Every night, before bed, Lenora sat on the floor. The hearts ran to her. They piled in her lap and beat their approval. Lenora was exhausted but validated. She sang to them. She read to them the sorts of things hearts liked hearing. Pablo Neruda, mostly. But also the personal ads.
“Divorced female, lapsed Catholic,” Lenora would begin, and the hearts would flutter in her lap. “Seeks recovering priest for champagne and chess.” If Lenora paused for too long between ads, the hearts would jump into the newspaper and rattle it. More, they seemed to say. Go on! Go on!
So, Lenora would. Single man, gay and Jewish, seeks badminton partner. Married but lonely atheist seeks backseat hugs in secret parking lots. Adventurous couple seeks adventurous couple for naked skydiving. Hippie seeks hipster for road/acid trips.
One night, when Lenora had read her heart out and the hearts were asleep, thumping contentedly in her lap, she came across a personal ad like no other. Single woman completely unsure of how to love or be loved, it read. But completely sure she is ready to try.
Lenora couldn’t sleep that night. She kept the personal ad folded in a square in her pocket, for a week. She bathed the hearts and read them Neruda and let them take from her what they needed to take. But she did not read them the ad. When she finally decided to call the number, she did so in the car, locked inside, while the hearts hammered the hood and windshield like heavy rain.
“Hello,” Lenora said, when the voicemail picked up. “Ready To Try? This is Also Ready To Try.” The two hearts that Lenora had found on her stoop in the fresh seafood box pounded on the glass. Lenora thought they might explode. “I was wondering,” she said to the voicemail, “if you might like to meet.”
Ready To Try did. Later that day, Lenora received a thumbs-up emoji on her phone and a 7PM? And Lenora responded with her own thumbs-up and her address, before considering what she was going to do with the hearts. She needed a plan, and fast.
Lenora put on a long prairie skirt. She located her copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. She ran around the house, the hearts at her heels, until they were exhausted. Then she sat on the floor and called them to her lap. She read 89 of the 154 sonnets until, finally, all the hearts were asleep. Gingerly, Lenora lifted her skirt full of hearts and closed the front of it with her fist. She stepped out of the skirt and walked in her underwear to the metal garbage can in the garage. She knotted the skirt and set the hearts down in the can. She noiselessly placed the lid on the can. She put two bricks on the lid. Then she put on a new, fresh skirt and lipstick and waited.
At seven, Ready knocked on Lenora’s door. Lenora took a deep breath and looked through the peephole. Ready looked exactly that. Her eyes were both hopeful and nervous. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Lenora envisioned her heart as plum-colored and muscular from longing. Lenora put her hand on the knob, and then she removed it. She put it back on the knob and took a breath. When Ready knocked a second time, Lenora opened the door and smiled.
“Hello,” she said.
Ready held out her hand. “Hello,” she said back.
Behind Lenora, past the kitchen, past the hallway that connected to the attached garage, Lenora heard a single metallic thump. And then she heard another. She gave an awkward smile and cleared her throat. The hearts were waking up, it seemed, and before Lenora could invite Ready inside, the hearts launched into a distant, rhythmic banging.
“What’s that?” Ready asked.
“Oh.” Lenora shrugged, walking out onto the stoop and closing the door behind her. “I have some shoes in the dryer.”
Lenora and Ready went out to dinner. They ate roast beef and talked about all the things they weren’t, all the things they’d never done, all the things they would probably never end up being. When they were finished, they went for a long walk. Lenora was afraid she might find another heart, or that another heart would find her, so she refused to look down. Instead, she looked right at Ready and Ready looked right at her. At the end of the night, on their way back to Lenora’s, Lenora worried about asking Ready in. Not because she wasn’t ready for Ready, but because of the hearts. How would Lenora explain the shoes still in the dryer?
“You’ll have to excuse my house,” Lenora said as they pulled in the driveway. “It’s pretty messy.”
The headlights from Ready’s car shone right at the front door, right into the house. “It’s also open,” she said, pointing. “I think you’ve been robbed.”
Lenora and Ready got out of the car. They approached the house warily. Inside the front door, Lenora turned on the foyer lights. She handed an umbrella to Ready for protection. She took another for herself.
“I don’t see anything odd,” Ready said.
Lenora looked around the front hall. She peered into the tiny living room, the tiny kitchen. Both were her-messy, but not thief-messy. “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to check on those shoes. In the dryer.”
Out in the garage, Lenora found the trash can toppled. The lid had rolled into a corner. The two bricks had broken in half. The prairie skirt was off to one side, wrinkled and unknotted. The hearts were nowhere to be found.
Lenora ran back into the house. She flew through the kitchen and the living room, past Ready and into the bedroom. On the floor was the fishbowl, shattered. On the rug, a circle of damp pink. Lenora got down on her knees and looked under the bed. She stood and tore back the sheets. She went to the dresser and pulled out its drawers. She felt something inside her break free and rise—a scream that came out and brought Ready to her.
“What is it?” Ready appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Tell me what’s happening.”
Lenora fell to her knees and put her face in her hands. “My heart,” she said. “It’s gone. It was right here when I left, but now it’s gone.”
Ready reached out a hand to Lenora. “Let me help you up.”
Lenora shook her head. “You don’t understand. All the other hearts did something to it. They stole it,” she sobbed. “They took it. They took my one good heart away from me.”
Lenora cried into her hands. She thought of the sacrifices she had made to the twelve demanding hearts. She thought of the first heart’s selflessness, its unconditional nature.
“Wait here,” Ready said.
Lenora looked up. She watched Ready leave. Eventually, Lenora went out into the living room and sat in the dark. Outside, she could see the beam of a flashlight bounce up and down. Ready was walking the yard in careful lines, down and back, left and right. Lenora went to the window and watched. She grew still and serene. After a while, something returned and settled inside her, like a heart dropped into a bowl. Lenora went to the open front door and stood. “Ready,” she called out. “It’s okay. You can stop. You don’t have to look anymore.”
Ready paused as if making sure she had heard Lenora right. Ready and Lenora both stood still and quiet. Finally, Lenora waved and Ready waved back. And then Ready turned off the flashlight and headed back to the house in the dark, her footsteps thumping, thumping, thumping to where Lenora stood waiting.
GOOD GUYS
TO BE FAIR, the kid was asking for it. The moment he stumbled into Holbrook College’s cooperative dorm with his archaic set of yam-colored suitcases and big Midwestern smile, he might as well have passed around engraved invitations to his own ass-kicking. He arrived at the Collective during a rowdy dinner of wine and lentil loaf, and as he stood grinning in the dining room doorway, the late August sun made a nimbus of his prairie-colored hair.