So, imagine you are a woman who, all your life, people have shied away from and avoided, and whenever you said something it went out into the world and just hung there, causing a neutral or slightly adverse reaction, and every time this happened, you felt it, and so, behind you, in your life there had accrued a series of light but painful little blows, conspiring to convince you that there was something wrong with you, and now you find yourself in the daily presence of a man who seems to be coming to like you and has even started to leave you little presents on the break room table (a chocolate mint, a single Twinkie). And imagine that this man’s mother is against it, against this thing that is the thing that, now, propels you, Gloria, out of bed every morning. And that she, the mother, finds all of this amazing and laughable and disappointing and even, one day, tells her son that his interest in you is causing her to downgrade her opinion of him. And imagine that the man shares this with you. But, far from discouraging him, he says, this has actually made him feel, for the first time, that he is the protector of some woman not his mother. Which, he says, blushing, has made him feel tender, toward you, or whatnot.

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.