Man of Wax by Robert Swartwood Page A

and that friends was all we were ever going to be. Then, just two days before she was supposed to leave, I couldn’t stand it anymore and found myself leaning in to kiss her. We were leaving the mall, walking through the parking lot, and I’d just unlocked her door. I tried to stop but had apparently lost all control over my body and continued, sealing the deal and ensuring our friendship would not continue from this moment onward.  
    But the strangest thing happened: she kissed me back, and like that, the world began to have meaning again.  
    The kiss, while deep, didn’t last long, and when we both pulled away she peered up at me and smiled.  
    “I was wondering how long I was going to have to wait for that.”  
    Long distance relationships, as a rule of thumb, almost never work out (this was the reason why my girlfriend the last two years of high school, Marissa, broke my heart just days after we graduated). Somehow ours did. Jen had to finish school, then had to go to law school, because her life’s dream was to become a lawyer. The fact that we were together and that I was a painter and would always be a painter, no matter what happened, never bothered Jen in the slightest. Which, as my dad told me one night, right after he’d been put in the hospital because of his angina, meant Jen was one special lady and I would be an idiot to think otherwise.  
    I met her father only three times, the first on one of my few visits to Chicago, when Jen brought me over to the mansion she’d grown up in.  
    Howard Abele was always a busy man, so much so he barely glanced at me when Jen introduced us. He was short and slim, wore glasses and had his hair combed to the side; he had a beak nose and piercing eyes and seemed to have been born in a suit. He didn’t shake my hand and hurried past, saying he was late for a meeting.  
    The second time came three years later when I approached him to ask for his permission to marry his daughter. He’d simply shaken his head and said no, walked away without a glance back. I had stood there stunned, speechless, unsure what to do next, but then Jen’s mother came to the rescue. She told me of course I had permission to marry her daughter; as long as I made Jenny happy, then she didn’t care what we did.  
    Unfortunately Claire Abele never attended our wedding, which was in Pennsylvania. She was killed in a hit-and-run only a few months later. I’d gone with Jen to the funeral, which was the third place I saw her father, and which afterward he’d taken me aside and handed me the check for five hundred thousand dollars. It was more money than I would ever see at one time in my entire life. More money than my parents would ever hope to earn even if they worked every day of their lives and saved every dollar and penny. I briefly thought about all the debts my parents had, about all the debts I had, and how even a tenth of this check would help improve things. Then, with these thoughts running tandem in my mind, I ripped the check up right in front of him. For some reason I hadn’t wanted to tell Jen, but she’d gotten it out of me sensing I was holding something back, and from that day forward she cut off all ties with her dad. Refused to speak to him again. Suffice it to say on our wedding day, her side of the chapel was quite sparse, so our guests had been encouraged to sit wherever they pleased.

    •     •     •

    I’ M NOT SURE what else I want to say about Jen. Obviously I could go on forever, and that doesn’t even include the three and a half years after Casey was born and our family really became complete.  
    But there, speaking of completeness, I should mention about the night, only a month before we got married, where Jen and I were lying in bed and I said something about us being soul mates. I don’t know what we were talking about but I said the words and immediately felt stupid, thinking they were beyond cheesy.  
    “Soul mates don’t exist,” she