Mr. Sweetheart

Four minutes after I ordered a Lyft, Mr. Sweetheart arrived. I rushed out of the restaurant, grabbed my things from my friend’s car, and climbed into the back of the minivan.

I forgot that the driver doesn’t know where they are going until they pick you up. After greeting me, Mr. Sweetheart said, “Oh, Santa Cruz.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. Are you okay driving over the hill?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “No problem. The thing about Santa Cruz is that it’s hard to find rides who want to come this way. But it’s no problem. Can you shut your door, please?”

“Can you refuse the ride?” I asked.

“If I refuse this, they won’t give me another,” he said.

It was Christmas night and it was lightly raining. Mr. Sweetheart was going to drive me over a road known as Blood Alley. Taking a Lyft that distance was a splurge for me, so it wouldn’t be nothing for me to tip him 100% to make up for the loss of paid driving time my trip was going to cost him.

I was going to have to get creative.

Mr. Sweetheart asked me about my day, and I told him I had come over from Santa Cruz that morning in my daughter’s car. I told him that I’d driven it to her dad’s house to give it back to her and to have breakfast with the group of them there.

“So you and her dad are divorced?” he asked. “And you went there for Christmas morning?”

I said yes and he laughed. “Is he married?” I said yes. “Is his wife kind to you?” I said yes, that she was great.

He laughed some more. “Ethiopians would not do that,” he said. I asked if he was married and he said yes. He said he had three children. I asked him what he liked most about his wife. He said she was patient, kind, and a good cook. I asked him what the secret to staying married was and he said they argued, but then they would talk about things until the argument was gone.

He asked why I was divorced. I told him I was not only divorced, but I was divorced twice. He laughed. I told him it was because I was a bad wife.

He said he guessed it wasn’t all my fault. He said I seemed like a good person, open, kind. I told him it was my fault. I told him I was a little high from eating Chinese food and that he was getting the nicest parts of me. He said he didn’t think that was true. I asked if I could use him as a reference for future boyfriends and he said yes. Then I asked him if he would find me a boyfriend and he also said yes.

I think I could have asked him if he would drive me to the moon and he would have said yes. Mr. Sweetheart seemed like the type of person who said yes.

I asked him if he went to church because I had the feeling that this was a guy who had a faith so deep it didn’t matter much what happened around me. He said yes. I asked him if he believed in god. He said yes. He asked if I did. I said I had a hard time with the white man thing. He laughed. I asked him if he thought god was white. He said that was something people talked about at his church.

It turned out that his daughter had also just graduated from Berkeley. I asked if she had played a sport. I was trying to see if maybe our daughters had known each other. He laughed. “Oh, no,” he said. “She just studied.”

We talked about Ethiopia, its government, its landscape, its people, its food. Mr. Sweetheart asked what I did for work and I told him that I write and that I help other people write their books. Mr. Sweetheart shifted in his seat. “I have a story,” he said.

We talked about what it’s like to move from one continent to another. We talked about why people want to come to the United States. We talked about the importance of leaving your story behind when you die so your children and their children can remember or see who you were, and therefore who, in part, they are.

I told Mr. Sweetheart about Write or Die. I told him that I walk people through a series of exercises in a 90-minute phone call in order to get them set up to write their story. Mr. Sweetheart said that sounded good to him. I wondered how many hours of driving he would have to do to pay the $150. I told Mr. Sweetheart that, if he wanted, my Christmas gift to him would be a Write or Die call since I wasn’t going to tip him the 100% I wanted to.

Mr. Sweetheart was so happy. He said a lot of things very rapidly, and my fatigue and his accent made a lot of it a blur for me. He asked if I wanted to have coffee before he dropped me off so we could talk about this idea. Reader, I know you may be thinking Mr. Sweetheart wanted some Christmas action in the back of the van, but I promise you it was not like that. Being with Mr. Sweetheart was like being with a father or a grandpa. A good father, a good grandpa.

I told him I was so tired that I might start crying if we sat down for coffee. I told him I was an introvert and that I’d been with people all day. He laughed. He said he could come pick me up and take me to an Ethiopian restaurant that he liked one day next week before he left to go back to Ethiopia to visit family in January. He said we could sit in the back where it is quiet. He asked that I not tell people there who I was, to not say that I was a writing coach and that he was writing a story. He said he didn’t want them asking about it later. He said writing was personal and he didn’t want people to keep asking him if he’d finished his book yet.

There’s that line between walking into something that feels wrong and walking into something that feels like grace.

I was right on that line.

For Christmas, my daughter had given me a red box with candies made of very dark chocolate she had bought from a small store in Rome we had both gone to the year before. I pulled out the box and asked Mr. Sweetheart if he liked dark chocolate, chocolate that was unprocessed and had no added sugar. He said yes. I opened the box and asked him if I could turn on the overhead light. We were driving 20 m.p.h. over the hill between San Jose and Santa Cruz and cars were speeding by us. I didn’t mind the slow crawl because, when it rains, people die on this road all the time.

There is something wonderful about driving with the light on inside a car when it is dark outside. It reminds me of being a child for some reason. It makes me feel safe and cared for and like something special is about to happen. You turn a light on in the dark when you are looking for something or when you are looking at something. A little bit you are breaking a rule, it feels like, because you are supposed to drive with your inside lights off, right? So the time feels special, limited.

Anyway, this moment felt holy to me: the rain, the light, the red box my daughter had brought all the way from Rome in her tightly packed suitcase, the chance I had to share this gift with someone.

I was a little worried about Mr. Sweetheart putting the chocolate in his mouth and realizing I’d been serious when I had said there was very little sweetness. I didn’t want him to feel obligated to eat something that was so bitter it made him want to throw up.

“Spit it out the window if you don’t like it,” I said, taking a bite of my own piece of chocolate. I waited to see what he would do before I started freaking out about how delicious it was. I didn’t want to force the idea that we were eating amazing before he had a chance to find out for himself.

“Yum,” he said. “This is delicious. Thank you for sharing your special chocolate with me.”

When you are a woman in a car with a man, so many stories come into the car along with you. Creating a friendship out of nothing, a friendship that feels clean and good, means that maybe you don’t watch the news every day or read the newspaper or talk to other people.

I have been thinking a lot about the word courage recently. I think that is going to be my word for 2020, but I haven’t officially decided.

It takes courage to trust another human being.

It’s so much easier to say no to lunch because then at least you know what will happen: you won’t go to lunch. You won’t forge any kind of path with a near-stranger.

I’m guessing I’m going to say no.

And I’m wondering why.