Dating by the Book

by Mary Ann Marlowe

  I used to love the old church at the end of the block. It dated back to the founding of Orion and had a deep history from the many christenings, weddings, and funerals. I’d insisted on getting married there, and now my own history stained those walls.

  I jogged down the little hill leading to the path by the stream. The gazebo was empty and dark. A perfect place to calm down and think.

  As I watched the black water ripple in the moonlight, I took stock of all the things I knew to be real in my life—my friends, my mom, my shop—and a book review wasn’t one of them. Silver Fox had no power over me here.

  I resolved to do what I should have done in the first place: Forget about him and let it drift away, like the gurgling brook below.

  One day at a time would become my mantra as I resisted the siren call of risking my career and reputation on another suicide note to my new arch nemesis. I would not respond to Silver Fox. I would not take his bait. He’d just have to wonder how his words had landed.

  Chapter 6

  Sunday, after church services ended, Gentry required all the store owners in town to meet at his restaurant to plan the Fourth of July activities coming up in less than a month. He put me in charge of writing the newsletter. Yes—Orion had a newsletter.

  When the meeting ended, I stretched and unlocked my phone to check notifications. The volume was down, and I’d missed a call from my mom, but I was heading over there anyway.

  I had a few emails in my personal account, mostly garbage, but there was a new one from Peter with the subject, “May Finances.” I groaned. The last time I’d talked to him, a couple of weeks earlier, we’d been texting about the insurance policy of all the boring things, and he just stopped responding without so much as a “talk to you later.” So I’d made another four or five replies before realizing I was talking to myself. Typical. If only he’d correspond about more than the monthly financial analysis.

  With dread, I opened his email and scanned it. He’d pasted in a small spreadsheet with a breakdown of last month’s income versus expenses. The outflow was more than the inflow, again. I’d covered the last deficit with a transfer from my savings account. I had to make the mortgage payments—which included interest on Peter’s down payment loan—and pay for electricity and WiFi. I had to buy coffee and milk and bread and, of course, books. I couldn’t tighten the budget much more. I’d already scaled back on promotions, which went against everything I’d learned in business classes. It was hard to justify the outlay of cash when I couldn’t see an immediate return.

  He added:

  Your credit is stretched, and I know you don’t have a lot of cash on hand. If you can’t increase revenue, you’re going to need to cut expenses. Look at how much you’re paying the Becketts for food you could easily make yourself. You need to sever ties with them and save the money.

  Oh yeah. He would love for me to sever ties with Max. He’d never liked Max from the minute they’d met. I always figured it was because Max never liked Peter. But Peter was wrong. Sure, I could save money if I made two dozen blueberry muffins every morning. Ordering from the Becketts allowed me to offer a variety of different items. I’d be baking nonstop. And I couldn’t simply stop selling food. Peter had to know that I earned more revenue on food than I spent. He had to know his advice would plunge me faster into ruin. That was probably his intent.

  The end of Peter’s email made me sit bolt upright.

  I read your blog last weekend, and I have to say, your writeup on Pride and Prejudice made me think about us. Anyway, I picked up a copy and reread it over the weekend.

  I scratched my head and tried to recall what I’d written. Other than him looking down on me and my small town, what comparisons could be drawn? Was he trying to say I was being stubborn and irrational? Did he believe his motivations were all noble and good if I’d just open my mind? Was he waiting for me to conclude I’d been wrong all along and admit defeat? To give everything up and integrate into his world?

  He’d be waiting a while.

  I wasn’t even sure how to respond to his comment, and I definitely wanted to ignore his financial input, so I gathered my things and began the walk out to my mom’s to help her in the garden and talk. It was almost two miles to the edge of the subdivision where Layla, Max, and I had grown up. It was another mile or so out to Dylan’s parents’ farm if I kept going.

  As I walked along the thin country road past shoulder-high fields of corn, I had such a strong memory of my days riding my bike back and forth between my house and Dylan’s. Or riding on the back of his motorbike.

  The blue sky stretched on forever to the horizon, unbroken by a single cloud or chem trail. A slight breeze stirred the tops of the corn. The phrase “knee-high by the fourth of July” was a lie. The stalks would soon get so tall it would creep me out to walk alone beside them, lest a demonic child or dead baseball hero should emerge. Today, the tops of houses in the subdivision beyond peeked over the farthest edge of the field.

  At the bend in the road, a crazy, twisty oak with a massive trunk stood like a landmark for locals to give directions by. “Go yonder past the great oak . . .” When I was little, I used to think this was the origin of the Berenstain Bears’ Spooky Old Tree. I could still imagine dragging a ladder up to it and climbing in to find a great sleeping bear.

  The occasional car passed, and I stepped into the ditch. The driver would wave or offer me a ride, but I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. It was too nice a day.

  Soon my mind ricocheted across my many worries: the health of the bookstore, the release of my first novel, the draft of the next, and as always, my sadness over a past I’d lost and a potential present I wasn’t living. It made me angry that I had to choose between two incomplete paths. It wasn’t fair.

  In the early days of our migration to the ex-burbs, when Peter was still naïvely enthusiastic about slowing things down and growing old in the country together, he’d unironically taken in all the local color of Orion. We’d go for a slice at Anderson’s or get a beer with my friends at the Jukebox. While the country pace fit me perfectly, Peter liked doing active, interesting things. I had everything I’d ever want or need. But I had to admit, the best Saturdays in Orion were lame compared to hip bars and cosmopolitan entertainment. Peter had traded cocktail parties in the city for casual walks along the path by the stream. There was nothing to do in Orion unless you knew how to find it.

  When we’d lived in Peter’s world, with his friends, he’d been perfectly happy with me. From his point of view, it must have seemed like I was the one who’d changed. I’d probably left him wishing he could return to the life he’d started with me.

  Peter tried to make it work for several months, and I tried to ignore the signs that he was growing bored with the prosaic routine, exactly as I’d lost interest in his fast-paced world. My relationship with him became more practical, in the way socking money into a 401k was more sensible than investing in a failing bookstore in a backwater town.

  Maybe if I’d never come back to Orion, we’d still be together in Indianapolis. Maybe we’d be sitting across from each other in a coffee shop, in separate worlds.

  Silver Fox’s words, “Not every romantic relationship is something to write home about” stung like rubbing alcohol on an open wound. We had been something once. I clenched a fist and muttered, “It wasn’t entirely my fault Peter left.”

  I found Mom in the backyard, white hair twisted up in a chignon, dirt up to her wrists. She handed me a pair of gloves and a trowel, and I took out my frustration by yanking out unwanted plants. I tuned her out a bit when she started relaying secondhand gossip from her bunco club the night before. All the moms on the block knew each other’s business, and whoever wasn’t there became the topic of any group discussion. I found it boring, but at least hearing the drama of the neighborhood reminded me I didn’t have the worst problems in the world.

  My ears perked up when she said, “Brenda asked after you and Peter.”

  So they
were whispering about me even out here in the hinterlands. I didn’t have a response to Brenda who wasn’t there, so I slammed the trowel into the earth and tugged on a stubborn root. “Uh-huh.”

  Mom paused in her labors. “I just can’t understand why you two haven’t worked this all out. I bet if you both sat down over a nice dinner, you’d resolve everything in a conversation.”

  As if Peter and I were the leads in an infuriating romance. Words from Silver Fox’s damn email floated to mind, and I quoted them at her, sarcastically, “I guess it wasn’t a love for the ages.”

  Her eyebrows knit together, and I felt like an asshole. Her husband, the man who would have been my adoptive dad, died before I’d even settled into my new home when I was a baby. I still called him my dad because my mom did. I never knew my original sperm donor. I liked to say I’d had a “near dad experience.” Never in front of my mom of course.

  Mom meant well. She’d always liked Peter. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still talked to him. I think he reminded her of my elegant dad somehow, and that pinched my heart more than anything. I sometimes forgot what she’d lost, what she’d sacrificed, and then I’d go and inadvertently say something cruel.

  I’d never seen my mom in a romantic relationship, so it was easy to imagine she’d always been self-sufficient. She probably could have remarried after my dad died. I used to think she didn’t date because it might confuse me or because she didn’t want to neglect me more than she had to for work. But when I asked her, she said, “I did it right the first time.”

  I only knew my would-be dad through photographs and stories, and the way she talked about him made him seem perfect. Caring, patient, handsome, funny. I envied my friends whose dads told pitifully awful jokes and let us watch questionable TV shows while their moms were away, who took us all out for ice cream and insisted on tuning the car radio to music from last century, telling us the history of bands they thought were the height of cool. Still whenever I used to picture my dad, I’d embellish him with wealth and intelligence and sophistication, every wish fulfillment trope in all of literature. My imaginary dad was better than anyone else’s real one.

  In reality, the universe didn’t have a father for me.

  I reached over and hugged my mom. “I’m sorry. I’m mad about so many things right now, but I’m not mad at you, and that wasn’t called for.”

  She smiled. “You were aptly named.” She let it go just like that. I always found it ironic that my birth mother gave me up because she couldn’t raise me alone, while Mrs. Trudi Hanson had managed to bring me up on her own. She’d done a kick-ass job.

  * * *

  The benefit to getting away from my apartment and the bookstore was that experiencing the world gave me food for thought and got my imagination spinning. The farther away from a keyboard I found myself, the more the words piled up in my mind, and I needed to pour them out onto the page.

  My characters talked to me the whole walk home, and I was eager to dive into my writing for the first time since I’d gotten that debilitating review. Glass of pinot grigio at hand, I set my timer to force myself to shut out social media for an hour. I needed to focus. A check-in email from my editor earlier in the day lit a fire under my ass. My deadline was barreling toward me.

  I stretched my fingers out, laid them on the keyboard, and then, to my horror, my mind went blank.

  The cursor blinked, taunting me, discouraging me. All the words that had been bursting to get out dried up and flew away. I typed a sentence anyway and cringed. I forced out an entire paragraph, fighting against a growing conviction there was no point to this book. Why finish it?

  The spidery voice of a lone douche lord insisted I couldn’t write romance. Had I bungled the chemistry of the leads once again?

  I’d written half the sequel in an emotional dead zone. Was it obvious?

  I reread the last paragraph I’d written.

  The fields burned for hectares in every direction, darkening the sky with a billowing tower of black smoke. Rane stumbled to the cliff’s edge, grasping the open wound at his side. He’d heal himself once the battle was over, if he lived that long. He needed to get to Lira before the flames reached the portal. He shuddered to think what might happen if the fire breached the door between worlds.

  What might happen to Lira.

  * * *

  It had sounded pretty good in my head. Now I stared at it and wondered if it was garbage. Would reviewers single out this passage to mock? Would readers roll their eyes at the melodrama? Or would they sense the urgency? Would they believe Rane’s desperate need to rescue Lira even at great cost to himself? Would they say this book was worse than the first?

  The impostor syndrome that usually plagued me had been given a voice. Damn that Silver Fox.

  So much for one day at a time. I hadn’t made it one full day before the hostility built up until I couldn’t stand it. If I knew where he lived, I’d bang on his door and demand he retract every word. Not just his review, but his criticism of me.

  I hit Reply on his last email and suddenly words flowed from my fingertips if for no other reason than to vent my spleen, even if I wouldn’t actually send it.

  Silver Fox,

  Do you even have a name? Or do you go through your real life hiding behind anonymity so you can shit on people without any fear of blowback? Seriously, I know I’m not supposed to respond to reviewers. You didn’t need to remind me of that. And I know what I’ve signed up for, but you know what? I was drunk and I made a bad decision. But you . . . You seem to think that since nobody will call you out on your opinions, you can be as hurtful as you want. Maybe it’s time someone let you know there’s a human being on the other end.

  As for being handed a shit sandwich and expected to sit down and eat it, you have no place telling me whether my romantic life makes me qualified to write romance. Last time I checked, Buster—

  Ack. Buster?

  I backspaced over that.

  —I’ve never stood on a planet with two moons while attempting to solve a puzzle that no man had solved for millennia. Maybe you think sitting in your underwear, playing Zelda until your hair turns crusty and even your mom is telling you to get a shower, makes you an expert in fantasy, but I happen to know it takes more than personal experience to bring a world to life—whether that world be complete fabrication or ripped from today’s headlines. You need imagination, and you clearly do not have a shred of that or an ounce of humanity.

  You can kiss my ass.

  Claire

  I may have gone too far. My finger hovered over the Send button, daring myself to jump off this precipice a second time. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew responding to reviewers was a major no-no. I wavered. He wasn’t worth wrecking my career over.

  But then I remembered his “get out of publishing” comment, and I felt righteously angry. I was Katniss Everdeen, giving Silver Fox a three finger salute.

  Fuck it. I hit send.

  Layla was going to crucify me. Something compelled me to read back what I’d written, and I was horrified, but I had to laugh, too. Morbidly. My career was probably ruined, but if Silver Fox was right about my novel, I wasn’t going to have a career for him to destroy anyway. My books would tank on their own.

  I looked at my draft, and the cursor blinked at me like a ticking time bomb. I couldn’t face it, so I did what I always did when confronted with life: I pulled out a book I’d already read many times and lost myself in the familiar words of someone else. Immersed in Jane Eyre, I found my soul. Suffering under surly Rochester, Jane understood my struggles.

  Chapter 7

  The week passed by blissfully, quiet in a good way. I didn’t hear back from that reviewer, so I assumed he’d turned tail and fled back to his mama’s apron strings. By Friday, I’d managed to work him out of my head and write a new chapter.

  The bookstore had not been quiet, thankfully. Business had steadily improved as the days grew warmer and longer.

  Orion’s proximity t
o Indianapolis made it a convenient stop along the way for antiquers or day trippers heading out to visit the various covered bridges farther west. As much as Gentry complained about my dilapidated shop, our quaint small-town storefronts were a part of Orion’s appeal. The worn exterior of my bookshop frequently popped up on Instagram. The front window had twenty-five panes of old-fashioned glass with THE MOSSY STONE spelled out in colorful paint. Sometimes with an addition from local hooligans.

  The inside felt as cozy as a warm blanket on a rainy day. Most visitors came in out of curiosity, but once inside, they’d catch a whiff of the coffee and be lured farther in to the café, like the couple now glancing at my displays.

  The woman picked up a souvenir mug, flipped it over to check the price, then set it back down. She did the same with the locally packaged candy. The man had discovered the shelf in the front of the store with curated titles—all handpicked to stroke the ego of readers with a literary bent. I liked to call it the Willing Wall because it was filled with books people loved to urge others to read, turning them into temporary salespeople for me. “Oh, you will love this book!” was an oft-heard phrase as people scanned the list.

  Today, the man lifted his eyeglasses and squinted at the titles. “Sandra, have you ever read Lords of Discipline?”

  Sandra joined him and scanned the wall. “Oh, look. Anne of Green Gables.” She picked it up like it was an old friend. I knew the feeling.

  I left them alone to talk themselves into buying the books they’d already read. I’d only approach them if they asked me for assistance. Or if they ventured into the stacks. Anyone who strayed from the prepackaged enticements was usually looking for something specific. Occasionally they were browsing, but then they might want recommendations.