Said Is All

They didn't know from anything else.  They didn't.

"What's wrong with you?" Charlie said to her.

"Nothing," Angela barked back at him.  "Why do you always ask me that?  It makes me wonder if something is wrong with you."

"Me?" Charlie said indignantly.  "You're the one who does the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen."

"So?"

"So, that's ridiculous!  Who does that?  Have you ever heard of anything more arrogant in your life?" he scowled.

Charlie was beginning to wonder what he had seen in this girl.  They had met six years ago in a Ray's Bait Shop.  Her father was terminally ill and every weekend she would come to Nantucket to fish with him.  Charlie was a local fixture there, having been adopted by a family on the Sound when he was four years old.  His own father and mother died in a car accident on the way home from a wedding.  They had an unusual courtship that consisted of many dinners talking about loss and what it had meant to them at such a young age.  Falling in love while grieving was always a dangerous cocktail, stirring irrational fears and trauma and igniting a profound addiction to empathy, and then cutting you off at the throat when any kind of happiness sets in.

That's what happened to Angela and Charlie.  They didn't know from anything else.  That's what they would say to you themselves.  They had only ever endured sadness and heartbreak.  They had become comfortable with their lives not working out the way they thought they would.  In fact, there was a profound relief in having disappointment in common.  But they never knew they could make each other this happy.  This was unexpected, offputting even.

"I'm not arrogant," she said.

"You most certainly are.  I knew it from the day I met you."

"That's an awful thing to say, Charlie.  You're picking a fight."

"I am.  You're right.  We need a fight, wouldn't you say?" he said.

"We need a fight?  Who needs a fight?" she said to him, confused and at the same time catching up with what he meant to say.  Her bottom row of eyelashes formed a crescent shape, the way they always did before she was going to cry.

"We do.  We need a fight, Angela.  It's who we are," he pointed out.

"No, Charlie.  You, maybe?  But not me," she said.

She knew that from then on, he would always want to find something wrong with her, that even in her eternal quest to make him happy, he would remain forever and intangibly dissatisfied.  This was a fast death.  Not like her father's.  Not like any others she had seen in her day.

It was fast.  This she knew.