Lisa fidgeted on the chocolate brown sofa. She pulled a pillow from behind her back, fluffed it violently, and replaced it in a vain effort to ease her discomfort. Tension bound her whole body, and she was unsettled inside and out.
After what seemed like ages, the doorbell rang. She rose slowly and trudged across the room. She opened the door and greeted her guest in a dull monotone.
"Hi Mom, how are you?"
"I'm fine," Claudette replied, quickly taking stock of her daughter's rejuvenated body. A clear improvement, she thought, and yet Lisa's face was forlorn. "How are you, hmm?" Claudette continued insistently.
Lisa responded, meaningfully, with silence.
"Okay." Claudette frowned. "Let's go to the couch and we will sit down." The old woman's presence was commanding, and Lisa obeyed without thinking.
"Now, what's happening with you?" Claudette asked as they sat.
Lisa was engulfed with shame. It was enough to fortify her against Claudette's needling questions.
"Nothing much," she offered with a fake smile, "Do you want some coffee?"
But Claudette was voracious. "What's wrong? Tell me."
Lisa's stomach lurched. It offered up a half truth.
"I'm not feeling good today," she said.
"Well why not?"
And Lisa was trapped. She envisioned Johnny's newly aged body, the angry red lines in his skin, his formless, melting face, and she shuddered. She steeled herself with a deep breath and blurted out the disgraceful truth.
"I don't love him anymore." The words seemed to echo inside her head. She could never take them back. His sacrifice, their covenant. They were supposed to spend these years together. She awaited Claudette's fury, and yet her mother just looked quizzically at her.
"Why don't you love him anymore? Tell me."
"He's so..." she began, then fumbled for an explanation. She couldn't be seen as shallow. Not now. "Boring!" she exclaimed with false fervor.
Somehow, Claudette bought it. "Well you've known him for over five years! You're engaged!"
This drew Lisa into a memory from just over five years before, when she had just arrived in San Francisco after finishing her associate's degree in computer science. Two interviews in the city, and she had washed out. She sat alone in the hotel restaurant sipping a coffee and wondering what she would do. Twenty years old and frustrated, directionless.
Claudette prattled on in an unbroken monologue about all Johnny does to support Lisa as her reverie continued.
A strapping bus boy from the hotel approached her and said hi to her. Perhaps the fresh rejections had made her vulnerable, but she took to him immediately. He told her he was thirty years old, though in his thick accent she thought he said twenty. He laughed musically before he gently corrected her, and she was enamored all the same. He was beautiful, then. She decided she'd spend some of her remaining money to take the charming rogue to dinner...
"And he told me he plans to buy you a house!" Claudette asserted. Lisa's awareness crept back in. Her reminiscence only made her feel more guilty about the revulsion she now felt when she looked at Johnny.
"That's why he's so boring!" she blurted defensively.
Claudette recoiled. "Well what are you going to do?"
"I don't know," Lisa admitted. "I don't mind living with him." Her face flushed. Was that all she could say?