, first taking care of her mom through her illness, and then trying to convince her dad to take better care of himself. Which he’d refused to do, until it killed him.
“I’m sorry.” Carlos’ face was troubled. “It sounds like you’ve had kind of a rough time of it.”
Pauline shrugged uncomfortably. “No rougher than most people. I’ve had my problems, but they were all...normal. No great tragedies or terrible suffering.”
Not like some of the people in town. Stella had been stalked by her ex. Mavis, who had come to town recently and was mated to Carlos’ old commanding officer Colonel Wilson, had been separated from her daughter Nina for seven years before they were reunited. Pauline couldn’t even imagine that kind of pain.
No, her life had been hard at times, but she’d just...kept on trucking. Like people did.
“Divorce is terrible suffering, I think,” Carlos said softly. “Losing both your parents in a year—that’s terrible suffering, too. Just because there weren’t, I don’t know, explosions or police cars doesn’t mean that you haven’t suffered.”
Pauline shook her head, feeling tears prick unexpectedly at her eyes. She didn’t know what to say to that.
Fortunately, the waiter arrived at just that moment with their food. “Oh, look at all this,” Pauline said gratefully. “I can’t wait to try it.”
***
Carlos
Carlos shouldn’t have pushed, he knew. It was a first date—he had no business prying into Pauline’s unhappy history, much less pressing her to admit how painful it had really been.