“He’s an engineer at the nuclear power plant. He used to do something extremely boring related to safety measures, and now he does something extremely boring involving the decommissioning.”
“Whereas your job was so exciting.”
She laughed. “You have a point. But I liked it.”
“How’d you get into it to begin with? Is that what you wanted to do?”
“No, I wanted to illustrate children’s books.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your …” He couldn’t think of the word for what kind of paints or whatever she used. “What kind of art?”
“My medium,” she said. “Pastels, mostly. Some watercolors. I draw a lot of cartoony people
, little bunnies, fat squirrels. Happy stuff.”
“You should draw me something.”
“What, right now? Like with a stick in the dirt?”
“Later. On a napkin.”
She smiled, testing a foothold with her toe. “Okay. I’ll sign it and everything, and then you can keep it in your junk drawer forever.”
He probably would.
“So did you ever do it?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Illustrate?”
“Just a little bit. In college. Mostly stuff I wrote myself, which doesn’t count.” She gave the boulder a pat and started walking again.
“Why not?”
“Why doesn’t it count, you mean?”
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“You know how families are. My mom thought the art was nice for a hobby, but she wanted me to figure out how to make a living. There was a lot of talk about health benefits and insurance, and I believe the phrases life-altering catastrophe and major strain on the family were used. So I switched from fine arts to graphic design. I thought I could maybe illustrate greeting cards. When I graduated, I wanted to move to Chicago, but Green Bay had the job listed, and who could turn down a job with the Packers?”
“So then you met Dan, and the rest is history?”
“Complete with shrimp fork.”
“How’d that happen, though?”
“The shrimp fork?”
“No, you and Thor.”
He knew how the shrimp fork had happened. He’d found the video on the Internet after she went to sleep last night. Listening to Dan’s proposal had made him so tense, he’d just about strained a muscle in his neck snapping the laptop closed.
He’d thought the video went viral because of what May did at the end, but it was Thor and his numb-nuts proposal. The lamest declaration of love in history.
Ben no longer wondered why she’d forked him. He wondered how she’d endured a relationship with such a douche for four years.
She shrugged. “I met him through work. He asked me out. I said yes.”