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  “His name is Patrick. Late forties. He’s an actuary.”

  “Lively.”

  “Yes, I made that joke, too. Turns out he’s heard that kind of thing before.” Nancy ran her hand through her hair, tossing her short auburn locks. Olivia wasn’t sure if the messy, sexy effect was planned or a happy coincidence. “He’s divorced, with a son and a daughter, one in college and one working,” she added.

  “Was it just dinner?”

  “After, we took a walk by the river. It’s so quaint there, the carriages and cobblestone street. And things seemed to be going really well. Then, suddenly, out of the blue, he said he needed to get back to his hotel for a business call.”

  “Why didn’t he just use his cell phone?”

  Nancy raised her eyebrow. “You tell me. So he walked me to my car and gave me a hug. Then, not five minutes after I got home, he texted me.”

  “Texting! Cool. Next he’ll ask you to prom,” Olivia said.

  “I don’t think so. I think he’s looking for the kind of girl who puts out on prom night.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Nancy laughed. “Him more than most.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “We started having this long conversation by text. I kept thinking I should suggest we just call each other. Or maybe he could come over for a drink. But it just kept on. He asked me about work and the kids.”

  “I love that feeling when everything they say is so interesting.” Olivia thought she could remember a time when she and Mike had talked for hours. But now she couldn’t think what on earth they’d spoken about. Possibly, she remembered it more romantically than the reality.

  “Oh he’s interesting, all right.” Nancy pulled her back to the present conversation.

  “Go on,” Olivia said cautiously.

  “By now it was nearly two in the morning, and I was so tired I texted him I was getting ready for bed. He wrote back, ‘I want to send you a picture to think about as you drift off to sleep.’”

  “Should I be afraid?” Olivia asked.

  “Yes. Be afraid. Very afraid.”

  “Naked chest. Looking-in-the-mirror type of thing?”

  “If only,” Nancy answered.

  “Lower?”

  “Mmmm hmmm. Fully erect, naked penis.”

  “No,” Olivia gasped, her eyes open wide.

  “Oh yes. Followed half a second later by a side view, just in case I hadn’t quite got the idea.”

  “Can I see?” Olivia glanced at Nancy’s phone.

  “Olivia!” Nancy’s voice shot up an octave. “I deleted them.”

  “Oh well. So much for Penis Patrick.”

  Unfortunately, Nancy had just taken a gulp of her water, and it sputtered out her nose like an angel in a baroque fountain.

  Olivia patted at Nancy’s wet shirt ineffectually with a napkin. “Sure wish I would have seen those pictures, though,” she lamented.

  “Why don’t you go home and look at Mike’s penis. They’re all about the same.”

  Olivia gave a sort of disagreeing snort, but it was only half out loud.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OLIVIA OFTEN WONDERED how she would have managed as a teenager with the time-sucking allure of the World Wide Web at her fingertips. Now, watching the Vikings game with Mike and Daniel, she sat on the couch simultaneously shopping for holiday sweaters at Macys, playing Words With Friends, and checking an email discussion about a pasta feed to be sponsored by the swim team booster club.

  Across the room, Daniel jumped up, screaming at the field goal kicker, and Mike dropped his head into his hands in disgust. Olivia glanced at the TV to see what knucklehead move the team had made when, over the tumult of the guys’ frenzied reaction, she heard a chat ping on Facebook.

  It was Jake. Her tongue gave a happy click against the roof of her mouth.

  “Tell me 100 things about you,” he wrote.

  “Well hi, Jake,” she answered.

  “Favorite book?”

  She gave a springtime smile. “Pride and Prejudice. Yours?”

  “No. Tonight’s just about you. Siblings?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Three,” she answered. “One sister.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Two older. One younger brother.”

  “In town?”

  “Nope. Milwaukee. Chicago. Albuquerque.”

  “Favorite holiday?”

  “Thanksgiving,” she wrote, leaning forward.

  “Favorite Thanksgiving food?”

  “Leftovers on Friday morning.”

  “Magazine you read in the grocery checkout?”

  “Cosmo.”

  “Ooh. La. La. Pajamas in the summer. Yes or No?”

  She narrowed her eyes, wondering if she should even answer that question, then shrugged her shoulders and wrote, “Bottoms, yes.”

  “Ooh. La. La again. Major in college?”

  “Journalism.”

  “Foreign languages spoken?” he asked.

  “High school French. But I’ve forgotten it all except bonjour.”

  “Best song to hear performed live?”

  “’Landslide,’ by Fleetwood Mac.”

  “Hey! I sing that,” he typed.

  “I know. You sang it that night at Anne’s wedding. I remembered.”

  “Oh yeah. It was her favorite song.”

  “I remember you looked so nervous walking up there. You had your guitar at the side of the stage. Billy told us that you played for your church youth group all the time. He said you’d be fine.”

  “It was a big crowd that night, though. I was used to playing for small groups of about twenty teenagers who were always in a receptive mood. They’d just had Kool-Aid, chocolate chip cookies, and the Good Word of the Lord.”

  “Well, this crowd had an open bar.”

  “True,” he wrote.

  “You were wonderful. I remember Anne had us all sitting at…I guess she thought of it as the kids’ table, although we were all in college by then. And you were fairly quiet, but after you sang you had this…swagger when you came back.”

  “Wasn’t there a guy sitting by you? And then he left. Is that right?”

  “He was a friend from school. He got up and went to the bar, and then you sat down next to me. I think he was annoyed. I was the only person he knew, so he stayed pretty close to me.”

  “Olivia, I don’t think that’s why he stayed close to you.”

  “Oh. You are sweet.”

  “Then I stuck close to you after.”

  “Yes. I remember. You made me laugh so hard. I wonder what we were talking about.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I asked you to dance,” Olivia said.

  “I don’t remember us dancing.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “I turned you down? Sorry, I hated dancing. Still do. Two left feet.”

  “A lot of men feel like that. Still, though,” she bantered, “a nice opportunity to wrap your arms around someone. Pull them in tightly.”

  “My older self would not have turned that down.”

  “What are you smiling at?” Mike asked, surprising her.

  Olivia looked up, the room’s silence assaulted her senses after the earlier pandemonium. “Where did Daniel go?”

  “He went up after the game. He said good night.”

  “Oh.” She sounded flustered. “I guess I didn’t hear.”

  Mike moved to sit next to her. “What are you so absorbed with?”

  Olivia quickly shut the Facebook tab, so the Macy’s page popped up, displaying rows of sweaters, in blacks, browns, and beiges, with an occasional red or green holiday offering. “Just shopping.”

  Mike touched his hand to her back, rubbing softly. He pointed to a black sweater covered in shimmering sequins. “You’d look hot in that.”

  It unnerved her tonight to have Mike sit so close, rubbing his hand possessively in sm
all circles around her back.

  “It’s almost $200,” she pointed out, angling herself out of reach. “I’m just going to play a bit more online. I’ll come to bed in a minute.”

  “Okay.” His voice sounded tired, and when he stood, his shoulders hunched a little.

  Olivia considered telling Mike she was just chatting with one of Billy’s old friends, but before she could, he turned away. She remained silent as she watched him retreat toward their bedroom. When she reopened Facebook, the jolt of pleasure she felt in discovering Jake still online surprised her.

  “Sorry,” she pinged him. “Interrupted.”

  She started to type that she needed to say good night, but then Jake wrote, “Where were we? Question 17 I think.” And when he asked her what her favorite Saturday morning TV program had been, she found herself typing out a long response about Scooby Doo.

  Then he wrote, “Okay, here’s a question I’m not sure if I should ask.”

  “Why not? We’re on a roll,” she typed breezily, but her stomach suddenly felt tight.

  “Did you ask Billy to ask me to a party at your college?”

  Olivia tried to remember. “Yes. Now that you say that. I did. That next fall. But you didn’t come.”

  “He didn’t tell me about it until years later. We were in our thirties, I think.”

  “Why would he tell you then?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I wonder why he never asked you?” she typed. After a moment she added, “Would you have come if he’d told you?”

  “I wasn’t very confident back then.”

  “It takes a lot of confidence to sing in front of a crowd of strangers.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Or to sit and talk with a lovely girl.” When Olivia didn’t respond he wrote, “You’re the lovely girl, you know.”

  The compliment felt like a warm sip of sherry. “Thank you. So, would you have?”

  “I think so. Yes. If Billy had told me you’d asked.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t,” she said again.

  “He never said.”

  Mike shouted to her from the bedroom. “Olivia, are you coming to bed?”

  “A few more minutes,” she called. Then she typed, “It’s late.”

  “Time flies,” he wrote in response.

  She wasn’t sure if he was talking about tonight or the last two decades, or possibly both. She had that feeling, like a summer evening, when the sun finally decides to set and she would try so hard to hold on to the last bit of light and warmth. “Tonight was fun.”

  “It was,” he wrote. “Kind of like our nineteen-year-old selves finally got to go on that date.”

  “Yes.” She wondered if she could prolong the conversation. She wondered if she should.

  But the message, “Sweet dreams,” popped up, and his green chat light disappeared.

  Olivia signed off, and as she walked into the bedroom, she let her mind wander to the traditional high mark of first dates, the good night kiss.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN MIKE ARRIVED HOME the next evening, Olivia had two place settings out for dinner. Daniel had called at the last minute and begged off. The table seemed overlarge with just the two plates, so Olivia added a robust glass of chardonnay at Mike’s spot. The glass she held was already half empty.

  “It took me forever,” Mike said, walking in. “Lee cornered me in the parking lot and I couldn’t get away.”

  “No problem.” She gave him an inept kiss that mostly missed his cheek. “I’m glad it wasn’t tomorrow night, though. I have to pick Nancy up at the airport.”

  “Where is she?”

  “New York, visiting her college roommate,” Olivia answered. And Mike made no further inquiries.

  As they ate, Mike told her about his coworker’s newest buying adventure. Lee, an engineer at Mike’s office, had remarried just before his fifty-fifth birthday, only to happily discover a month after the wedding his new wife had stumbled into a $100,000 inheritance. He and his blushing bride seemed determined to spend the money as quickly as they’d come into it.

  “He’s looking at buying an RV. He’s thinking either a travel trailer or a fifth wheel. Do you know the difference?” Mike asked conversationally.

  “About the difference between a Lutheran and a Methodist, I’d guess.”

  Mike laughed and took her hand across the table. She looked at him and noticed the stubble on his chin had some silver mixed in with the reddish tones. She touched the coarse hairs gently.

  “I guess the difference is a travel trailer makes towing smoother and gets better fuel mileage, but a fifth wheel is easier to hitch and unhitch and has more storage space.”

  Olivia could not think of a single word in response.

  “Good pasta,” Mike said after a few minutes, and Olivia wondered if they were on the verge of running out of conversation entirely.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OLIVIA FOUND NANCY WAITING, hands full, in the glass entry outside baggage claim. It took a moment to stow all her paraphernalia: a small, wheeled suitcase; a tote with a semicircle airplane pillow poking out; and Nancy herself, holding her Caribou takeout cup.

  Once she was settled, Olivia navigated back to the highway and said, “Tell me everything.”

  “Wait. First.…” Nancy held up her index finger and dug around in her purse with her free hand. “I have something for you.”

  “Ohhh. A souvenir.”

  “Yep,” Nancy answered without looking up. After a suspenseful moment, she pulled out a canary-yellow business card and held it up for Olivia’s inspection. Although it was too dark in the car to read the name, Olivia clearly made out the familiar black bumble bee icon in the top right corner.

  “Stinger Publishing,” Olivia said, her voice awed. The symbol had adorned nearly all of Daniel’s favorite childhood books.

  “This card belongs to.…” Nancy dragged out the last word, clearly relishing prolonging the mystery.

  “To?”

  “An acquisitions editor for their middle-grade line.”

  Olivia tried to read the name on the card, but that was both difficult and unsafe as she drove.

  “Hey. Watch the road,” Nancy said. “I’ll tell the story.”

  Nancy and her college roommate, Tonia, had come to the city for lunch and a Broadway matinee to meet Tonia’s aunt Ruth, who Nancy described as the quintessential New Yorker. The older woman had lit up a cigarette in the twenty-odd feet between the cab and Carnegie Deli, then talked nonstop through lunch. Ruth had listed the things the two younger women absolutely, positively had to see between proficient bites of a monstrous corned beef sandwich. Nancy, having ordered the same, hardly knew where to begin tackling the lunch, which would have fed both her and the girls.

  Ruth chain-smoked as they walked to the theater, despite Tonia’s admonishments.

  “They got in a little scuffle over who smoked more, Ruth or Tonia’s mom,” Nancy explained. “But as soon as Tonia asked her to put the cigarette out, she did. Ruth would do anything for Tonia, especially since her mother died.”

  As Nancy told Olivia, Ruth had been chief consoler, funeral planner, and surrogate mother, even though the loss of her sister had to break Ruth nearly as badly as it did Tonia.

  Olivia tapped her finger on the corner of the card, silently urging Nancy back to that part of the story.

  Picking up the hint, Nancy continued. “After the show, we walked Ruth back to her office. She’s a bit self-important. ‘West Coast calls,’ she kept saying. And when we got there and I saw where she worked…I told her about you.”

  Olivia looked away from the road again. “That’s amazing. I can’t believe you did that for me.”

  “It didn’t do much good at first. She told me everyone has a friend who’s an author.”

  “I think that’s literally true,” Olivia said, her words as heavy as a stack of rejection letters.

  “She said she was too busy to look at unagented authors. And I
was ready to leave it at that, but then Tonia said, ‘C’mon, Ruth. Nancy saved my life.’”

  “You saved her life?”

  “I didn’t step in front of an oncoming car or anything,” Nancy said. “It was in college. Tonia found her boyfriend in bed with another woman.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yep. Her first real love.”

  “Oh,” Olivia said sadly.

  “Well, by that I mean the guy she lost her virginity to,” Nancy explained. “But it broke her heart. Temporarily. For weeks she just moped around our apartment, skipping classes, sleeping all day.”

  “Poor thing.”

  Nancy nodded. “I listened. I brought her bags of Snickers and crates of Kleenex. What else can you do?”

  “Sometimes that’s all a person needs.”

  “True.” Nancy nodded. “And it did work, eventually. Tonia was mostly over him by the time her family knew anything, but by then her grades had plummeted, so I think she made it sound more desperate than it had been. Anyway, Tonia loves her aunt. But she also knows how to work her. So when Tonia asked, Ruth pulled out her card and said, ‘I’ll give your friend’s manuscript a fast look. But make sure she writes Tonia’s roommate in the subject line or I’ll forget I agreed to this.’”

  “I can’t believe it,” Olivia said, reaching for the card. “She’ll read it. Oh, Nancy. Thank you.”

  “It’s only fair. You saved me after Dave died. You know, crates of Kleenex, bags of Snickers.”

  “I never bought you Snickers,” Olivia said, as if it had just occurred to her how restorative the nutty chocolate bars could have been.

  “Thank the Lord for that. I certainly didn’t need another five pounds to work off my butt. Now, let me tell you about New York.”

  “Yes,” Olivia agreed. But she found it hard to concentrate on what Nancy was saying because the name Stinger Publishing kept buzzing about in her head.

  CHAPTER NINE

  RUNNING ERRANDS AT LUNCH, Olivia rehashed the previous night’s brief conversation with Jake, which began with his familiar habit of starting talks halfway through, leaving her a bit off-kilter, like the sideways fun of a carnival ride.

  “Halloween plans?” he’d asked, as a greeting.