She pointed her chin at the phone in Samantha’s hand. “Look it up.”
Samantha felt utterly foolish. Had she really never thought to plug these lines into a search engine? She did so now, mumbling, “But they don’t make any sense.”
“That’s because the poem’s not finished.”
Huh? It took several seconds for the results to appear, thanks to Cindy’s choosing to live in the boonies. “You’re right. Shakespeare. Unreal.” She clicked through to see the entire poem. Her lips moved as she silently read. She finished and then read it again.
Then she gave up and looked up at Cindy. “I did not get good grades in high school English.”
Cindy smiled and took the phone from her hand. “Neither did I.” She used two fingers to zoom in on the poem and then read it aloud. “Okay, let me try to translate, but I’m mostly just guessing here. I think it means something like this ... I don’t want to admit my problems to people ... But love isn’t love if it changes when life changes ... or if it goes away when someone tries to remove it. No!” she said, raising one fist into the air with gusto. “Love is a permanent thing ... that does not get shaken by the storm.” She paused. “Okay, I have no idea what a wandering bark is, so we’ll skip that line.”
“That’s okay. I haven’t received the wandering bark line yet.”
They both laughed.
“Okay, let’s see ... time doesn’t change love ... loveoutlaststime. Oh, I like that part. And then he finishes with, if I’m wrong, then no man ever loved.” She looked up, a hint of pride in her eyes.
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“Brent sent that.” She couldn’t believe it. “Does that mean thatBrentknows what it means?” She felt like such an idiot. “He didn’t get good grades in high school English either.”
Cindy chuckled. “I don’t want to take anything away from him, but maybe he simply did an internet search for romantic poems and then picked the one that had the right amount of lines.”
Yeah, that made some sense. “Still, though. Pretty romantic.”
“It sure is.”
“But Brent isn’t romantic.”
Cindy shrugged. “People change.”
“Do they change that much?”
“I don’t know. How much have you changed since you got married?”
Oh.“That’s a good point. Wow,” she said again. “I should have looked it up. I thought the secret admirer wrote the poem, like, for me. So it didn’t occur to me that it would be online.”
“That makes sense. We are always smarter when we share our mysteries.” There was a distinct sadness in her voice when she said that last part. “But!” She cheered herself right back up. “We all get smarter every day! How old were you when you got married?”
Samantha sighed. She was a little embarrassed of how young they’d been. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. She’d been head over heels in love, and if she was honest, she’d also been afraid of losing him. “We were twenty. We’d both just dropped out of community college. He dropped out because he got a good job. I dropped out because he did.” She sighed. “I guess I shouldn’t say dropped out. That makes it sound worse than it was. We finished our second year and then just didn’t go back. Anyway, I wanted to get married, I did, but we were also under huge pressure from my parents. They didn’t want us living in sin.” She made air quotes when she said the last phrase. “Which is hilarious because I wanted nothing to do with God at the time, and Brent didn’t even know God’s name. Premarital sex wasnotour biggest problem.”
“And how was the marriage in the beginning?”
“It was good. It was fun. But not too long into it, Brent got more serious. He didn’t want to party as much anymore. He wanted to talk about having kids. I was like, I’m only twenty! And the trouble began, I guess.”
“Did he drink a lot in college?”
“He did. And in high school. It’s all we did together. It’s what we had in common. And then all of a sudden, he wanted to become an old man. I felt like he yanked the rug out from under me. Of course, I know now that this isn’t what happened, but at the time, well at the time, I was young and drunk.”
“And now you’re older and sober.”
Samantha sighed. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Cindy’s expression grew serious. “Do youwantto get back together with Brent?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I’ve never loved anyone else. But ...”