LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Three

      Jane was almost late to her Getadate meetings that afternoon at Peet’s. When she’d jumped into Old Reliable in the Walden Spring parking lot, she noticed a scary-looking white glob on the shoulder of her good, pink blouse that had mercifully turned out to be vanilla pudding, a consequence of the food fight. By the time she’d stopped at home to change and found a place to park in always congested Harvard Square, she had to hustle to get to the coffee shop before the first Getadate did.

      She ordered her decaf coffee drink as soon as she got inside, so there wouldn’t be any weirdness about who paid. The coffee ordering always seemed unnecessarily complex but the petite, dark-haired barista was a pro who deftly guided Jane through the process. She gave Jane an ear-to-ear grin as she handed over the steaming cup.

      Jane settled at a table in the middle of the room, in a seat facing the door, and then checked her phone for the list of date names Phyllis had sent her.

      It took a few moments for Jane to recognize Calvin Marquart, but she felt she could be excused because the photo on his profile had been taken at least twenty years earlier. And he was hidden behind his giant mobility scooter.

      He spotted her and drove straight to her table. “I’ll be honest,” he said before introducing himself and at a volume not usually used indoors. “My kids don’t think I should be living alone. They want to put me in a home. They call it a ‘community, ’ but it’s a home. I thought if I could get married again to someone a little younger, I could stay in my house. I’m willing to fight my kids to leave you something for your trouble.” He paused for a moment and looked at Jane appraisingly. “But you don’t look desperate enough.”

      “You’re right,” Jane said. “I’m not.”

      “Thanks for your time.” And with that, he rolled, very slowly, out of Phyllis’s life. Behind the counter, the little barista stood, hands out, palms up, the universal symbol for “Whaddaya gonna do?”

      Mark Pearson arrived at two forty-five. Although he seemed like an okay guy, his comb-over was so distracting, Jane barely heard a word he said. She found herself staring at it and daydreaming about its construction. It was pulled up and wound around in a structure that would have made Gustave Eiffel proud. Jane was not the least surprised to learn that Mr. Pearson was a civil engineer.

      She felt terrible about crossing him off Phyllis’s list for such a superficial reason. Perhaps he simply needed a kind person to whisper in his ear that the whole skyscraper needed to come down. But then, what did the comb-over say about his judgment if he thought he looked coffee-date ready with that thing on his head? What did it say about his self-confidence? After the whole Awful Craig crisis, Phyllis didn’t need another project.

      At three-fifteen, Guy Kroner, despite having checked on his Getadate profile “one or two glasses of wine a week” for alcohol and “never” for tobacco, reeked of alcohol and cigarettes. After he left, the girl behind the counter rolled her eyes. “Worst one yet,” she sympathized.

      By four o’clock, Jane was beginning to feel bad about having nothing positive to report to Phyllis. She’d had three cups of decaf and three trips to the restroom. The afternoon was turning into a bust.

      And then, there he was. Harry Welch.

      He was the only one who stood at the table, introduced himself properly, and shook Jane’s hand. Jane was a sucker for that sort of thing, though in fairness, neither Calvin nor Guy could have probably stood for that long for any reason. When Harry took her hand, he shook it firmly and looked straight into her eyes with his own warm brown ones, which were framed by impressively bushy eyebrows. Although he had less hair now than he undoubtedly did at twenty, all he had appeared to be his own and it was worn on his head in the places nature intended.

      Harry and Jane had both listed travel as an interest in their Getadate profiles, and he dove right into the topic. Where had she been on her last trip? He had covered the same territory and had been some places Jane never had—India, Australia, New Zealand. They discovered they were both happy to travel alone but also enjoyed company. “Sometimes when my wife and I were traveling, we would split up during the day if we had different interests. It gives you even more to talk about at dinner.”

      Harry had been a widower for five years. With his sixty-sixth birthday approaching, he was “getting back out there” at the urging of his two grown sons, who both mercifully had homes of their own. Harry was a genial man, direct and curious, but the loss of his wife explained the sadness around his eyes. For the first time in decades, Jane felt something stirring. She had an impulse to make that sadness go away.

      As the coffee date ended, Harry reached across the table and took Jane’s hand. “I’ve enjoyed this a great deal. Can we perhaps consider dinner and a movie?”

      Jane gave him her number. Then, her knees having turned to Jell-O like an adolescent’s, she slid back down into her chair and watched him go. Behind the counter, the young barista raised her hands in the air and did a little victory dance.

      * * *

      “You want him for yourself,” Helen said.

      Jane had gone straight to Helen’s house after she left Peet’s. Helen’s husband, Hugh, had been home reading the newspaper, but as soon as he’d seen the look on Jane’s face, he’d hustled out. “Council of War,” he said. “I’ll leave you two.”

      Helen had poured two glasses of white wine. Jane had walked her through the afternoon, allegedly to validate the elimination of Calvin, Mark, and Guy as contenders. She wasn’t sure what she intended to say about Harry. It turned out she didn’t need to say much. As soon as Jane described him, Helen guessed.

      “That’s ridiculous,” Jane responded. “I haven’t been interested in a man in thirty years. Thirty-two, if you count the last two years with Francis.”

      “It’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget.”

      “I haven’t ridden a bicycle in thirty-two years, either, and I guarantee you are not going to see me zipping past your house anytime soon.” When Helen said nothing, Jane continued. “You wouldn’t be so eager, either, if the last time you were on a bike, riding along, happy and oblivious, a tractor trailer careened out of a side street, hit you, rolled over you, then backed up and rolled over you again.” Jane stretched the metaphor beyond its breaking point.

      “That’s not quite the way it happened,” Helen said. “Remember, I was there.”

      “Then I shouldn’t have to tell you about it,” Jane responded, a little testily.

      Her former husband, Francis Darrowfield, had convinced her to renovate their kitchen to celebrate his getting tenure as an economics professor at Harvard. They had gutted it to the studs and sold all their old appliances. They had applied for, and Jane had cosigned, an enormous home equity loan.

      Then Francis left.

      After transferring the cash from the loan into a bank account only in his name.

      And moved in with his department secretary.

      Jane was left, humiliated, alone, in a home she couldn’t afford, which had no kitchen. A judge eventually sorted it out, but it took forever, and more than once Jane

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