Marijean Oldham
What the Heart Wants
Fate finds Junie in the Taco Bell parking lot, a cup of ice pressed against her swollen eyelids, Diet Coke coursing through her veins. A wrapper floats from her fingers to the floor. She’s smuggling her broken heart into the secret compartment in her chest, girding her body before driving home. She scrolls through her phone, deleting the professor’s texts, his number. A broken heart is harder to hide than the affair ever was.
Her phone rings. “Where you at?” her husband asks, putting Junie’s teeth on edge.
Stan is a courier of human organs, packed in ice, gentled into coolers. He speeds down the highway from hospital to hospital. When Junie thinks of Stan in his vehicle, cooler next to him on the passenger seat, she imagines the heart inside red and beating.
“On my way home,” she says, cutting her eyes to the wrapper.
Stan, that courier of hearts and livers, a devout eschewer of fast food, cannot know about the way she takes her hurt to Taco Bell, sinking into the soothing comfort of a cheesy double beef burrito. The affair with the professor would be a more welcome revelation than this; her drive-through dalliance. The weight of her secrets hardens like plaque in an artery until she’s an impenetrable wall of pain.
Junie looks in the rearview and uses the condensation from the cup to clean the ruined mascara from under her eyes. She rolls down the driver’s side window and tosses cup and wrapper into the trash can with its long, wide neck, there for just this purpose, there to receive deceit, the driver never having to come fully to a stop.
Keeping it Together at the Falling Apart Salon
I settle in the chair at Rose’s, careful not to bump my broken elbow. She fusses, getting the cape just right. “Washing my hair one-handed isn’t really getting the job done,” I say, embarrassed at the state of my faded crowning glory.
“Of course it isn’t, honey. I don’t know why you didn’t call sooner!” She teeters behind me on sky-high heels and, as always, I marvel at her pinup figure.
Theresa pops out from under the dryer hood with a head full of green curlers and scowls at me. “Aren’t you the one who swapped husbands with that other lady?”
“Theresa! Let’s mind our manners,” Rose says, trying to come to my rescue. Theresa’s memory might be fading, but this salacious detail remains.
“Not exactly,” I say, reaching for my cup of takeout coffee, the question still a gut punch after all these years. “It was more a matter of my husband dumping me for her, and her dumping her husband for mine. Later, the two of us dump-ees decided to get together. But that’s old news!”
Claire, her white hair already coiffed and gleaming, chimes in from the manicure chair, where Louanne is just finishing painting her fingernails a bright coral. “Theresa, you know that’s none of our business.” She pauses a second, cocks her head with a smile and says, “Now, whatever happened to those other two?”
Rose leans me gently back into the washbowl and begins to rinse my hair, “They got married just as soon as they could,” I say, looking at the ceiling.
Rose gets to lathering my head, rinsing, conditioning, and rinsing again, suspending further conversation. When I’m upright again, I find them all looking at me, Theresa, Claire, and Louanne. There’s nothing this bunch likes more than a little gossip.
While Rose combs my hair into tidy sections, Claire takes the seat next to mine and pats my leg. “That must have been hard, dear.”
“It almost broke me, at first, if I’m being honest,” I say, patting my elbow in its formidable splint, the result of a misstep on a steep gravel hill. “But if it weren’t for them dumping us, my husband and I never would have gotten together! Every year on the anniversary of simultaneously being asked for a divorce, we say we ought to send them a fruit basket.”
The ladies hoot with laughter.
Rose’s eyes meet mine in the mirror as she uses a round brush to dry my hair, the sound drowning out all conversation, and holding me in a cocoon of my own thoughts. I give her a grateful smile. Rose has heard it all. It was in this exact chair that I dissolved into tears when I got the text from my daughter telling me her dad had set a wedding date. She saw my hair fall out at the worst of it, my eyes and skin wrecked from sleepless nights and tears. And when I first told her about Sam, she said she thought I should go for it, and in the years that followed saw me lift and brighten, along with my hair, which got blonder and bigger with every visit. She squealed and kissed my cheek when I asked her to do my hair for our wedding.
When she’s finished smoothing and curling my unruly mane, Rose turns me in the chair so the other ladies can cluck their approval.
Rose says, “Honey, every single person who has sat in this chair has fallen apart from time to time. There’s nothing like a good friend and a blowout to put you back together.” Rose has been the glue for each and every one of us; Louanne, getting back on her feet after a bad marriage, Claire when her husband passed away from a heart attack at fifty, and even cranky old Theresa, when her dementia became undeniable. I reach back with my good hand and hold Rose’s for a minute.
Louanne says, “Are they happy?”
“Who?” I ask.
“The other couple—your exes?”
“I assume so,” I say. “They divorced each other and are both married to entirely other people now.” And again, the tiny salon fills with laughter.
Marijean Oldham is a public relations consultant and writer. In 2003, Marijean set a Guinness Book World Record for creating the largest bouquet of flowers. When not writing, Marijean is a pie enthusiast and competitive baker.
