“So, I know this isn’t original, but what made you decide to use Finders Keepers?”
“A couple of friends did. One’s dating a nice guy now. The other wouldn’t call anybody. I’m pretty shy so I’m glad you called me.”
“Well, I don’t want to sound like the questionnaire, but what’s your favorite thing to do on a date?”
Eve gave a nervous laugh that wasn’t unpleasant. “Talk. I know that sounds terribly cliché, women like to talk, but I’m a kinder-garten teacher and I spend all day with sentences of four words or less. Some days I get in the car and say words like ‘multi-syllabic’
just to prove I am.”
Marissa chuckled. “I can see that. I’m not a great talker unless, I’ve been told, I get all worked up about something.” Linda had commented on that, and the way she used her hands to talk. Self-conscious, she shoved one hand under her thigh and let the other toy with the stir stick in her coffee. “I should confess that I’m a computer geek and I don’t talk to real people. Well, actually, in the last six months or so I’ve been talking to a lot of real people. It’s been a change.”
“You know, you look familiar, but I can’t place you.”
“Might have been one of the photos at the back of the Finders Keepers brochure. I’m one of the owners.”
“Oh!” Eve sipped her coffee. “I would have thought you had the perfect match already.”
“No time to look. Then I realized if I let work take all the time, 196
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I’d be forty and single and no telling how many perfect matches would have passed me by.”
“You think there’s more than one?”
Marissa shrugged. “Maybe for some people. I think that those who are fairly easygoing can be very content with a number of people. I mean solidly, happily content. Not to be confused with settling.”
“But shouldn’t there be more than that? I mean, I can’t imagine living with someone without a strong sense of contentment.” Eve frowned slightly as she chose her words. “But what about that certain zing? The passion?”
“I know what you mean.” She was liking Eve more by the minute, just as she’d liked Cicely and Wyndy when they’d had coffee. The computer had been right about a high-degree of compatibility—all had been in the 96 to 98 percent range. Conversation was easy. She had thought all three attractive in their own way and each had had an engaged intellect she found she could relate with.
But her pulse had never risen, not the way a single look from Linda could make it race. If not for Linda, she might easily have found Eve a perfect, comfortable companion. Because of Linda she knew she wouldn’t be happy with that. She didn’t know if that knowledge was a gift or a curse. “Passion matters to me.”
“So,” Eve asked, after another little pause, “another question.
What’s your favorite place to go on vacation?”
“Anywhere but work.” Marissa smiled into her cup then added more seriously, “I was in Tahiti last year and I’d love to go again.
Preferably without the shipwreck.”
“You were shipwrecked? How thrilling!”
Marissa found herself telling the tale, leaving out the part about Linda, Linda’s hands and mouth all over her and the resulting broken heart. She even chided herself for being on a date with a very nice woman only to think about Linda. “I finally did get the trip insurance money and I bought the books again, all prepared for that next trip.”
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“That sounds like the adventure of a lifetime. One I could do without, probably. I want to see Alaska.” Eve shook back her hair, looking as if she was truly enjoying their conversation.
The coffee was long gone when they both gathered their things and walked out of the coffeehouse together.
Summoning her courage, even though she was certain of the answer, she asked Eve, “So, are you feeling any of that zing?”
“I like you,” Eve said immediately. “I’d like to see you again.
But if there’s a zing, it’s going to take a while, I think.”
Relieved, Marissa said, “That’s about where I was. I can always use more friends and someone who has read all the Darkover books, more than once, that’s a real treat.”
“There’s a Xena convention in the city in a couple of weeks.
They’re fun and zany. What do you think?”
Marissa made a show of biting her lip. “I have to confess I never watched the show.” The mention of Xena made her think of Linda. What didn’t? “I never gave it a chance. The history thing bothered me.”
Eve laughed and it was full-throated and utterly charming. I could like her a lot, Marissa realized. I bet making love with her is easy and fun. There’s just no room in me right now for something so simple. Which is a completely messed up way to be.
“I have so many friends who feel the same way. Okay, so not your speed. Can I make a confession?” Eve’s expression turned serious as they sidestepped out of the way of more people exiting the coffeehouse.
“Sure.”
“I really did sign up because a friend did and filling out the questionnaire was really interesting. It was like a mini-therapy session. I had to think about a lot of things to be really honest. But I’ve been out of a relationship for about six months. It was a really bad relationship and I like you. Enough that I’m thinking hey, I could date you. And then this little voice asks me if I’m really ready to subject someone I like to some of the leftover stuff. I’m totally over her but some of the things that happened I’m not.”
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“Oh. Thank you for being honest about where you are, really.”
Marissa briefly touched Eve’s sleeve. “I’m, well maybe I’m a little bit in the same place. I got hurt, well, let’s say I let myself think something was more than it was and when it was clear it meant nothing to her it took me a while to get over it. I’m not sure that I am. The hurt, I mean.” Plus, she knew she could have added, the woman in question just showed up again and now I don’t know what I’m feeling.
“Well,” Eve said, her eyes taking on her easy smile again, “I think what all that means is for now, let’s not presume we’re going anywhere with this.”
Marissa had to grin. “I think that’s a total violation of the Finders Keepers recommendations. We signed something, didn’t we, that we felt ready and able to enter into a new relationship?”
“Yeah.” Eve flushed. “But doesn’t everybody think that in the abstract? But when faced with taking that next step, everything feels a little different.”
They turned toward the parking lot as Marissa said, “You and I are going to bring down the Finders Keepers statistics.”
“I am hungry now, though.” Eve had an engaging grin, and Marissa had no trouble imagining a room full of five-year-olds thinking their teacher was a total rock star.
“Me too. Think we should have dinner in the same place and share a table? For expedience, not because it’s a date?”
Eve chuckled and pointed at a burger place across from the movie theaters. “They do a turkey burger with mashed avocado and a lime sauce that’s pretty good. We could skip the fries.”
“I’m loving it already.”
Okay, Marissa thought, as they companionably consumed their meals, there will be no meaningless getting-over-Linda sex for me tonight. Not that she had seriously thought there would be. She’d had very little meaningful sex in her life but what there had been she’d downright enjoyed. She wanted what she’d felt with Linda—
but not with Linda she thought hastily. Maybe she wasn’t as over Linda as she had thought and maybe she had no business dating 199
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Eve or anyone else. Was that why she’d never followed up with Cicely and Wyndy? Had they also sensed that Chabot, Marissa wasn’t ready-for-prime
-time dating?
“Hey, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me you’re calling to cancel the salon appointment on Saturday morning.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you that, because that’s not why I called. Do you think I have some kind of relationship death wish?” Marissa veered around a speed bump then turned out of the megaplex parking lot.
Her mother laughed into the phone. “Are you asking me how to stop hanging onto a bad thing so you can take advantage of a good thing that comes along?”
“I suppose I could ask someone else but you’re the only person I’ve told about the Tahiti situation, though I’m not sure at all why I told you.”
“It was Christmas and you’d had that extra glass of red wine.
Besides, I’m your mother and you tell me everything.”
They snorted in stereo at that idea. “Yeah right. Anyway, this woman tonight seemed very nice. But as soon as I started thinking about U-Hauls the flashing neon lights went off.”
“Then you’re not ready. I’m not so sure it’s pathological though.”
Marissa turned onto the freeway ramp and accelerated toward home. “Oh, I don’t know. I had a crush on Octavia for years. It was a good shield against having to even try to date anyone. Besides—
hang on, I need to merge.”
After a lane change, Marissa continued, “Besides, Linda turned up this morning. Alive and well and she said she wanted me.”
“Oh, please. After a year?”
“Yeah, I know. I know.”
“The nerve.”
“She looked really good. Every time I see her or a photograph I 200
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realize I’ve forgotten how drop-dead gorgeous she is. It’s like I never see that. I see something else, but I don’t know what.”
“Please be careful.”
“I’m not going to see her again.”
“Oh, of course you are. If nothing else you’re curious.”
“My heart’s still got duct tape marks.”
“Just be careful.”
“You can bet on that.”
The words rang in her head as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. The sunshine earlier in the day had given way to a chillier front that threatened rain. There were no flowers on the doorstep, no letters in the mailbox, no messages blinking on the answering machine. She ignored the brown-wrapped package Linda had given her that morning—it already seemed ages ago—
as she made herself some green tea and sat down to check her e-mail.
She scanned the sender addresses on the new messages and her heart stopped. She closed her eyes briefly but when she looked again it was still there, a message from Linda. Her throat tightened as she relived all the months she had wanted to see that name. The subject line was “Up to You.”
Dear Marissa,
I’m not perfect, but I’m not a bad person, either. If you do look at the book I gave you I am hoping you can understand why I let go of you until now.
I will be in the area for at least another week, perhaps as long as a year if I am fortunate enough to get the job I interviewed for. I’m only telling you that because I won’t be in touch again. It’s up to you.”
Yours, Linda
The bottom of the message gave a cell phone number.
“It would serve you right if I never got in touch,” Marissa said to the screen. The stinging tears of hurt were a surprise. Hadn’t 201
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she cried enough? Hadn’t she changed enough? Why was Linda so far under her skin?
She glanced over at the package on the counter then resolutely went to bed.
The package was still there in the morning. After communing with the scale, opening her first Diet Coke, munching an energy bar and packing up a few things from the fridge, Marissa could ignore it no longer.
“I’ll glance through it at lunch,” she told herself. Running through the rain she got to the car in record time. She tossed her daypack on the passenger seat and the package on top of that.
It was a very long red light to get onto the main boulevard toward work, so it made sense to pick the package open at least.
After all, the paper was wet. She didn’t want to ruin the book. It would save time doing it later.
“Damn,” Marissa swore, when the light turned green. She set it aside, paper half torn, and dang it all, the lights were green all the way to the office.
It wasn’t until after an all-staff meeting followed by a sales staff meeting followed by a management meeting where she and Ocky drank too much coffee and fussed about loan interest rates that Marissa found any time alone in her office where she could finish unwrapping the book.
She didn’t know what she had expected, but it wasn’t a trade paperback with a blue cover and simple white lettering reading Winning at any Price: the Story of a Daughter and Mother. At the bottom the author was given as Lindsey Vanessa Bartok Price. So Linda had written a book?
She flipped the pages to find an About the Author or Foreword but instead the book opened to a substantial middle portion of photographs. The first literally took her breath away.
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She would know those eyes anywhere, the curving smile equally so. They belonged to a teenager with incredibly long legs, a waist that seemed nonexistent and long, dark hair that shone as if with its own light. Clad in a glittering one-piece swimsuit and strappy sandals, she posed with one leg back, one hand resting lightly on her hip.
The caption read, “Junior Miss Massachusetts was the height of my pageant career with a first runner-up finish. The winner was able to complete all of her duties and fulfill all of her obligations and so I remained a non-winner.”
Intrigued, she turned to the next photo. Linda looked perhaps a year or two older and was clad in a long silky sheath dress and a sash that proclaimed her “Miss Suffolk County.” Linda’s allusion to time in doctor’s offices, to needing “fixing”—had that been to be a beauty queen?
The caption was so bizarre she had to read it twice. “Though I was again crowned Miss Suffolk County, the state pageant was a complete rout when I didn’t even qualify for the finals. The next day I realized that my mother was tainting my food and had been for some time.”
Stunned, Marissa turned to the next page. Linda, at nineteen, looking gaunt and foreign with her hair shorn, had no smile. “My mother took this photo when I was being transferred from the emergency room that treated my cough syrup, wine and valium cocktail to the mental hospital where I would be treated for anorexia, a condition I did not have.”
Marissa’s heart seemed to be missing beats. She flipped through the remaining photographs and they were all the Linda she knew.
Whether a too-grown-up little girl’s body, a waiflike anguished young woman or the stronger, more familiar form of a Yale coed, Linda was there. Marissa looked back at the second photo and made herself reread the words, “ . . . My mother was tainting my food and had been for some time.”
She wanted not to believe it, the way she hadn’t wanted to believe a mother would drown all of her children or a father shoot 203
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his entire family. Monsters wore white sheets and hid in the shadows. Monsters weren’t real, she wanted to believe with all her heart.
Except they were. Sometimes they wore a religious smock or a banker’s suit. Sometimes they looked like the best father in the world and walked around free in the sunshine. Linda had been raised by a monster.
Her heart was breaking again, in a different way. She looked at the little girl one last time and turned to the front pages to confront the opening words.
“There was a night, not long ago, when I experienced moments of complete happiness. When every instinct in my body told me to run away from this happiness I knew there was something wrong, deep within me. I did run away from happiness b
ecause I wanted it for all the wrong reasons.”
“Marissa, whatever is it?”
She gasped and realized she was still at work and that tears were running down her face. “Sorry, Heather. A sad book. Silly, huh?”
She whisked a tissue out of the box and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “I’m going to make a ruin of my makeup.”
“Must be some book.”
“Yeah, it is. So you caught me, reading on the job.”
“I just stopped in to tell you that I’ll need to be gone for an extra hour at lunch on Thursdays. If that’s okay.”
Marissa managed a shaky breath. “It’s definitely okay. I think we can get Ruthann to agree to another hour on the desk—besides, she sort of hinted if you move into the tech side, she’d like the chance to prove she can do reception.”
“Well,” Heather said seriously, “she’s young but let’s give her a chance.”
“She’s the same age you were when I hired you.”
“True.” She grinned and Marissa wondered how it was Heather knew that shade of lipstick would make her mouth look wide and appealing. Guys were idiots—Heather was a doll. “I thought I 204
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could make up the hour by coming in thirty minutes early and leaving thirty minutes late?”
“It’s a plan. I’ll let Ocky know. I’ll call it cross-training and administrative staff development opportunities.”
“You,” Heather said cheekily, “are so full of shit sometimes.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Heather laughed as she headed back to the front office. Marissa could feel the book warm under her hand. She didn’t want to look down. She’d only start crying again. She closed it without another glance and pushed it gently into her daypack. Then, before she could rationalize away her impulse, she turned to her computer.
Dear Linda,
There’s a beautiful rose garden not far from my office.
Could I meet you there Saturday afternoon at three for a walk?
Marissa
P.S. If yes, click this URL for directions.
She held her breath for several moments before she clicked the send button. Then she found herself holding it again, waiting for a reply, which was a silly waste of time. Linda could be anywhere, of course.
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