A Girl Like You Page 16

“It’s a very good thing, Mombo.”

  * * *

  “This isn’t working, Madd,” I said over after-dinner coffee. “It’s rush hour and I can’t find anyone I haven’t already messaged.”

  “Try not to be so picky. Are you still looking for tall men only?”

  “I’ve messaged men who are my height. And I’m short.”

  “What about opening up the age range?”

  “Overall, I’d guess guys take eight years off their true age. So, when I say I’ll date a 55-year-old, I may get a geezer with none of his original teeth.”

  “You have a capped tooth, Mombo.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  * * *

  Another evening Maddy came over with a bag of plums, handing me one without even having to ask if I wanted it. We ate them silently.

  “You’re never going to meet anyone sitting on your front porch,” she said at last.

  “I’m waiting for a visit from Lily.”

  “She’s a cutie, but she’s not going to solve your dating dilemmas.”

  “Hey, I was out last Friday night.”

  “Talk to anyone?”

  “There was a cute guy around my age with curly blond hair. He was chatting it up with the bartenders like he was a regular.”

  “Wedding ring?”

  “Didn’t see one.”

  “So did you talk to him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Just when I was about to, he got a huge honking platter of wings. You know I won’t talk to a man slobbering away at a plate of greasy wings.”

  “I don’t like this no-wings rule,” Madd said. “Bars have beer, and wings go with beer. Bars, beer, wings. You’ll never get away from it.”

  “I think it’s nasty.”

  “Mom, you’ll never find a bar with just wine spritzers and salads.”

  “Hey, don’t mock my spritzers!”

  Madison was quick to point out the many mistakes I was making in my Fish connections.

  “You can’t keep checking to see if a guy has read your message! Every time you do that, it registers as you looking at his profile!”

  Sweet Jesus. There were men I’d checked several times an hour, obsessively, to see if they’d read my messages. No wonder I’d never heard back, stalker that I was.

  * * *

  Another night, she caught me admiring a pic of a cute guy against a backdrop of puffy clouds that brought out his shiny white teeth.

  “You’re violating the rule here—how many times do I have to tell you, never message anyone with just one photo!” Maddy looked over my shoulder and scolded me.

  “But it’s such a nice picture.”

  “It looks airbrushed,” she said suspiciously. “I’m going to do a reverse image search on it.”

  “What?”

  It took her less than a minute to find the exact same photo on a site showing guys modeling trendy short hairstyles for men.

  “I can’t believe it,” I sputtered in sheer disbelief.

  “Believe it,” she said wisely. “Lots of people do it. That’s why you need to see at least two or three photos to prove it’s the same person. One picture is never genuine.”

  “What a dickwad. I’m going to message him to take down that picture!”

  “Yeah, like he cares what you think?” Madison was laughing at me again.

  49

  One morning, Penny came running into the bathroom carrying a small scrap of silver paper in her mouth.

  “Give it here, honey.” I coaxed it from her mouth.

  It was an empty condom wrapper.

  My first instinct was to chuckle and be glad Ian was being careful. My second was to text Eddie.

  “Good for Ian,” Eddie wrote. “Have you seen her?”

  “No. It’s noon, but no one has come downstairs, unless she’s already gone.”

  “Don’t ask a lot of questions if you see her!” Eddie warned.

  “Of course I won’t. When have I ever done that?” I was mildly insulted.

  Two hours later, I heard Ian talking and knew he wasn’t alone. I busied myself in the laundry room to give them space.

  “Mom, this is Destini,” Ian said a minute later from the kitchen.

  “With an I,” she said.

  “An I?”

  She was a tiny blonde, wild bedhead hair, blue eyes with remarkably unsmudged black eye liner and a pair of silver high-heeled strappy sandals dangling from her fingers.

  “Nice meeting you,” I said.

  “You have a very cute house,” she said. “I didn’t see much of it when we came in last night—”

  “It was late,” Ian explained unnecessarily.

  Penny nosed around Destini’s perfect hot-pink toenails.

  “So, can I get you something?” I looked at the clock, wondering if I should offer lunch.

  “We’re going out for waffles,” Destini said. “With strawberries.”

  “At the diner,” Ian said.

  I realized he was glowing. “Well, have fun, kids!” I said, too brightly.

  Ian smiled at me over his shoulder as they left.

  I gave him the thumbs up, knowing afterward that it probably looked silly. It was just so great to see him happy.

  I texted Maddy with the news.

  “So where did he meet her?” Madd texted back.

  “Must’ve been out. I think he went to see a band last night.”

  “And she stayed over? Does she look a little slutty?”

  “Not at all,” I texted, although I did wonder about the “I” in Destini and the way she made strawberries and waffles sound sexy.

  Ian was gone all day. It had been nearly a 24-hour date.

  “What did you think of her?” he asked when he got home that night.

  “She seemed very nice. What does she do?”

  “She’s not in school right now, trying to figure out what she wants to do. For now, she’s working at CVS.”

  “Nice. Does she live at home?”

  “Just moved to a new apartment with two friends. She was with a really bad boyfriend and finally left him. That took a lot of guts to do.”

  “It did,” I said.

  “She’s so small, but she’s a really strong person inside.”

  I was proud of Ian for being attracted to that.

  “How were the waffles?”

  “Great, Mom. Everything was great.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I’m going to call Madd,” he said, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Madison had always been the first person Ian went to for relationship advice. She could always be counted on for support, whether it was cheering him on or cheering him up. Ian had a serious girlfriend his senior year in high school. Maddy and I stood in Congress Park on prom night near a fountain and snapped at least fifty photos of them, Ian in a grey tux, Amber in a shimmering mermaid gown. But their first year in college, Amber met someone else and broke up with him by text.

  Ian sent her roses and asked her to come back to him.

  “You’re pathetic,” Amber had texted, her last message to him.

  “I’m going to find her and break her legs,” Maddy had said when she heard the news.

  “Could you get someone to do that?” I’d asked hopefully.

  Madd had come over with a bottle of tequila to spend the night with Ian, and by morning, he was cursing Amber and saying how lucky he was to have her out of his life.

  It wasn’t in the stars for Ian and Destini with an “I.” She ghosted Ian after their night/day together. Ian texted, called and went back to the bar two nights in a row where they’d met, but didn’t see or hear from her again.

  “How is he?” Madd asked as she came through my kitchen door on the third day.

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “Told you she was a slut,” Madd said. “Probably went back to the shitty boyfriend.”

  She went up to see if Ian was awake, then came
down with a pink hairbrush full of blonde hair.

  “This was on his dresser,” Maddy said. “Not something he needs if he’s going to get over her.”

  “Yeah, toss that in the trash.”

  “Or we could make some sort of voodoo doll,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Really?”

  “No, Mom. Not really. You’re so gullible.”

  I sighed. “Do you think he’s OK?”

  “Absolutely,” Madison said with complete confidence. “No one keeps this family down.”

  “Not going to happen,” I said, just as confidently.

  50

  RescueU had chosen an unfortunate name, in my book, because I didn’t need to be rescued from anything. I didn’t need to be saved from anything but the possibility of spending another Saturday night with a bag of Chex Mix and Netflix. I wanted to be intriguing, likeable, someone a guy would want to hang around with to see if anything developed, organically.

  But Rescue was actually a firefighter/EMT with the local community emergency corps in town. I was impressed to know if we were out someplace, he could save the life of anyone who started choking, and also, he rushed into fires while everyone else ran out screaming.

  Rescue, aka Curt, had a photo on his profile wearing firefighting gear, and another with his arms around someone who’d been photoshopped out of the pic. He was wearing a tux with a pleated shirt and dark-blue bow tie, maybe at a wedding, maybe one of his kids, which was a good sign because it meant they were all grown up. In the third pic he was wearing a knitted ski cap, but when I examined the photo closely, it looked like he was standing by a snowbank at the end of a driveway, not skiing down a scary icy slope. Not a semi-pro skier. Good sign.

  Curt popped up on a search that had previously brought only a man with a flowing white Santa beard, a truck driver who badly needed a shower, and a guy peering at a bug under a microscope.

  I passed the emergency corps building every single day going to and from work! What could be a better sign than Curt being so close that we could already have bumped into each other on the sidewalk? Maybe it was meant to be. Maybe.

  Best of all, Curt messaged me first.

  “Hey, neighbor,” he messaged. “You work downtown?”

  “Town hall. Behind the front desk.”

  “Yeah? I think we were in there a couple years ago, older man had symptoms of a heart attack and we were dispatched. Got there in under three minutes. Turned out it was anxiety.”

  “Probably paying his tax bill,” I wrote. “People look like they’re going to keel over when they come in.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had that feeling myself.”

  We asked the obligatory questions: Divorced five years, Curt had two grown kids and an apartment in the next town over. He had plans to build a house, but his work schedule barely gave him time to sleep, so that was on the back burner for now. He never watched TV and cooked once a week at the firehouse. His specialty was stuffed shells with homemade sauce.

  We also exchanged horror stories about Fish.

  “I’ve been ghosted more times than I can count,” he wrote.

  “Thought it was just me. Women do it too?”

  “Oh yeah, especially after the first date. We have a good time, then they disappear and never answer texts again.”

  I couldn’t imagine anyone ghosting fireman Curt. Hadn’t they known a good thing when they saw it?

  “Well, I met a fireman,” I told Eddie the next day when we went for asiago cheese bagels at Brew Coffee.

  “Ohhh,” Eddie said, settling back in his chair. “Do tell.”

  “He’s fifty, and 6 feet tall.”

  “So, he’s already your type.”

  “Do I have a type?”

  “Sweetie, you know you like them tall and younger.”

  “Yeah, if I can find them.” I pulled a bit of cheese off my bagel to chew.

  “So, when are you meeting?”

  “Maybe dinner this weekend; he has to work an overnight Friday so he might sleep Saturday.”

  “Saving lives is draining.” Eddie chuckled.

  “I know, right?”

  “Is that one of the old geezers coming up the street?” Eddie pointed out the window.

  “Jesus, let’s get out of here,” I grabbed my purse and practically ran before Wes could see me and rope me into an extended conversation about town gossip.

  “Caught up on sleep,” Curt texted Saturday afternoon. “You pick a place and time and I’ll be there.”

  There were too many restaurants to choose from, so I called on my best resource.

  “Maddy, I can’t find the right place to have dinner tonight,” I texted.

  “What are you looking for? Romantic? Pub with lots of people in case you run out of things to talk about? Candles on the tables?”

  “None of those. Someplace with wine, and food that doesn’t come in a spinach wrap.”

  We debated a while before deciding on Spice, a nice but not fussy restaurant in downtown Ashton. I pulled up the menu online and picked a meal—grilled chicken with roasted asparagus—to avoid the awkward moments of deciding what to order.

  I texted Curt to meet at 7:30 at Spice.

  “See you then,” he replied. “Let’s have a great time.”

  It was exactly what I wanted.

  I wore ghost leggings with black boots and a long maroon sweater. Parking was always an issue in Ashton, so I left home at 7:00 for the fifteen-minute drive. Another good sign: a car was pulling out of the parking garage just as I drove in, giving me a premium spot. Spice was a short walk and I was inside with a wine spritzer by 7:15, trying to discreetly check my hair in the reflection of my phone.

  Curt was ten minutes late, but that gave me time to drink half my spritzer, and when he came over to the table, he was wearing a long coat and the cute knit hat from his photo.

  “Jessica?”

  “Curt?”

  He held out his hand and shook mine, that limp way some women do, then hung his coat on the back of the chair where it grazed the floor. Frowning, he folded the coat in half and placed it carefully over the chair so it didn’t touch the ground. I’d tossed my wool jacket carelessly behind me and was actually sitting on part of it.

  “What’s good here?” Curt said, pulling off his hat to reveal a severely receding hairline.

  Don’t get me wrong; I had no problem with the follicley-challenged. But the tux photo was clearly more than a few years old.

  “I hear the chicken is good—”

  “Here we go, wings, wanta share a couple dozen?”

  “Um, no thanks, not really a wing person.”

  Curt tipped his head to look at me. “How can you not be a wing person? That’s un-American.”

  “Sorry,” I said weakly.

  When the server came over, Curt ordered a crab dip appetizer and wings, extra hot.

  “You like crab?” he asked, handing his menu to the server without looking at her.

  “I guess so.”

  But when it arrived it was a cheesy, milky mess with chunks of crab I could smell even before he scooped up a heap with a tortilla chip. It was possibly the worst thing to order on a first date. That, and the wings.

  “I’m probably going to smell like seafood the rest of the night.” Curt laughed.

  “Probably.”

  He laughed again, as if it were actually funny.

  “So, tell me more about your kids,” I said, leaning back in my chair to get away from the pungent smell of cheesy crab.

  Curt’s face darkened. “They treat me like an asshole these days. Lived with their mother, my ex, since the divorce, and she’s turned them against me with her lies.”

  “Wasn’t your divorce, like, four years ago?” I polished off my spritzer and looked around for the server to order another.

  “Five. But it dragged out in court for years. Worked three jobs to keep that bitch happy and all she did was complain.”

  “Wow,” I said, signaling the ser
ver from another table and pointing to my wine glass for another.

  When the food came, Curt asked for extra wet wipes. “I really get into my wings,” he told the server. “Can get a bit messy. My date will have to tell me if I’ve got hot sauce on my face.”

  My grilled chicken was charred and the asparagus limp.

  We’d covered all the small talk questions by text, so I was at a complete loss as to what to say. We ate in awkward silence.

  “So, you never told me if you had pets,” I came up with at last.

  Curt put down a half-eaten wing and wiped his greasy face, leaving behind a smear of hot sauce on his chin that I didn’t bother to point out.

  “Had a beautiful Husky, Mandy, but she slowed down after eight years, dragging her back legs and then her eyes kind of glazed over. Wife had the kids convinced Mandy would get better but she got worse. Lost control of her bodily functions so she was shitting all over the house and had to sleep in the garage.”

  I closed my eyes, very sorry I’d brought the subject up.

  “Told them it was time to put her down, but the kids kept saying I was going to kill their dog, so six months passed. One morning I got up and opened the garage door and blood was everywhere. Mandy had bitten through her own tail and bled out.”

  I gagged on my asparagus, then took a long drink of my water to keep my food down.

  “Excuse me.” I practically ran from the table to the ladies’ room. It was an image I would never forget.

  I splashed water on my face then used a paper towel to wipe off my smeared mascara, taking a deep breath before returning to the table. All I wanted was to pay my half of the bill and get the hell out.

  “I paid,” Curt said as if he’d done the most gallant thing in the world.

  We put our coats on and left, pausing on the sidewalk while I fumbled in my purse for my car keys.

  “Wanta come to my place for a few drinks?” Curt asked, leaning too close and breathing hot crab into my face.

  “No thanks,” I said, stepping away.

  “Really?” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “Thought we hit it off.”

  “Really?” it was my turn to ask. “I don’t think so.”

  Curt took a step toward me. “You know what your problem is? Women like you act one way when they text, then become a whole different person when we meet. Then you have to run because you can’t keep up the charade.”