Imagine the kind of month that would be for you if you were that woman.

And imagine you are that man, who, for the first time, feels he is protecting a woman not his mother, a woman who is so much more full of life than his old, tan, bent-but-agile mother, whose smug eternal certainty is, for the first time, coming to seem tiresome, as are those big honker glasses that once belonged to his father, into which she, for some reason, put new lenses last year, that is, eleven whole years after your father’s passing. That woman, that young, energetic woman with whom you often now find yourself in pleasant agreement, might suddenly start to seem even prettier to you, even if no one else seems to notice it. But you notice it, this uptick in her prettiness, and say so, in one of those notes you’ve begun leaving on the break table, with those snacks, notes that are getting longer and longer lately and sometimes even border on the passionate, in which your grammar will sometimes go a bit off as you struggle to express these new feelings, and that might even include a drawing of, for example, a cartoon man with stars pouring out of the open top of his head.

And one day there comes a kiss. In the stockroom. After it, you say, “Not bad,” to which she replies, “Not bad at all,” which you take as confirmation that you are, as you have always felt yourself to be, an excellent kisser, and now someone has finally noticed it, thank you very much.

And then the two of you are off to the races, and no matter what we, the people who live in that town and shop in that store, think about it, or how we snicker about it in the parking lot, saying unimaginative things ourselves now, such as “Well, good for them, really, why not?” or “One thing I would not want to be is a fly on the wall of wherever it is they go to be alone” or “I guess you never can tell, with people,” and no matter what the mother with the men’s glasses might hiss at night at her son in the house, her house, that she and the son share but that she owns, there would still be, as if willed by some force bigger than any of us, a wedding, in July, in the church just up the block that had formerly been a private home and that the current pastor had crowned with a bell tower of sorts but without any bell in it.

And all of us would go to that wedding, because how could we not? And because the new couple looked so naïve, happy, and clueless, standing there at the altar of the church with no bell in its tower, we would think: “Oh, this is not going to end well.”