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I thought I wanted to marry Irene.
Fortunately, she was not in love
with me, and so I didn’t.
Instead, while I was in the Air
Force and stationed in Texas, I served as her back-up beau for the nights
when her official boyfriend was otherwise occupied. Irene said that she loved
him, but never seemed certain that he loved her back. She certainly did not
love me, and she protested all of my verbal efforts to show honorable intent.
However, when it came to physical intent, she was quite amenable. Admittedly,
that was probably why I swallowed my pride, and accepted what should have
been a humiliating situation.
She was very lovely, Irene was.
Once a month, on the anniversary
of the date that we met, I would give Irene a single yellow rose.
“Don’t ever give me a bunch of
flowers all at once,” she had insisted. “Men always buy a dozen roses for
their girlfriends. So the flowers all die at once. Just give me a single
yellow rose. Once a month.”
One night, while out on an
“anniversary date”, we took a long drive, and in a somewhat isolated area I
spotted a flower shop right next door to a gas station.
“I need to get some gas,” I told
Irene, and pulled up at the pump.
“Fill ‘er up,” I told the
attendant, and then said to Irene, “I’ll be right back.”
When I got back to the car, I
tried to hand a yellow rose to Irene through the open car window. She had
just finished drinking the Coke she’d gotten from the vending machine, and
still had the bottle in her hand.
“Oooh. Wait, wait,”
she said. She hurried out of the car and scooted into the service attendant’s
office. When she came back, the Coke bottle was filled with water, and she
took the rose and put it in the bottle.
I smiled wistfully, knowing that
she cared more about her rose than she did about me.
“It probably would have survived
till you got home,” I teased.
“It will for sure now,” she said.
When we got back to her house, she
put the rose in a small vase and pressed the Coke bottle into my hand.
“What am I suppose to
do with this?’’
“Take it back to the gas
station?’’
“I don’t think they’ll miss it.”
“I’m very tired tonight. Do you
mind?”
She gave me a quick dismissive
kiss, and navigated me out to the street.
That night I gave up the dream
that Irene would ever be mine, and I never saw or called her again.
A few weeks later, I got orders to
ship out to Germany.
The empty Coke bottle was still in
my car.
On the day before I would leave
San Antonio, I took the bottle to the florist who had been providing the
monthly roses.
“I’m leaving San Antonio for good
tomorrow,” I explained to the pleasant elderly lady who had always smiled and
winked when she'd given me the roses of yesterdays. “Please put a yellow rose
in this Coke Bottle and send it off today."
She nodded and handed me an
embossed card to be signed and enclosed with the last rose I would ever give
Irene.
I wrote on the card only
"Your Proxy Lover".
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