Make Me a Match

by Diana Holquist

  Maya looked at her clothes and shrugged. “You’re too fancy for him. And too—pinchy.”

  “Pinchy?”

  “Yeah. You know. Mean-looking.”

  Cecelia blinked again. “I can’t be that mean-looking. You’re not afraid of me.”

  “I’m not afraid of anyone. But if you want to get my daddy—”

  “I do not want to get your daddy.” Geez, hadn’t she already had this conversation with Finn? They passed an empty storefront and Cecelia stopped to look at her reflection. She did not look mean. She looked—professional. The little girl standing at her side reflected in the mirror too. They were ridiculously incongruous, like two strangers in an elevator, on their way to two very different floors.

  “So. First, we get you out of your witchy clothes.”

  “Black happens to be very chic, young lady.”

  “Whatever. It’s scary. Then, we let down your hair so you don’t look like a skull-head. And you have to lose that vampire-lady makeup.”

  “Now stop right there!”

  The girl stopped. She bit her lip. “Sorry. But if you’re daddy’s True Lover, you have to learn to get him to love you and he needs to love you because I want him to be happy. So you have to go home and put on pretty clothes and wash your face, and then you can apologize to him for being so mean. Then, since he’s your True Lover, you can play cards.”

  Cecelia was speechless.

  “So you can get laid!” the girl explained as if to a two year old.

  Cecelia bit her lip in consternation.

  The girl took a crumpled piece of paper out of her pocket. She thrust it into Cecelia’s hand. It read: “Fisher man’s Warf, sushy restorant, 20 minets. Meet my Daddy. No whichy clothes.”

  Cecelia was aghast. The nerve of this child. As if Cecelia were going to go to a smelly fish market to apologize to a jerk who couldn’t stand her. Apologize for what?

  She looked up from the paper to see the girl heading downtown. “Where are you going?”

  “To Granny Trudy’s.”

  The bar from the ball team. She thought back to the address she and Amy had found in the phone book what seemed like ages ago. The girl was going the wrong way. “How did you get here?”

  “Bus. But I don’t have enough change to ride it back. I lost my allowance to Granny T. at cards and I just had enough in tips to get here.” The girl began walking the wrong way again.

  Cards? Tips? The girl looked so tiny, weaving through the grown-ups, her head proudly lifted.

  Cecelia looked at her watch. She caught up with her. “C’mon.” Cecelia hailed a passing cab. She couldn’t let this child get lost in the city. Baltimore was a town of hundreds of tiny neighborhoods with invisible borders. Go one block the wrong way, and you were suddenly somewhere very different than where you had been before. “We’re going to take you to your daddy.”

  Chapter 13

  Here’s fine,” she told the cabdriver. She gave him a ten, and they emerged into the fish-laden air. Homeless men on cardboard boxes held out their hands to her. She ignored them, and herded Maya ahead of her into the block-long open market through the rough-wood swinging door. Vendors of every kind shouted out prices and haggled with shrunken old ladies over shrimp counts. Asian grocers bagged apples and bok choy while mothers juggled babies on their hips, their strollers overflowing with the makings of dinner.

  Maya—the girl was named “Maya” Cecelia had learned on the way down—suddenly cut right, then left. She shouted out, “Daddy’s at the sushi stand!” And was gone.

  “Maya!” Cecelia almost slipped on the shiny wet cement floor trying to catch up with her. She definitely wasn’t dressed for this place, with her two-inch heels and power-doctor Armani black pants suit.

  Where had Maya gone? Dumb kid. She had no idea how dangerous a city could be.

  Cecelia searched up and down the stands, giving wide berth to the angry-looking piles of crabs. She collided with a man mopping down the floor with filthy water. He gave her an appreciative whistle, which she studiously ignored. Okay, if she couldn’t find the kid, at least she could find the sushi stand. Who in their right mind would eat raw fish in a place like this?

  There was Finn on a bar stool, chatting with the sushi chef. She stopped, mesmerized by the side of his face. A curious roiling began in her stomach. She hadn’t felt like this since she had hid behind the bleachers in seventh grade to spy on Danny Michaels at football practice. She ducked behind a mound of clams and watched him. This was ridiculous. He was such a beautiful man. Lust isn’t love, she reminded herself. Just because I want to take him home means nothing—anyway they needed to find Maya.

  The sushi man handed Finn a plate of sliced sushi roll. Finn took it, bowed his head to the chef, and popped a piece into his mouth.

  She marched up to him and tapped him on the shoulder at the exact instant she spotted Maya, ducking behind a display of packaged chowder crackers.

  Finn turned, saw Cecelia, and leaped off the stool. His eyes were wide and blazing. He waved his hands in front of his face, forcing her away.

  “Don’t get all crazy. I came for a reason.” She was shocked by his visceral reaction to the sight of her. Had she been that awful?

  Finn shook his head and continued to gesture.

  What was wrong with him? Was he too upset to even speak to her?

  The sushi chef handed Finn an opened beer. Finn grabbed it gratefully, bowed his head quickly to the chef, and guzzled almost the entire thing. He gasped for breath. “Macho man,” he croaked, pointing at his chest.

  Cecelia just stared. Was he serious? Sure, his shoulders were amazing and his tanned, muscled arms were nothing to scoff at, but really. She glanced back to where Maya had been, but the girl was gone.

  “Wasabi. Too much wasabi,” he explained weakly, his eyes tearing up. He finished the beer. “It’s a sushi roll Kaiya makes. It’s called Macho Man. You gotta try it. Whew, that was a rush.”

  Cecelia tried to fight off the rush she felt watching him. She was here on business. “I brought Maya.”

  Finn looked around, confused. “Maya?”

  “Your daughter? Only she ran away from me when we got in here. I just saw her spying, so don’t worry, she’s okay. I’m sure she’ll turn up in a minute or two.”

  “Why—? What—? How—?” He looked around suspiciously. “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know. Maya was supposed to be with her grandmother. I’ll have to talk to that lady.” He turned his back to the market. “If we pretend that we don’t care where she is, she’ll come over.”

  Now what? Cecelia couldn’t exactly leave until the girl showed her face again. She sat on the stool next to Finn, trying not to look around for the girl.

  “Nice day,” he said.

  “Yeah. Unseasonably warm.”

  “Yeah. Warm. But I hear it’s gonna rain soon.”

  Silence.

  Cecelia rolled her eyes. This was unbearable. Not doing anything made Cecelia restless. “Maya told me about your wife,” she blurted.

  Finn’s eyes widened.

  “Well, not everything, but she told me the basics. I hadn’t realized. I’m very sorry. I wouldn’t have spoken so bluntly if I had known you had a—history.”

  Finn shrugged and went back to his sushi.

  Cecelia felt adrift. If there was one thing they didn’t teach at medical school, it was how to say, “I’m sorry.” She breathed in. “The picnic, it was a really nice thing to do. It was kind.”

  He picked up a piece of sushi with his chopsticks. The sushi was huge and messy and looked just exactly the way sushi belonging to a tattooed construction worker should look. He offered her the piece, but she refused. He popped it into his mouth. “You don’t eat much do you?”

  “I do. I just run every morning, seven on the dot. Three point two miles. It keeps the weight off.”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything. She watched him eat the fish, but this time he just grimaced and swallowed.
/>   She took a deep breath. Where was that kid? How long did she have to sit here? She couldn’t stand the silence. “I knew that someone had been sick,” she blurted. “I realized that when I was talking to you. But I just—”

  “You just rambled on like a bureaucratic, no-soul robotron.” He looked her square in the eyes.

  She blushed. Maybe they could go back to silence. Or discussing the weather.

  They sat wordlessly while the market bustled around them. He popped another sushi and swallowed it with no problem. The sushi man nodded his approval from his side of the counter.

  She risked a glance around for Maya. “Maybe she left.”

  “She’s here. We have to wait.”

  Right. Wait. She watched the sushi man, Kaiya, put together an avocado and tuna roll. She wasn’t used to waiting. She was used to action. She watched how peacefully Finn sat, as if his daughter hadn’t gone AWOL in a public place. As if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  She decided to try it. She tried to clear her head. Relax her body. Just breathe in the fishy stench. Suddenly she was struck with a memory so vivid, she almost fell off her stool.

  “You okay?” Finn asked. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “I was just remembering that I used to come here with my sister,” Cecelia said.

  “The psychic?”

  “Yeah. We lived in Baltimore when we were kids. Came back for a few years when we were teenagers. We used to steal apples from that guy. I can’t believe he’s still alive. See the short fat man at the vegetable stand over there?”

  “The sweating, dirty guy?”

  “Yeah. He was an awful man. Terrible racist. Oh, hell, I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  Finn was looking at her as if she had grown horns. “You want me to believe that you used to steal apples?”

  “We used to steal everything that wasn’t super-glued and alarm-tagged. We didn’t have much, ah, guidance. But we only stole from bad people.” She couldn’t believe the words she was saying—as if stealing were ever okay. She sounded like Amy.

  “But now look at you. You couldn’t steal an apple from Hitler.”

  “I could so.”

  He smiled a devilish smile that nearly knocked her off her stool again. “You couldn’t. You’d be too afraid of your social standing. How would it look, after all, to the folks at the country club?”

  “I don’t belong to the country club,” she said. Okay, so Jack did. But that wasn’t the point.

  “Then steal an apple.”

  “No. Back then we had to. Now, it would just be wrong. And what if your daughter is watching?”

  “She’d like you better for it. Come to think of it, I probably would too.” He shrugged. “Anyway, you can’t do it.”

  “I could. But I’m not.”

  “Right.”

  Silence descended on them again. It felt okay this time. Like they had come to some sort of understanding, although Cecelia wasn’t sure what it was. She watched the vegetable man arrange grapefruits. It was the same guy. She and Amy used to slip away from him down these crowded aisles, just the way Maya had slipped away from her. They could snatch a whole dinner in minutes. Tiny, darting hands. They would take it home and arrange it the best they could on plates. Then they’d pretend their mother was calling them. Cecelia! Amy! Dinner! Wash your hands! It was no good not having a mother. Just too hard. A wave of compassion for Maya washed over her. “Tell me what happened to Maya’s mother.”

  “She needed an aortic valve. But she couldn’t withstand the operation—too weak. Some experimental guys had a new procedure for a nonoperative valve insertion.”

  “The team in Atlanta.”

  “Right. She qualified for the trial, but our place in the study kept getting taken by, well—”

  “By people with connections.”

  “Right.” His face hardened. “Anyway, finally, we got in, but before we could get there, well, it was too late.” He looked as if he had swallowed another dose of wasabi.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I should apologize too,” he said. “It’s just that doctors set me off sometimes.” His eyes were unfocused, as if he were seeing into the past. “Anyway, we’re even. I didn’t know about the fiancé thing. And you didn’t know about Sally.”

  “Not quite even.”

  “Right,” he said. “I apologize for Maya too. I’ll talk to her. I don’t know how she found you. I never should have told her that True Love stuff.”

  Cecelia smiled. “Yeah, well, it is a nice fairy tale for a kid. Except I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m the wicked witch.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “She said I was scary-looking.”

  “You are a little—formidable.”

  Cecelia felt the color rise on her cheeks.

  He ate the last sushi and he handed the empty tray back to the chef. “Well, let’s go.”

  “What about Maya?”

  He leaned in and whispered, “Behind the broccoli.” He left a twenty on the counter. They made their way over to the vegetables as if nothing were amiss.

  “You’re not so bad, Doctor,” Finn said loudly. “Even if you’re not my True Love but a wicked witch in disguise.”

  “She’s not a witch, Daddy, she just looks like one,” Maya cried, emerging from behind the oranges.

  “Oh! Look who’s here!” Finn put his hand firmly on Maya’s shoulder, trapping her in his grip.

  The vegetable seller came over and said to Cecelia, “You should watch your daughter! Sneaking around here like a thief. I would’ve called the police if she wasn’t so—so—”

  “White?” Cecelia supplied. Her fingers itched. The apples were gorgeous—shiny and huge.

  The man scowled at her. “This is a dangerous place, missy. There’s all kinds of bad sorts here. I gotta look out for myself. I don’t have time to worry about watching out for kids with lousy mothers.”

  Maya beamed up at Cecelia like an angel.

  Finn squeezed her shoulder harder.

  Cecelia took one last look at the fruit. She shook her hands, rubbed them together, then quickly followed Finn and Maya toward the exit.

  They snaked their way out of the market, then stood awkwardly on the sidewalk.

  “Thank you for bringing her,” Finn said.

  “No problem,” Cecelia said.

  “You should thank me for bringing her,” Maya complained.

  Finn tightened his hold on Maya’s shoulder. He steered the girl away.

  “Bye, Cecelia!” Maya called. “See you soon!”

  “Bye, Maya,” Cecelia returned. But she wouldn’t see her soon. In fact, she’d probably never see the girl, or her father, again. She turned back for one last look, and froze, stunned at what she saw: the homeless man had a lap full of beautiful apples and he was waving happily at Maya, who winked back at him, before taking Finn’s hand and skipping merrily away.

  The next morning, Cecelia pulled on her running shoes, went into the kitchen, and found her mother’s postcard taped together and stuck on the refrigerator with a smiley-face magnet. She pulled it off and reread it. Just when everything was going so right, why did her family have to bust in and try to ruin it?

  Jack came into the kitchen dressed for weekend work, khakis and a light blue shirt. He went to the fridge and got out the juice. “Your mother’s worried. I’ve got to tell you the truth, I’m a little worried too. Why didn’t you tell me about any of this, Cel?”

  “About any of what? That my family is nuts?” She reread the postcard. I have a feeling your sister needs help. What if her mother didn’t mean her? What if her mother meant Jasmine?

  “Your family, they’re not Sufis, are they? Why did you make up a story? I would have understood the truth.”

  Cecelia stood dumbly with the card in her hands.

  Jack shook his head and guzzled the juice, glanced at his watch, then came to her and wrapped her in his arms. He rested his chin on her head.

>   She buried her head on his chest. “Amy is leaving soon. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” The vision of Jasmine’s face formed in her mind so clearly, she closed her eyes, hoping to hold on to the vision for a moment, as if somehow it might contain a clue as to where Jasmine was.

  “It matters to me,” Jack said. “Your family is a part of you, whether you like it or not. You can’t pretend they’re off in a commune. That scares me. You need to tell me things. We never see each other. There’s never time to talk.”

  “I know. But tonight, you’re coming with me to the Baltimore Physicians Gala. Right? We can talk there. I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

  Jack winced. “I can’t go. The Barker case—I’ve got to work all weekend. I forgot all about the dinner. Darn it. I’m sorry.” He let her go.

  Cecelia looked at her watch. Why did a Saturday seem like any other day to them? “I’ve got to get my three miles in before eight, then go in and catch up on paperwork.”

  “You could take Amy tonight.”

  Cecelia imagined Amy breaking up her colleagues’ marriages, cracking sulfur capsules in the gilded Rainbow Room of the Hyatt Hotel, slipping silverware into her purse. “I don’t think so. I’ll just go alone. It’s okay. Elliot bought a table. I’ll have friends to sit with.”

  “Sorry, sweetums. But we will talk soon. Work this all out.”

  “Right. Soon.”

  He kissed her gently. “Soon.”

  And, as usual, she watched him go.

  Cecelia emerged into the brisk morning air. She loved this time of the morning. Everything seemed possible. Everything, of course, except speaking to her fiancé. This was getting bad. The conversation she had with Finn the day before seemed deeper and more real than all the conversations she’d had with Jack in the last year. Had they had a real conversation in the last year?

  “You’re late.” It was Finn, running up beside her. He was wearing gray sweats, gray sneakers, and a wool cap pulled down over his ears despite the warm summer morning. He looked like a hoodlum. He fell easily into her stride.

  The shock of seeing him nearly threw Cecelia into the gutter. How did he find her? Then she remembered, at the market, she had told him she ran every morning at 7:00 A.M. “How did you know where I lived?”