Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy) by Robert Swartwood

completely rare that they might as well not happen. I’d say it was love at first sight, but that would not only be cliché, it would be wrong, because there really is no such thing when you think about it. Still something had been there, something that caused us two days later to start talking. A group of us had decided to walk the city and went down to the Lincoln Park Zoo. I’d been meaning to go up to her but kept losing my nerve until eventually it was she who made the first move, Jennifer Abele, daughter of the renowned Howard Abele who would someday offer me half a million dollars to break up with his daughter and turn my back on her forever.  
    “I don’t know about you,” she said, coming up to stand beside me, “but I’m not a big fan of elephant shit. I mean, it just reeks, don’t you think?”  
    At first I didn’t even think she was talking to me. Then I looked over, saw her staring back at me, trying to keep a straight face, and I just burst out laughing.  
    “I know we were introduced before,” she said, “but I’m Jen.” She extended her hand and I shook it, not being able to find my voice for the longest time. Then finally it came, and I said, “I’m Ben,” and that was how it started, how we began talking. But it wasn’t like there were any instant fireworks. Far from it. As it turned out she had a fiancée, a guy named Jeremy she’d dated since high school and who now attended Yale. She was getting married in the fall, would probably get pregnant and have to settle down, which would play hell on her career, because she wanted to be a lawyer. No way, I told her, I want to be a lawyer too—but then caught myself a few seconds too late, when she asked me if that was true. Well no, I had to admit, the defeat apparent in my voice, I had wanted to be a lawyer. Oh really? she asked. What happened to change my mind?  
    But of course I didn’t tell her. That would come years later, about a year after I learned her little dark secret, feeling as if I owed it to her ... though, to be honest, I never did tell her the whole truth.  
    By the time the week of my visit was up Jen and I had grown a strong rapport. The woman I’d first thought was an angel would turn out to be nothing more than a friend, and a long distant friend at that, because on the last day we exchanged email addresses, Jen telling me to stay in touch, and while I had hope, I also knew she was just being nice. Still, on the long drive back home, she was all I thought about.  
    I tried forgetting her, shoving the scrap of paper she’d written her email address on in the bottom of my desk with no intention of contacting her, but she emailed me that first week. We stayed in touch, talking about random things, until one day months later the phone rang. My mom answered and she called for me, and I took it in my bedroom, expecting one of only a few friends from high school I still kept in contact with. It had been none of them, had instead been Jen, who was in tears, who had just found out her fiancée had cheated on her, had in fact been cheating on her, and she wanted to get away, just wanted to leave Chicago, and could she come visit me in Pennsylvania?  
    I almost told her no. I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought I was dreaming and that I might as well not allow this dream to continue any longer, because eventually I would wake up and realize just how pathetic my life really was, and to tell her no now would at least keep the majority of my pathetic existence at bay.  
    “Yes,” I said, sitting on the edge of my bed, “of course you can.”  
    She flew out a few days later and stayed at a Holiday Inn (which was no doubt the first Holiday Inn she’d ever stayed in). I took time off work, taking her down to Philly, down to Baltimore, up to Harrisburg. Hershey Park would be closing in a month and we spent a day there too. Things felt just as they had back in Chicago, like we had been friends since we were born,