Merriton

“I wonder where she is right now,” John Sebastian thought to himself as he sat in his room with the door closed. As he uploaded the photos of his most recent fountain pen refurbishment to eBay, he could not stop thinking about Kit Kat. Next week, she would be in Merriton. She would be signing papers in June’s office and it was all he could think about.

“Esterbrook ‘CA101’ Fountain Pen Cartridge Mint,” he typed in the description and then paused to look at it. The pen was green and the color was called mint, but when he read his own description it appeared that he was saying that the pen was in mint condition. He pressed backspace, but then he paused again. The pen was in excellent condition. It had arrived in a box with twenty other pens and pencils with its ink bladder shaking like a maraca in the barrel. He had restored it to nearly mint condition, but he could not say that it was mint. It had been used.

He sat, paralyzed, trying to decide on the proper wording through the fog of his memories of Kit Kat. Had the pen been blue, he would have typed, “Esterbrook ‘CA101’ Fountain Pen Cartridge Blue.” Shouldn’t he do the same when the pen color is mint? Perhaps he should just type green, but if a collector was looking for the mint-colored fountain pen, it wouldn’t show up in the search properly.

For a brief moment, John imagined Kit Kat watching him. Somewhere, she could be looking for him. She may even be looking at his online eBay store at this moment. He immediately looked at the other pens he had up for auction. It was the same description over and over with only the colors and models of pens changed. The photos were what made each item unique and he glanced through them, proud of his handiwork. He thought about what she would see if she found his eBay store online and hoped that she would be proud of his work.

One week and she would be home and for the first time in his life, John would be available. At the thought, he pulled out the yearbook from his junior year in high school. He turned to the page that he had read so many times before. It was an action that he had done many times over the years. The day that A.S. served him with the divorce papers, he had turned to that yearbook for solace. Even during the dark times when he was feeling lost and alone before the divorce, he would pull out the yearbook.

The pages of the book smelled like a combination of dust and Elsha. It was the cologne that John had worn for years until the day A.S. mocked his singular choice of aftershave. Lately, he never used cologne at all. He made a mental note to pick up some the next time he went into Emigration.

He looked at Kit Kat’s face on the Literary Magazine page. She had signed next to her image with the words, “I had such a crush on you, but you were always with A.S. Now I’m graduating and leaving you all for college. Don’t ever forget me. I sure won’t forget you.” Her handwriting was round and bulbous. He had touched her words on the page so many times that there was a darkening around them from his finger oils.

He had never known who she was when they were in high school. He knew her younger sister, Mira, and even worse, he knew Ricky, her brother. Over the years, his imagination had created an amalgam of Katherine Townsend that was based on the four sentence note she had written him.

That image of her changed when he discovered that she was a published author. He had purchased every romance novel that she had written, reading them voraciously. A.S. had teased him mercilessly when she found his stash of books, hidden in the garage. Christian romance novels, where the most racy scene would be a single touch of hands to steady a maiden disembarking from a coach, disgusted his ex-wife. She had said that she would have rather found graphic pornography. The contrast between his wife and his image of Kit Kat was stark indeed.

He set the yearbook down and looked at his eBay listing. He retyped the description just as before, deciding that he would leave the word mint just as he would have had the pen been blue. He finished posting the listing and reviewed it carefully for errors. Finding none, he closed the browser.

He immediately opened the browser again and typed Katherine Townsend into the Google search field. He found a psychologist and a Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. It took him a bit of scrolling before he found her author’s page on her publisher’s website. He reread the blurb for the hundredth time:

Katherine lives in New York City with her husband, Dave, the sales vice-president of Dreamscape Herbal Remedies. They have never been blessed with children, but are eager to start that life together.

Her other interests include visiting her siblings in San Francisco, exotic cooking, and naturally, reading.

John pondered the blurb and wondered why it hadn’t been changed. She was moving back to Merriton. She was getting divorced. He was so eager for her to change that blurb to read that she was finally single and returning to her old high school crush, John Sebastian. He imagined how that blurb would look when the two of them could finally be together until the light outside became dim and James knocked on the door softly, wondering if his brother would want some dinner.