The Boyfriend That Wasn't

My oldest and I were talking.

The conversation turned to how when I was younger I thought it was weird that I had blond hair while my sisters had dark hair. I had no idea that my sisters had a different bio-dad from mine until I was close to 10. It blew my mind. I remember sitting at some coffee shop near the Cerritos Mall and I asked my oldest sister why I had blond hair and they had brown. My sister told me that they had a different dad and my mom was married before she was married to my dad. I was floored. It had never occurred to me. OK, yeah, I admit I was a little slow on the catching on that they were older than my parents' marriage. It just never came up. It wasn't ever really discussed.

So anyways, flash forward to when I was about 18 or 19. I dated this guy for a few weeks. It was never serious and we were in the early stages of dating and just getting to know each other. His name was Joe. He was an exterminator. He had a glass eye. I never asked him how he got it. I was too busy being grossed out; not because he had a glass eye. That was fine with me. It was that it was always weeping a really weird stringy, viscous substance and he always was wiping it. It was kinda icky.

That's not why I stopped dating him, though.

He didn't have a place to go for Christmas dinner so I invited him to my house. He gave me the strangest gift. It was, no lie, a painting; a HUGE painting; not Oath of Horatii big, but still pretty big. It was the ugliest swirl of pastels anyone had ever created and it had this weird flocking stuff on it, like fake snow on an artificial Christmas tree and was about 4'x6'. He said he bought it for me because on one of our dates he had to stop at Ethan Allen or some similar store to look at something. While he was there doing what he had to do, I walked around. He told me he saw me looking at this particular painting and my face looked like I liked the painting. Me mistook my laughing and pointing for admiration of "fine" art.

That's not why I stopped dating him either.

Sometime during the day we took a group picture. The next day my mom took the pictures to Fedmart to get developed. Three days later when we got the pictures back I noticed that with my white-blond hair, I looked like the guest and he looked like the sibling. It made me mad. It was an irrational mad, but mad nonetheless.

That's why I stopped dating him.

My oldest laughed and laughed and laughed.