“Congratulations,” he said, dropping it in my palm as if he understood the freedom the car represented. The weight of the key in my hand surprised me.
Use your independence wisely. That was the message I’d read on a fortune cookie I’d gotten the last time the kids and I had ordered Chinese takeout. I’d taped it onto my computer. Buying the TT was as good a way to symbolize my independence as I could conjure.
He climbed back into his cab for the long trip back to Nashville. As the empty box truck started to ramble down my drive under its shady canopy of beech trees, he cranked down his window. “Babe,” he yelled over his shoulder, his grin showing stained teeth. “You’re gonna be the coolest MILF in the Hamptons!” I loved it when any man called me babe. And if older, male rednecks knew what a MILF was, I’d been a worm living under a rock.
Then I slid behind the wheel, cranked up the engine, gunned it a few times, and zipped to the grocery store in my official MILF mobile.
* * *
A few weeks into my TV gig, while still getting down the new routine, Marc Jessup and I nearly collided in the break room after my segment.
“Hey, I’m going down,” Marc said, pointing to the elevator. “I’ll walk out with you.”
We rode down in awkward elevator silence. He was shorter than I was, and skinnier in a geeky, unathletic way I nonetheless found so attractive I could hardly look at him. We both turned right in the marble-and-chrome lobby, heading toward the back entrance. The TT was delicately squeezed into a spot on the narrow Philly street behind the studio. Marc stopped on the sidewalk as I pulled out my key and chirped the remote security system.
“Whoa, nice car,” he gushed. He walked around it and whistled. “Costs more than the balance on my student loans. You have to take me for a ride,” he said, raising one eyebrow flirtatiously. “One day.”
I laughed. This was getting interesting.
“Hey, I’m getting coffee around the corner,” he said, holding out his hand as if he were asking me to dance. “Wanna join me?”
“Sure, Marc.”
I clicked the TT remote to lock the car, and we walked kitty corner across the street to La Colombe. It was empty at this hour. The barista, who looked like she could be Rihanna’s twin sister, seemed almost happy to have something to do. I wondered how we looked to her.
“Black coffee?” Marc asked after I placed my order. He slid a ten-dollar bill across the counter. “Thank God. My old girlfriend took this crazy mix of cream and hazelnut flavor. I could never get it right. Ugh. Black is so easy.”
I pushed the ten back to him.
“Save your money for that student loan,” I told him, smiling.
He nodded. “Thanks, babe.”
Babe? He kept talking. “Every penny counts.”
He put the bill back in his jeans pocket while I paid for our coffees.
“But you miss her, right?” I said, trying to pretend that twentyish men called me babe every day. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about her coffee.”
He grinned. “Yup. Cried like a baby the day she left. She got a big job in California. She had to go. It’s been two years, but I still talk to her almost every day.”
We moved to the pickup counter. Through La Colombe’s four-foot-high speakers, Sheryl Crow crooned, “You’re my favorite mistake . . .”
“Why didn’t you go with her?”
“Complicated. She was older. She wanted kids. Only a few years to squeeze them in. I was right out of college. Everything was good between us, but we were at such different places in our careers and our lives.”
The barista put our steaming coffees on the counter. Mine was so hot, I could hardly pick it up.
“When her job offer came, we both knew it was time to end it. But when you love someone, it never feels right to let go.”
Wow. If he’d been in his twenties, and she had only a few more years to have kids, she must have been at least ten years older. Maybe fifteen. Was he one of KC’s MILF fans? Obviously, he wasn’t afraid of loving someone older. Or talking about it. Did that explain why he’d been flirting with me?
He walked me back to the TT. We stood on the Philadelphia sidewalk, generously festooned with gum and trash. He talked, I listened, and we finished our drinks. He took my empty cup in his free hand. Our fingertips touched briefly and I felt a jolt of connection.
“And now? Anyone special?” I asked him.
“I’m trying to be good,” he said, looking straight into my eyes with a mischievous grin.
I slipped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. In the rearview mirror, I watched him watch me drive away, holding both recycled cardboard coffee containers, an inscrutable half-smile on his perfect twenty-whatever lips.
* * *
Before I knew it, it had been more than a week since I’d heard from Damon. Then I had a three-day trip to Orlando to speak at the Delta Gamma national convention. I texted him when I got home, the day before the AAU baseball nationals, to ask if he wanted to watch it with me.
Oh, I’m sick as a dog. Haven’t been to work or yoga. Gonna have to miss the finals this year.
I offered to bring him homemade soup, medicine, books to read. Whatever he needed.
I don’t want you to see me like this, he texted back. I don’t want anyone to see me like this.
I gave birth to a child in the U Penn hospital lobby, I wrote. I’ve changed over 1,000 diapers of the humans I love most in this world.
Hahaha. Let me feel better. Imagining you holding my hand in yoga is all I need now.
Okay, Damon. Have it your way!
That was that.
* * *
Philadelphia Airport security. A man behind me, wearing a black and gold Pittsburgh Steelers cap, flashed me a grin. He had large blue eyes, paler than Dylan’s, though. I started blushing and spun away.
After years wrestling my way through security, pushing strollers overloaded with baby supplies and actual babies, airports had now, to my surprise, become vast pickup bars. In case you’ve been blind like me, let me enlighten you: airports are stocked with men like trout in a pond, mostly traveling solo, easy to approach with casual questions about destinations and delays. Although not all the men in airports were quite as attractive as this man, whom I was too shy to even smile back at.
I took off my boots to go through the metal detector. The man with the Steelers lid plopped his bag onto the conveyor belt. He wore a Florida Georgia Line T-shirt and jeans. He was younger—late thirties, I’d guess—and muscular. Strong hands. No wedding band.
I heard KC’s voice in my head, telling me to turn my body toward him, to smile back. So I did.
“Nice socks,” he said, after our eyes met. He looked down at my stocking feet as other passengers pooled behind us.
Everything I was wearing, including my boots and jeans, was black, my usual travel uniform. What did he mean?
I glanced down. Under my black suede boots, I’d thrown on electric pink, purple, and orange socks that looked like I’d stolen them from a five-year-old, which I probably had.
“Thanks,” I managed to force out, red-faced.
Once I was on the other side of the conveyor belt, I was so frazzled I put my boots on the wrong feet.
I wish I were joking.
“Hey, have a nice flight,” he said, hoisting his bag over one shoulder while looking at my mismatched boots and grinning as I stumbled away.
What was wrong with me? A cute guy. Single. Friendly. And I couldn’t say more than one word to him, and then make a fool of myself like a kindergartener dressed up in her mom’s high heels. Would I ever get good at flirting with men?
I had almost an hour until my flight left. The terminal was small, a cul-de-sac with only ten gates. Maybe I could find him, have another crack at this, and redeem myself enough to face KC.
I walked from gate to gate, pulling my black Rollaboard, clutching my business card in one hand. You can do this, I told myself.
Oh God. T
here he was. Standing next to the red and white checked Five Guys burgers sign with two friends. All unusually muscular, dressed similarly in jeans and T-shirts.
I walked up to them, like an eighth grader trying to sit at the cool kids’ cafeteria table, punchy with adrenaline, hoping the men could not see my knees trembling.
“Hi again.” I smiled. So far, so good—two words in. Like an inane cheerleader–cum–fairy godmother, I tried to reassure myself.
All three men stared at me like cows in a pasture watching traffic go by. No one can tell you are sweating, I said silently. Then I started really sweating.
“So, where are you guys headed?” I managed to ask. I could smell the salty potatoes sizzling in the Five Guys fryer.
The man with the brilliant blue eyes stepped away from his friends. Maybe he could tell how hard this was for me.
“We’re from North Carolina,” he said. “We had a business trip up here.”
The cashier called out, “Number four sixty-nine! Number four sixty-nine!”
“Ah. Sounds good.” That was all I could squeeze out. I rocked back on my heels, feeling I’d matured to at least sixteen years old, talking to a new guy at the school dance.
“What kind of work do you do?” I succeeded in asking, as a bead of sweat trickled between my breasts.
“We’re Marines. Marine Special Operations Command. We led a weeklong training off the New Jersey coast. We do it a few times a year.”
“Ah, sweet.”
No wonder he was frighteningly fit. But not as verbal as this conversation required. It was up to me to keep this paltry exchange going.
“I’m heading to Alaska. For work. My first trip there. Have you been?”
“No. Long flight, huh?”
This was worse than a blind date. I fought the urge to wipe my forehead, which was covered in a light coat of perspiration. Time to pull the rip cord.
“Well, it was nice meeting you. Have a safe trip home.”
Then I remembered KC’s admonition: give him your name. Duh.
“My name’s Leslie, by the way.” He took my card, slightly crushed from my sweaty grip.
He didn’t say anything. His two friends stepped toward me.
“Hey, we want your card, too,” one said, with a hint of a leer tossed in.
Oh my God, I didn’t want every man in the airport calling me! The idea was horrifying and humiliating. Blue Eyes shot them a glare.
“Oh, never mind. We’ll . . . um . . . look at his,” the friend added meekly.
I smiled and turned away. Quickly.
Well, I did it, at least. I gave him my name, although I didn’t get his. I walked away, dodging families with strollers and businessmen with briefcases, dragging the Rollaboard behind me like a bedraggled stuffed animal. I rued how absurd this whole five-boyfriend strategy was. How had men weathered this humiliation, asking women out, since we were teenagers? I’d never thought how hard it must have been for them.
I went to my gate and looked around for a place to charge my phone. When I glanced up, the Steelers man was in front of me, a big grin on his face. This time, he held out his business card in a muscular, calloused hand.
“Sorry about my friends,” he said in his soft Carolina twang. “Leslie, I’m Chris. Chris Bailey. Nice to meet you. It was good of you to come find me. I thought I’d return the favor. Thank you for your card. Here’s mine. I wrote my cell phone on there, too. Next time I come back, I want to take you to dinner.”
It was easy to smile at that, so I did.
“I never do this kind of thing,” Chris said, smiling down at me. “I’m really shy. But I mean it.”
“Sure,” I said, putting out my hand. He shook mine. I could see the soft brown hairs on his forearm.
“Take care, Chris. Nice to meet you.”
I watched him walk away, looking over his shoulder at me, smiling.
Chris Bailey stopped halfway across the shiny terrazzo airport walkway.
“I changed my mind,” he called back to me, pronouncing the last two words like mah mahnd. His words carried over the waiting area, filled with molded gray plastic seats, moms with toddlers, dozens of travelers, all suddenly staring at us. He continued, as if now that he’d gotten a head of steam, he couldn’t stop.
“Two dinners!” Chris Bailey put both arms in the air in a V shape. His voice echoed across the airport hangar. “I’m taking you out for two dinners next taaahhm!”
I wasn’t sweating any longer. I was beaming. It felt like the whole airport was watching, thinking middle-aged-girl-meets-hot-young-guy who makes her feel good about herself again, awww . . .
Okay, maybe KC was right. Maybe I could do this. Wait—I was doing this. And it was fun.
* * *
Dozens of buzz-cut soldiers in green and brown camo were scattered around the ski resort lobby as I hunted for coffee the morning after my keynote address at the district attorney’s domestic violence conference outside Anchorage. It was summer, even in Alaska, so there were no skiers. The hotel had been empty when I went to bed the night before. Now clumps of uniformed men covered every couch, spilling out to the stone patio and outdoor fire tables. Was this an inside joke from God?
To find out, I approached a comparatively ancient man in his forties sporting what looked like a commanding officer’s stripes.
“Yes?” he said with a serious face, as if addressing the First Lady of Alaska. “Ma’am?”
The “ma’am” got me smiling.
He smiled back. He was shorter than I was, with a sturdy build and buzz-cut gray hair, and a gap between his two front teeth. My favorite imperfection in a man. My grandfather had a tooth gap, too. I’d fallen for Marty’s tooth gap the first time he smiled at me. Until the day, ten years into our marriage, a new dentist mentioned that of course, Marty should get the gap capped.
“But honey, I love your gap. It’s the best part of your smile,” I told Marty when he came home that night. “Don’t take away the gap!”
I hadn’t been joking. Yet, a few weeks later, one night while we were eating our dinner salad, the gap was gone. Marty didn’t say anything about it, as if my view had been irrelevant to his decision.
“Our transport planes from Japan to Ten Thousand Pines in California had to be diverted last night,” the captain explained. This resort was the only place within three hundred miles that could accommodate so many men. “We’ve got six in each room.”
I raised my eyebrows at that. However, despite waking up in a rustic paradise surrounded by hundreds of buff, unencumbered single men, before I could even think about flirting with anyone, I needed time alone to recover from the flayed-skin feeling I got after delivering my keynote about surviving relationship abuse in my twenties. I thanked the captain and went out to my rental car. Alone.
I drove down the curvy Seward Highway from Anchorage to the Kenai Peninsula, searching for a hike despite the light rain that had begun to fall. I passed so many bald eagles and moose that I stopped keeping count. A familiar ache rippled through me as I wished that Bella and Timmy could see this place, too; I felt this way every time I traveled without them. The road sliced through indigo, snow-covered mountains that looked like the Rockies had a hundred babies who had moved out west to find room to thrive.
I parked next to three moose as big as pickup trucks, placidly munching catkins and tall reed grasses. Across the road, a glacier melted like a huge inverted white triangle. The morning air was cold and damp; it was like I was inside an igloo, which I kind of was.
At the entrance to the path, I laced up my hiking boots under a dew-covered, Plexiglas kiosk holding a map of the Resurrection River Trail. Inside, under a graphic showing an orange sun rising over a jagged purple and blue mountain peak, the cautionary notice read:
TRAVEL ON THIS SECTION OF TRAIL IS FOR THOSE
WHO SEEK RISK AND SOLITUDE,
ARE SELF-RELIANT AND WANT A CHALLENGE.
I set out along the rocky, two-foot swath of path. Could
those words describe me? I craved risk and solitude as I sought resurrection, of myself, of who I’d been as a little girl and an independent twentysomething woman before I’d fallen in love with Marty and started losing little bits of myself trying to become his ideal wife.
After an hour on the rugged, rocky path, my thought pattern veered from philosophical to practical: You are alone, in Alaska, hiking a rainy trail marked with a sign to scare people off. There had to be moose and bears and bobcats lurking behind the white spruce. I had seen zero other hikers and only one small metal trail marker once I left the trailhead. How long would I survive alone if I got lost out here? Maybe I wasn’t so brave.
The map had starred a spectacular view of a glacial lake within four miles. Where was the turnoff? All I could see were rocks and bushes. Fir tree branches overhead surrounded me like a dark green circus tent. Despite the cool, wet weather, I was sweating. My thirty-two-ounce Nalgene water bottle was half-empty. Turning back seemed prudent.
But I didn’t. I pushed on, stubbornly, for another thirty minutes, despite my sweat and doubt. I rounded a bend. A twelve-foot-high boulder blocked the path.
“Fuck,” I said out loud to the rock face. It looked like it had been there for several centuries. Was I supposed to climb it, or go around? There were no blazes or arrows. The rock took up the entire path. Thick, scratchy rhododendron and scrub spruce trees flanked each side.
I decided to climb the boulder.
I scrabbled up, digging my hiking boots into shallow toeholds and scraping the skin off my knuckles and palms. I could barely breathe from the exertion of hauling my body straight up a slippery rock in the rain. This was crazy. I was crazy.
“Screw you, universe,” I said under my breath. I gave myself one last push and almost fell over the top of the rock. I lay with half my body across the crest, my legs dangling behind me.
Laid out before me like a Patagonia catalog cover was a panoramic view of an ultramarine glacial lake, ringed by endless dusky blue snow-capped mountains. I felt gutted by the beauty before me. Easily the most spectacular sight of my life. Off to the right was not just a rainbow but a double rainbow.
The Naked Truth Page 11