THE NEXT NIGHT was Friday. The night of my synchronized caffeination event with Dr. Addison.
Also known as my first date with my future husband.
He wasn’t calling it a date. And neither was I—out loud.
But that was all for the loophole.
He’d be at Bean Street Coffee—just a short walk for him from his work
—at six o’clock. And I would be there, too. It was a bad idea, for sure. But more important: What should I wear? Jeans and a top? Sneakers? Sandals? Or god forbid—heels?
I tried many outfit options and modeled them all for Peanut. We don’t need to get mathematical about it. Let’s just say I was very thorough.
In the end, I settled on a black wrap dress with white polka dots and a ruffled hem—with the mental caveat that if it was too fancy, I could always pop back up to my place and change.
Other than the historic nature of the First Date, there was one other notable thing about today. But I wasn’t sure if I was going to share it with Dr. Addison.
Today—March fourth—was my mother’s birthday.
And I always celebrated my mom’s birthday. Just the two of us. I’d tuck a flower behind my ear, the way she always used to, and I’d bake a cake from scratch, and I’d buy candles, and I’d sing happy birthday to her. And then I’d talk to her like she could hear me. Just out loud—alone in a room by myself. As if the birthdays of the dead were the one day of the year when they could tune in to the voices of their loved ones left behind like a radio frequency.
I’d tell her about my life—catch her up on all the nonsense and goings- on. Give her the Peanut update. Reminisce a bit about fun things we’d done together when she was alive. And then I’d always, always thank her for being my mother, and for being such a source of love and joy that I could still feel it all these years later, so long after she was gone.
That was no small feat on her part. But it was also a choice on my part.
It was so tempting—even still—to feel bitter that I’d lost her so soon. I had to work to turn the other way: to remember to feel grateful that I’d had her at all.
I’d thank her, and then—yes—I’d cry … because happiness and sadness are always so tangled up. And then I’d put on a Cary Grant movie—and usually eat the birthday cake, sometimes digging straight in with a fork without even slicing it, until I conked out on the sofa.
It was quite the ritual.
I’d started out trying to feel happy. But in the end, I’d settled for grateful.
Which might be the better emotion, if I had to choose.
Anyway, the chances I’d be telling Oliver Addison, DVM, about any of this were pretty close to zero. He didn’t need to do a belly flop into my sad past on our first date.
I’d be cheery and positive and funny and charming—as best I could. I’d set all my bittersweet emotions about my lost mother on a mental shelf. And then I’d shut the conversation down before I could accidentally reveal any personal imperfections … and go stop by the grocery store for the ingredients for the cake.
Yellow cake with chocolate icing. My mom’s favorite. And mine, too. This would work. I could have it all.
As long as I kept to the schedule.
 |
I WENT DOWN to Bean Street at six o’clock on the dot. I found a table that faced the exterior door, couldn’t resist dabbing just one more spot of a lipstick color called Passionfruit onto the poutiest part of my lower lip, gave
myself a little pep talk about how doing scary things is good for you, and waited.
And waited.
And then I waited some more.
And while I waited, I could feel the confidence leaking out of me like a punctured tire. Was it cold in here? Maybe I should’ve brought a sweater. Should I take my hair back down? Was my lipstick too orangy? And of all the bras I owned, how had I managed to grab the one that always slid off my shoulder?
I yanked the shoulder strap up and pressed it in place sternly, like, Stay.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe I couldn’t pull this off. The entire future I’d just mapped out for myself as Mrs. Oliver Addison, DVM, was riding on not screwing up this moment.
The words don’t screw it up kept circling around in my head like they were on an airplane banner. Great tip—but the problem was, there were so many ways to screw it up.
What if, to just take the biggest, scariest, most likely example, I didn’t recognize him?
What if—and this likelihood was really only occurring to me now, as I sat there—without his lab coat on and out of the context of the clinic, I truly couldn’t tell him apart from anyone else? It was more than possible.
How mortifying would that be?
I thought about the woman on Facebook who’d called her face blindness “a superpower.” What would she be doing right now? She wouldn’t be sitting here nervously ripping up a paper napkin, her stomach cold with dread as she questioned her value as a human being. Hell, no! She would put her shoulders back, embrace the uncertainty, surf that tsunami of self-doubt like a badass, and find a way to make it fun.
At the very least, she wouldn’t give up on herself before she’d even tried.
You’ve got this, I pep-talked myself as I started mutilating a new napkin. You know what to do.
And with that, I did know what to do: Just smile—and positively radiate warmth and availability—at every single man who walked in through the Bean Street doors as if he were my future husband.
Not my usual strategy in life.
But not that hard to do, either.
I mean, Dr. Addison had a job to do here, too—right? He would recognize me. Sure, I looked a little different with my hair up and my passionfruit lips. But I could rely on him to know me when he saw me.
Anyway, I’d just have to put my faith in destiny. What was meant to be was meant to be.
Except maybe it wasn’t meant to be … because an hour—an actual hour
—went by, and Dr. Addison didn’t show up.
There’s a very specific slow-burn heartbreak to getting stood up as the realization slowly comes into focus: No one’s coming. In that one interminable hour of looking up each time the doors opened and watching every single one of them sweep on past me like we were total strangers— which we must have been—I felt myself wilting like a time-lapse version of a neglected houseplant.
It was the lethal combination of the hope with the disappointment, I decided.
I’d walked in, all fresh and bright with my green leaves lifted high toward the sun … and it took only an hour to render me flopped sideways, limp and melted over the edge of my pot.
Emotionally, I mean.
The point is, untold numbers of innocent napkins gave their lives during that hour of waiting. All for nothing.
At the one-hour mark, with no text from him, I called it. I was done here.
I stood up, feeling like the whole room of people must be watching me and shaking their heads, and started picking up all the napkin shreddings off the table—deliberately, self-consciously. Careful not to screw this up, too.
But that’s when the outside door opened again, and this time a breeze burst in with it, and that breeze sent the napkin pieces scattering off the table onto the floor—all my efforts destroyed, as so often happened, by some totally unrelated outside force. And despite everything, I smiled like a movie star at whoever was coming in, just in case.
It was Pavlovian at this point.
But it wasn’t Dr. Addison coming in the door. It was a lady.
So I turned my attention now to the floor and the tragic heartbreak confetti now covering my section of it, squatting to start picking it all back
up.
That’s when a pair of shoes appeared in my field of vision.
And from the fumes of evil radiating off them and the sudden waft of
Dior’s Poison, I could take a pretty good guess: Parker.
I stood up.
“You look like a girl who just got stood up,” she said. It wasn’t the voice I recognized. It was the viciousness. Definitely Parker.
Nobody else on earth could make me feel that shitty that fast. “Hello, Parker.”
“How did you know it was me?” she asked, sounding overly delighted
—almost sarcastically so—to be recognized.
I sighed. “By the cruelty. It has a distinct frequency.”
“I saw you here an hour ago on my way out,” Parker said then, enjoying a chance to savor my misery. “Now I’m back, and here you still are— wearing lipstick and everything—but still just utterly, completely alone.” I could feel her gleeful pout. “It’s so heartbreaking.”
“What do you want, Parker?”
“I want to ask you about that super-cute guy on our floor.” “What guy on our floor?”
“The one who stares at you in the elevator.”
There was a guy who stared at me in the elevator?
“The one with the bowling jacket,” she said, like, Hurry up.
“Joe?” I asked. Joe stared at me in the elevator? Something about knowing that felt really … nice.
Parker had no idea she’d just made me feel nice. She snapped her fingers at me. “I need his number.”
All I could think to say was “Why?”
“Because I’ve decided he’s my future husband.”
Hey. That was my thing. I was the person with a future husband.
“Future husband?” My body was suddenly filled with tiny firecrackers: a flash of jealousy; a flash of protectiveness; and then a final flash of Hell, no.
Now, I didn’t know Joe all that well. And it’s fair to say I’d had a lot of conflicting feelings about him since that red-and-white bowling jacket of
his came onto my radar. And my jury was still out on whether he was a good guy or the full opposite.
But I would never in a million years sic Parker on him. That was just basic human decency.
“I think he’s dating someone,” I said. “So?”
“So, I think he’s taken.” “So?”
“So…” The fact that I had to explain this was the exact reason why she was never getting his info. “It would be morally wrong of you to pursue a man who’s already seeing someone else.”
Parker did not take kindly to my obstructionism. “Are you the cheating police?”
“I’m just not going to help you with anything, Parker. Ever. For any reason.”
I could feel more than see Parker narrowing her face in suspicion. “You like him, don’t you?”
What? “No.”
“The way you say no is a clear yes.”
“I am protecting that guy from you the way I would protect any random stranger off the street.”
“Any random stranger you had a thing for.” “No.”
“Oh my god!” she said then with a thrilled gasp. “Is he the one who stood you up?”
“No one stood me up,” I said. “You’re a hilariously bad liar.”
Why was I even talking to her? I should have left the second I sensed who she was. “Just—fuck off, Parker. Okay? Can you do that?”
“Not until you give me his number.”
And that’s when we both heard a ding coming from my little purse, which had been hanging mutely from my shoulder this entire time, with the zipper unzipped and my cell phone sticking partly out. And the screen now lit up for us all to see.
There was a text on the screen: This is the front desk at Petopia Vet Clinic.
Then another quick ding: An emergency case came in just as Dr.
Addison was leaving.
Then a final: He asked us to let you know.
This was the text I’d been waiting for the entire eternity of the last hour
—but I didn’t even have time to respond before Parker reached out to try to snatch my phone. Like it might be a message from Joe.
Just as I realized what she was doing, I spun away.
Without even skipping a beat, as if she were perhaps a person who stole other people’s cell phones all the time, Parker lunged again in a one-two— this time around my other side, and with a lot more force.
It might even have worked—how hard is it to overpower someone in a coffee shop, after all?—but in the end, it didn’t. Because just at that moment, a woman with very unfortunate timing was walking toward us, and when Parker lunged to my side, she slammed right into her hard enough to knock her to the ground.
I remember it in slo-mo. The oof the woman made as her bottom hit the floor. The sloosh of her cold brew spilling. The tintinnabulation of ice cubes hitting the tile. Her shocked, shallow breaths at the cold shower of it all.
In the aftermath, we both stared at the woman, her white linen outfit now saturated brown with iced coffee like a sopped-up paper towel—and then Parker did the most Parker-esque thing a person could possibly do.
“Hey!” Parker said, checking her clothes for coffee splatters, like she’d been the victim all along. “Watch it!”
And then, done with both of us, she sailed out.
Anyway, that’s when the woman in the white linen dress started to cry. I bent down beside her. “Hey. Are you okay? Bet that was cold.”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“I’m so sorry about that,” I said then, helping her up. I glanced at the doorway Parker had just blown through. “She is the actual devil.”
Once she was vertical, the woman looked down to survey the damage— and started crying harder.
“Can I run up and grab you some sweatpants or something?” I asked. “I just live upstairs.”
But the woman said, “I don’t have time. I have to get to the airport.” I shook my head. “You can’t go like that.”
We both stared at her coffee-drenched clothes. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m late to pick up my boyfriend.”
“You can’t pick up a boyfriend like that, either,” I said. She started crying harder. “I know.”
“Okay,” I said. “Two minutes. Let’s get this solved,” and I pulled her by the hand behind me toward the bathroom.
There I toweled her off while she just stood there like a little kid. And I thought—as I often did—about how my mom would handle this situation. “Let’s switch outfits,” I said. “We’re about the same size.”
She hesitated like I was nuts.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I live right upstairs. I’ll just pop up and change.”
She wasn’t sure, but there was no time to argue, and before she fully knew it, we were in our underwear in side-by-side stalls, flopping our clothes over the divider.
“Are you sure?” she asked as I watched my dress slither away and disappear on the other side.
“I’m sure,” I said, wincing a bit as I slid my arm into her cold brown linen sleeve. “And, anyway, there’s no time to argue.”
“But … you looked so pretty in this.”
“Ha!” I said, the way women do, like she couldn’t possibly mean it, just as her compliment took its place as the best moment of my entire night. Then I went on, trying to stress how totally okay it was for her to walk out of the Bean Street bathroom in my favorite dress. “That dress was twenty dollars at Target,” I said. “It was on super clearance.”
“That just makes it more valuable,” she protested. Good point, in fact. She wasn’t wrong.
When we stepped out, I covered how wet and cold I now felt with massive enthusiasm for the sight of her in my dress. “You look phenomenal!” I practically sang. “You were born to wear that dress!”
“I’ll return it to you,” she said. “I’ll have it dry-cleaned and bring it back.”
But now I’d been swept away by the general joy of generosity—and the specific high of channeling my mother’s wisdom and kindness. “Keep it,” I said. “It really does look amazing.”
I mean, anybody would look amazing in my favorite dress. But still. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” I said, missing it already, even as I nodded. We both turned to give her a final once-over in the mirror.
“I look better than I did before,” she said, looking herself over. Then she turned to me. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“You weren’t even the one who knocked me down,” she said.
But then something occurred to me. “It’s really okay,” I said. “It’s nice to have a reason to do something nice.”
And I meant it.
