by Elise Sax
Road to
matchmaker
a matchmaker mysteries series prequel
elise sax
Road to Matchmaker (A Matchmaker Mysteries Prequel) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Elise Sax
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1978443297
Published in the United States by Elise Sax
Cover design: Elizabeth Mackey
Edited by: NovelNeeds.com and Lynn Mullan
Formatted by: Jesse Kimmel-Freeman
Printed in the United States of America
elisesax.com
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For Sam, my dreamer.
Also by Elise Sax
Five Wishes Series
Going Down
Man Candy
Hot Wired
Just Sacked
Wicked Ride
Five Wishes Series
Three More Wishes Series
Blown Away
Inn & Out
Quick Bang
Three More Wishes Series
Matchmaker Mysteries Series
Road to Matchmaker
An Affair to Dismember
Citizen Pain
The Wizards of Saws
Field of Screams
From Fear to Eternity
West Side Gory
Scareplane
It Happened One Fright
Operation Billionaire
How to Marry a Billionaire
How to Marry Another Billionaire
Forever Series
Forever Now
Bounty
Switched
Moving Violations
Also by Elise Sax
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
I was a dreamer. At least that’s what I told people. But I was called other things: Lost. Directionless. No rudder.
But I had a rudder. A big, fat rudder that turned me in all kinds of direction all the time. Over and over and over.
That’s what happens to dreamers. They dream a never-ending stream of dreams, making them crazy and pulling them this way and that, like a scary, life-altering taffy machine.
My taffy machine had brought me to Los Angeles in April. I had managed to get three jobs so far, but none of them had worked out. That led me to job number four. The good news about job number four was that it came with a wardrobe.
“I don’t think it fits,” I told my supervisor, Homer. I was wearing a white jumpsuit, which was way too big for me. I had cuffed the legs and the sleeves, but I was still swimming in it. The back of me looked like my butt was drooping to my calves.
“It don’t matter,” Homer said, digging at the dirt under his fingernails with a flat-head screwdriver. It wasn’t working. The dirt was holding strong. “Ain’t nobody gonna see you in there.”
He shrugged in the direction of a cement truck. There were at least twenty cement trucks in a makeshift parking lot behind the City of Angels Cement For You headquarters building.
“I’ve never done this before,” I said, not wanting to do it.
“You’re small, and you know how to hold a hose. That’s about all you need.”
I was small. I knew how to hold a hose. That was just about the extent of my skills and talents. It had come down to this. I was now a cement truck cleaner. The inside of cement trucks, that is. They used a truck wash machine to clean the outside.
Homer opened the back of the cement truck, revealing a small, circular opening. “I’ll heave ho you in there, Gladys. Then, I’ll hand you the hose. Here’s a scrub brush.”
He handed me a large, wire brush, and I tucked it into a pocket of my uniform. Homer interlaced his fingers and leaned over. I put my foot on his hands, and he heave-hoed me. I grabbed onto the rim of the truck’s opening and slipped through, crashing down the other side into the belly of the beast.
As I rolled to a stop, my white jumpsuit turned gray with a coat of cement. “I’m in!” I announced.
“Yeah, I know. Here’s the hose. I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Homer said, slipping the hose into the truck and spraying me with water. After a struggle, I caught the hose and aimed it at the interior walls. The water didn’t do much, so I hung it out the opening, and went at the truck with the wire brush. It didn’t do much, either. The job required a lot of elbow grease, more than my elbow had. Nevertheless, I scrubbed with every ounce of energy I had because my rent was due, and I had thirty-three dollars in my checking account.
Twenty minutes in, my neck seized up from constantly bending over in the cramped space. It was lucky I wasn’t claustrophobic, or I would have been freaking out. My right arm was sore, and I was sweating buckets.
Twenty-two minutes in, my psyche realized that I was stuck in a cement truck with my supervisor gone for hours or maybe forever. The walls of the cement truck seemed to close in on me and my baggy jumpsuit. I clutched onto my wire brush for security. Holy crap. Why did I take a job cleaning out cement trucks? How could I be this stupid?
Actually, I didn’t have much choice. My temp agency was running low on possible jobs for me. I was their best client, but their worst worker. I didn’t have a lot of staying power, and I either got fired or I quit pretty regularly. I blamed it on my dreaming. The temp jobs never jived with my dreams. I had just worked for two days as the official shower drain cleaner for Los Angeles Real Men Gym, which I thought was pretty long, considering that Real Men had a lot of hair. It never dawned on me that the next job would be even worse.
The truck seemed to get smaller, and my breathing became shallower. I had made barely any progress in the cleaning. Why were cement trucks so small? Why was cement so hard to clean? Why didn’t I marry rich or rob a bank instead of a terrible string of temp jobs?
I ducked my head out of the truck’s opening. “Hello? Hello?”
Nothing. Not a sound except for the normal cement truck parking lot activity. Nobody came to see who was yelling from inside a cement truck. Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm myself. As soon as I finished cleaning the truck, I would be able to get free.
But then I would have to do another truck.
It was times like these that I wished I had finished high school and had gone on to college. But I wasn’t exactly the commitment type, especially commitment to geometry and world history. And I didn’t like to be yelled at by teachers and only peeing when I was given a bathroom pass.
Bathroom pass.
Peeing.
“Hello? I need to take a break?” I said like a question. There was still no reply. I dropped the hose out of the truck and let it fall to the ground. Putting the wire brush in my pocket, I carefully slipped through the hole to my freedom.
The air was so much better on the outside of the truck than it was on the inside of the truck. I was covered in cement, which stuck to my body in sweaty clumps. The once-white jumpsuit was gray and wet from the hose and my sweat. My body was like a limp noodle, except for my right arm, which was cramped from the effort.
Working sucked. If I had an extra dollar, I was going to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket on my way home.
“Homer?” I called.
He was still gone. I figured he wouldn’t mind if I took a bathroom break. Actually, I wanted to take a forever break.
Turning off the hose, I walked across the parking lot into the warehouse. The cement company had a nice breakroom, but nobody else was in it. There was complimentary cereal and milk. I ate only organic, vegan, and I was a diehard fitness buff. Surprisingly, I found a box of Paleo muesli and almond milk. I filled a bowl and dug in.
Not bad. Perhaps I had pre-judged the cement industry. There was even air conditioning.
After the cereal, I turned on the television just in time to catch an episode of The View. I almost felt human, again.
“What the devil is going on?” Homer growled, storming into the breakroom. “What’re you doing?
“Oh, hi. I was wondering where you were.”
“You were what? I thought you had gotten killed. You left the truck without finishing. It looks like you didn’t even start.”
“I needed a break,” I said, as Whoopi said something funny on TV.
Homer’s face turned red, and his mouth dropped open. “You couldn’t have been in there for more than ten minutes.”
“Twenty-one minutes. Boy, it was hot in there. My arm is killing me, too,” I said, rubbing my arm, as if to prove my point.
“You…wha…huh…excuse me?” Homer stuttered. Then, he settled on one train of thought. “You’re fired!”
I turned off the television. “No! Please! I need this job!”
What was I saying? Being fired was the best possible outcome. I didn’t want to go back into the cement truck. I would have rather had my eye poked out with a giant spider leg.
“Please let me get back to work. I swear I won’t let you down. I’ll do double the amount of trucks you want. Double!” I continued, my mouth betraying me. I didn’t know what I was saying. It was like I was high on battery acid or something.
Maybe it was a reaction to cement.
I had found a great apartment in Los Angeles over a small Italian restaurant on a corner in a dilapidated downtown neighborhood. The area had evaded the gentrification of the rest of downtown. I accessed the apartment through a staircase in the back of the restaurant. So, I had to walk past the tables of diners to get home, and I tried to time my comings and goings away from mealtimes. But tonight, I came home at six on the dot, and the restaurant was bursting with people, enjoying spaghetti and veal parmigiana.
Jordan, one of the waiters, was standing outside on the corner, getting some air. His jaw dropped when he saw me get out of my car.
“What happened to you? Are you okay?”
I locked my ancient Oldsmobile and hobbled toward him. “New job.”
“Whoa,” he said, eyeing me. “What’s that in your hair?”
“Cement. I cleaned the inside of six cement trucks.”
“Is that a social media joke? I’m not on Facebook.”
“No, it’s my life. My life is cement trucks.”
Jordan nodded, thoughtfully. He was an attractive man, about my age. He was about six-feet-tall with thick, wavy brown hair and big, thoughtful brown eyes. He was wearing a waiter’s uniform with a long, black apron.
“I thought you worked at a gym.”
“That was two days ago. Today was cement trucks, but they fired me.”
Thank God. I should have let Homer fire me when I had only been twenty-one minutes into the first truck, but I had to show him that I could do it. I didn’t want to be a failure, again. I wanted to succeed at something. So, I continued cleaning cement trucks. So, six trucks later, he fired me.
Because I couldn’t do it. I sucked at cement trucks.
Go figure.
“Sorry to hear that.”
Jordan had worked at the restaurant for the past two years while he studied to become a CPA, but he didn’t strike me as a numbers guy.
“You want to come in? I’m working on a fettuccine recipe with white truffles.”
“I thought you were a waiter, Jordan.”
He looked around, as if he expected someone to jump out between the buildings. “I am, but sometimes, I…cook. But I’m going to be a CPA.”
He added the last part, like he was trying to convince himself.
“It sounds delicious, but I’m a vegan.”
Jordan’s face dropped, which was a common reaction to my strict dietary habits. I hadn’t eaten junk food in years, and I was an obsessive spin class junkie. But I didn’t know how I was going to get up the next morning and move my body. My right arm was pinned to my side, too painful to move.
I heard a whimper. At first, I thought it might be me, but it turned out to be a dog. It stepped out of the doorway, next door, took a couple steps and whimpered, again.
“Look at that dog,” I said. “What’s he doing?”
“That’s Ralph. He doesn’t want to get electrocuted. His owner strung an electric wire so the dog couldn’t run away.”
“That’s not very nice,” I commented. I had a strong desire to free the dog and let it run wild through the streets of downtown, even though that wouldn’t be wise. “Can we turn off the electricity?”
“I don’t think the owner would like that, and he’s sort of ornery. Besides, the dog knows not to touch the wire, so he isn’t in any danger.”
“I’m sorry,” I called to the dog. He whimpered again and went back to his place in the doorway. I wanted to find my place, too. I was worn out. “I better get in and take a shower,” I told Jordan.
He opened the door to the restaurant for me. “It was nice seeing you.”
I walked upstairs and unlocked my apartment. I had never been so happy to see a tiny studio with furniture from the 1970s. I peeled off my shirt just as the phone rang. Digging it out of my purse, I answered. It was my grandmother, who lived in a small town in the mountains, east of San Diego. I hadn’t seen her for about five years, but she was my closest family member. I only had two, my mother and my grandmother. I hadn’t seen my mother since the last time she asked for money, which was like asking the Gobi Desert for a house on the lake.
“Hello, bubbeleh,” my grandmother said. “This is your yearly, happy birthday call. Are you ready?” She started to sing happy birthday to me before I had a chance to answer. I had completely forgotten it was my birthday. April thirteenth. One more year. How could I have forgotten? It might have been because I didn’t want to think about getting older while crammed in the belly of a cement truck.
“Thank you, Grandma,” I said when she finished singing.
“Dolly, I’m going to tell you something.”
Grandma was the center of her town and a renowned matchmaker. She pretty much told people things from morning until night. She also had a way of knowing things that couldn’t be known. Yes, she was wise, but it was more than that. She had a wickedly talented sixth sense. A third eye. So, it was always good to listen to her, even if I didn’t want to.
“Okay, Grandma. Shoot.”
“You’re a good person, but if you want to grow and change, you can go ahead and do that. Evolve. It’s your time, bubbeleh. Your time to move on.”
“All I do is move on, Grandma. I’ve lived in six different cities since the beginning of the year. I think I’m going for the world record for the most jobs in a lifetime. I get fired faster than Superman can change to save Lois Lane.”
“That’s fast.”
“Today I got fired, again.”
“I know. At least the cement truck didn’t blow up,” Grandma said, somehow knowing about the humiliation that preceded my termination from the cement company.
“I didn’t mean to set it on fire,” I told her. “I was just checking my work, and it was getting dark.”
“And you didn’t have a flashlight, but you had a book of matches in your pocket,” my grandmother finished for me.
“It wasn’t even my pocket, so it wasn’t my fault that there were matches in there.”
“Homer’s hair will grow back,” Grandma told me, comfortingly. My boss had appeared just as the fireball started. I was never going to forget the look on poor Homer’s face the moment he realized that a fireball wa
s coming right for him from the back of the cement truck.
Somehow, I didn’t get burned. Not even a burned finger. The fire seemed to have a mind of its own and just like I wanted to, ran out of the truck as fast as it could. Poof! It hit Homer and took his hair with it.
“How about his eyebrows?” I asked my grandmother.
“Nope. Those will be gone forever. But he’s not hurt.”
Phew. “That’s good. The paramedics hinted that it was my fault.”
There was a long pause. I guessed she wanted to say something diplomatic but was at a loss for words. She was right, and so were the paramedics. It was totally my fault that Homer would never arch an eyebrow again.
“You have a gift, Dolly, but it’s not for cement trucks,” she said, finally.
I wanted to ask her what my gift was, but I was afraid to ask. What if it was for something worse than cement trucks? Actually, after a lifetime of failed temporary jobs, I doubted I had any gifts. I was giftless. I was a bad Christmas or a bad birthday.
Speaking of bad birthdays, I looked at the small pile of bills on my kitchen table for a birthday card that I might have missed. Sure enough, there was a card from my grandmother. I opened it, and a check for twenty-five dollars fell out.
“Thank you for the card, Grandma.”
“My pleasure. Remember what I said. You have a gift. A calling. You’re going to move on. It’ll be like you’re someone else. Don’t be scared.”
Then, she hung up. I had no idea what she meant, but I was sort of bummed to have been reminded that it was my birthday. The day had evolved from a miserable day to a miserable and supremely disappointing day.
Usually, I ate and got drunk on my birthday, but this one was a reminder that my life was no place. No friends were calling me. I didn’t have a party or a gluten-free, vegan cake.
I stripped down and walked into the bathroom. Turning on the shower, I got in and started to scrub the cement off me. My hair was thick with it, and it reminded me that I felt guilty about Homer’s now-bald head.
After finally getting clean, I turned off the water. But before I could open the shower curtain, a large hand reached in and grabbed me hard. I struggled against the grip, but I wasn’t strong enough.
