Gabby Stein

A Place To Meet a Husband

I once lived in a house in a small, tourist town in Costa Rica. The house was too big for one person, but it had a television and after six months in the damp forest of Costa Rica, I was happy to have a way of accessing the world. The house sat atop a large hill that required effort to walk up. Once you reached the top you could see the undulating, cobalt waves of the ocean for miles. Below me, a few feet away, lived the caretaker of the house. He would fight with his girlfriend and smoke cigarettes like staccato beats, but he gave me the place for cheap, so I was grateful. Often, people would come up to the house and ask to watch television and I would let them, grateful for the company. Other times, I wanted to be alone even though at night I would be scared, wondering if someone would come up uninvited to the house in the murk and the dark. The house was too big, I would say. It’s too big. But he said to me once, “someone would have to really like you to walk up this hill”. And he was right. And he did walk up the hill. He walked up into my arms and became the father of our children.