The following is true, details as close as I could remember.
*
I started jogging in the summer of '05. I had been laid-off from work a few months before and began noticing that I was gaining weight around my thighs and mid-section, and that would not do. I was a nurse. I had been a nurse for six years and knew how fast an unhealthy lifestyle can sneak up on people. I had always been in decent enough shape for my five foot-six frame, especially working as nurse. My body was clearly missing the leg work that nursing required. So I decided to do something about it. I decided that every morning before I sent off my daughter to school and my husband to work, I would wake-up a few hours early and take a few laps around the park. It wasn't a particularly big park, so I didn't think it would be that big a challenge.
The first week was terrible.
I remember oversleeping the first few dawns when I started, coming back from my jog dead tired with sores on my feet. The second week wasn't any better, but I had actually begun finishing my laps by then. As the weeks went by, the more I ran, the more I was getting into a groove of things. I started to get leaner and feeling better about myself again. And just as fall was around the corner, that is when I officially met Henry.
I had seen Henry around the neighborhood many times before, going years just passing by each other without saying a word. I didn't think much about him except that he was the single, older man living in the nice green house a few blocks away. He had been a tall, sleek man then, with thinning silver hair and a king-like face, rugged and a bit haggard.
"Morning," were his first words to me as we passed each other on the park one day. He had just been finishing up his run and I was beginning mine. The park stretches out into curves that sometimes are difficult to read, especially early in the mornings when fallen branches and tree saps wind up on the ground. I was passing by such a stretch of turns then, when I failed to notice a branch at my feet. I stepped on it and my ankle rolled. I tumbled right into the concrete.
It honestly didn't feel that bad at first, but I was bleeding from my elbows and I had dirt on my face. I just laid there for a minute or two, not wanting to move, as I heard a voice approaching me.
"Hun, you okay?" Henry kept saying as he knelt down to help me. Months later, he would admit that he had been staring at my ass as I ran past him, and that's how he happened to see that I needed help. If he hadn't been a dirty old man, we probably wouldn't have had our adventure together.
I told him that I was okay.
"No, you're not," he told me and he helped me up. He was right. I was hurting, mostly my ankle. I leaned on him getting up and noticed for the first time that he had these strong, broad shoulders on his body. I was impressed. He didn't come off like a well-built structure with his wiry frame, but apparently he was hiding a respectable physique under his clothes. He helped me home with me leaning against him the entire time.
I found him rude though. He talked about how people don't watch where they're going, like it was my fault I fell. I thought he sounded like a grumpy old man, but now I see he was probably just talking in generalities. I thought I was getting lectured. "Common sense for people to watch where they're going," he told me, "and clean up if they see something on the road."
When we reached my lawn, I thanked him and sent him on his way. I was put-off by his attitude, but thought of him differently after that day. He was no longer the single older man that lived a few blocks away. He turned into the well-built, single, old jerk who lived a few blocks away.
Four or five days later, I started running again and decided to wake-up earlier to make up for my missed time. I wanted to run five or six laps on my first day back. I felt good. I ran into Henry then in the middle of the park.
"Hello," He said waving at me and slowed down, "How are you feeling?"
I told him I was fine and thanked him again for helping me the other day.
"Oh, please," he said showing me his nice smile. "Do you want to run with me?" he asked.
I thought about saying no, but I didn't want to be rude after he helped me the other day, so I accepted.
We ran four laps together and I got to know him a bit better. Henry was fifty-seven years old and a retired actor. He never did anything that anybody would recognize him for, but he had a few minor television roles back in the seventies and did some work in the eighties as an extra. He said he retired early in the nineties and moved back home to work in his father's dealership. He was just okay at it, he said. He sold some cars, but was never the salesman of the month or anything of that nature.
"Just like the acting," he told me. "I never stood out."
I told him about my life. I was born in Queens to Puerto Rican parents, but raised by my grandmother. My father had left my mother and me when we I was five, and then a year after that, my mother followed him. My grandmother was all the family I had for a long time until I met my husband. My husband and I met in college. He wanted to be a musician then, the last great Guracha musician, but somewhere along the way he ended up as a CPA. A good one, but not what he wanted.
"It happens," Henry told me and made some points about how life never pans out. It didn't really make me feel better.
When we finished our run. I felt a great deal of respect for him and was surprised at myself for opening up so much to a stranger. He would have made a great therapist. When he had asked me questions about my life, questions that I should have given the standard -everything is fine - answer to, I instead told him the truth. Like when he asked me about my parents, he offered his sympathy and told me that my grandmother had done a good job with me. He had a soothing, courteous voice and a way of talking that put me at ease. Right away I found that I was very wrong about him.
"Same time tomorrow?" he asked me as we finished our run and we were leaving the park.
I told him that I would love to, but I couldn't wake up that early every time, not while I was still looking for a job and had a household to keep up with.
"That's okay, hun" he said like a kind father. "I like having someone to talk to. Tell me what time and I'll meet you right here. I don't have to be in the dealership until ten anyway." We agreed to meet at six thirty-am the next day, but it didn't stop there. We jogged together for two months.
During that time, Henry and I talked about everything. He turned from the single, old, jerk who lived alone a few blocks away, into the single, gentleman I had gotten used to seeing in my life almost every day. He was my confidant. A friend. We met mornings around the same time, sometimes missing a day or so when one of us couldn't make it, or when our times didn't quite sync up. I told him about my nursing career and how I had been laid-off. He told me about his drug use, and one morning, he brought me his sobriety chip to look at. It was a ten year chip. He was proud of it and I was proud of him for having it. I learned a lot about Henry those months, and I thought I could love him.
But not romantic love, oh no, at least I didn't think so then. I never in my dreams imagined we would end up in bed together. I thought I could love him like a kindly friend. The father I never had. So It was a surprise to me what happened next.
The first time he kissed me, we were deep in the park and it was mid-October. The trees had turned mutant and the leaves were colored. There was a slope coming up in our run, a mini-hill, and we liked to pick up speed for it and ride up as fast as we could, but Henry stopped me that time. He grabbed me by the hand and said, "Slow down, stop."
I got worried and asked him if he was feeling okay.
He shook his head no and sat down on a stretch of grass on the curb. I thought he might pass out and got close to him in case he did. When he calmed down a bit, and we were both sitting down, I put my two fingers on his wrist to measure his pulse. I was busy trying to find it, when he leaned his face on my left and kissed me. He surprised me. His tongue exploded in my mouth and I felt his saliva wetting my own. His lips weren't soft or rough, but rather comfortable and warm. Inviting. It wasn't the best kiss I ever had, but still I found myself kissing him back, with my hand venturing on the crotch of his pants, reaching for his stiffness.
I grabbed it through his sweats and rubbed it a few times as we locked lips. Then we heard a car up ahead and quickly separated. He stayed sitting down, trying to cover his hard-on, while I had knifed on my feet and put some space between me and him by pretending to stretch near some bushes behind. A car drove by slowly with the headlights on and inside was an older couple, they seemed to know Henry and said hello to him.
Henry played with formalities for a bit, asking them how they were and talking about work. I stood frozen and was hoping Henry didn't try to introduce us. He didn't and we watched them drive away. We finished our run in silence after that. He tried to get me to talk, but I didn't have anything to say. I just left the park without saying a word and went home. I darted straight to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. My family was still sleeping.
I never had an affair before. I had been married for eight years then. I had kissed another man once in that time, but like with Henry, I had stopped it before it went anywhere. I didn't regret stopping it with that other man, but standing in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, I regretted not doing more with Henry.
Henry's age bothered me and I tried to focus on that. I had been a few months away from thirty-three at the time and started doing the math.It didn't work. I found the difference of twenty-four years didn't bother me that much.
I went downstairs preoccupied. I made breakfast for my daughter and husband, kissed them goodbye and told myself to forget about what happened by looking for nursing jobs online. I truly tried to focus on my job search, and I don't quite remember what changed, maybe it was yet another polite rejection email for a job I had applied for, but I found myself leaving my desk, running out of my house and right to Henry's street.