In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner Page A

on, old man! he told himself. He'd been in a war; he'd buried a wife; he'd watched his son become a Republican with a Rush Limbaugh bumper sticker on the back of his minivan. He'd survived worse things than this. "Would you like to have dinner with me?" He could see her getting ready to shake her head even before it happened. "I ... I don't think so." "Why not?" It came out louder than he'd intended. Ella sighed. Lewis took advantage of her momentary silence. "Okay if I come in?" he asked. She looked reluctant as she opened the door and ushered him inside. Her apartment wasn't cluttered, as so many of the smallish rooms at Golden Acres tended to become, when tenants tried to cram a lifetime's worth of possessions into space that was never meant to hold very much. Ella's apartment had tiled floors, cream-colored walls, the kind of white sofa that, in Lewis's experience, was much better in theory than in practice, especially if you had grandchildren, and the grandchildren liked grape juice. He sat at one end of the couch. Ella sat at the other, looking flustered as she tucked her bare feet underneath her.
     
     
     
78 Jennifer weiner
     
"Lewis," she began. He got to his feet. "Please don't leave. Let me explain," she said. "I'm not leaving, I'm finding a vase," he told her. "Wait," she said, sounding alarmed at the thought of him going through her things. "I'll do it." She hurried into the kitchen and produced a vase from a cabinet. Lewis filled it with water, put the tulips inside, came back to the living room, and set it in the center of her coffee table. "There," he said. "Now, if you're going to say no, you'll have to look at those tulips every day and feel guilty," he said. She looked, for an instant, as if she might be getting ready to smile . . . then the look was gone, as if he'd imagined it. "The thing of it is," she started. "Hold on," he said. He opened the box of candy. "You go first," he said. She waved the box away. "Really, I can't ..." He put on his glasses and unfolded the candy map. "The dark chocolate hearts have cherry cordial inside," he reported. "And those roundish ones are nougat." "Lewis," she said firmly. "You're a wonderful person, and . . ." "But," he said. "I hear a but coming." He got up again, went to her kitchen, put water on to boil. "Where's your good china?" he called. "Oh," she said, hurrying after him. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm just making us a cup of tea." Ella looked at him, then at the kettle. "Okay," she said, and pulled two mugs advertising the Broward County Public Library from a shelf. Lewis dropped tea bags into the mugs, located her sugar bowl (filled with packets of Sweet 'in Low), and set it on the table, alongside a pint of lactose-free milk. "Are you always this handy?" she asked. "I wasn't always," he said. He opened the refrigerator, found a lemon in back of her vegetable crisper, and sliced it as he talked.
     
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"Then my wife got sick, and she knew . . . well. She knew. So she gave me lessons." "Do you miss her?" Ella asked. "Every day," he said. "I miss her every day." He set her cup on a saucer and carried it over to the table. "How about you?" "Well, I never met your wife, so I can't say that I miss her ..." "A joke!" He applauded, and sat down beside her and studied the table. "I think it still needs something," he said. He opened Ella's freezer. "May I?" She nodded, looking slightly dazed. He dug around until he found a familiar-shaped object that he instantly recognized as frozen Sara Lee pound cake. It had been a favorite of Shark's. More than once he'd woken up in the middle of the night to find her in front of the television set, watching infomercials and munching on a hunk of thawed pound cake. Usually those nights signaled the conclusion of one of her twice-yearly grapefruit-and-tuna-fish diets, and she'd come back to bed with a guilty smile and a mouth that tasted like butter. Kiss me, she'd whisper, sliding her nightgown over her