Matchmaking for Beginners

by Maddie Dawson

  “Good-bye!” she says. “And don’t come home later than you said, okay? We’ve got to stick to the schedule we agreed on, Andrew.” She turns to me. “Let’s get out of here. Do you mind?”

  Sammy is giving me an imploring look. Me! Like I could help.

  “Of course I don’t mind,” I say. And I smile at her son.

  “Sorry that was awkward,” she says. “That man is constitutionally unable to stick to a plan, even if he’s the one who made it.”

  “So I’m not the only one processing about an ex,” I say lightly, and am glad when she laughs.

  “Gah! No, I’ll be processing this guy for the rest of my life if I’m not careful,” she says.

  By the time we get back to Yolk—after threading our way down the street as she points out the best places for beers, for East Asian clothing, for jewelry, for hamburgers, for muffins, for coffee, for everything—it’s somehow become our turn to eat, and we snuggle into a tiny table near the back.

  The waiter comes by, a hot-looking guy with a black knit cap and red plastic glasses, and I order a cheese omelet with bacon, coffee, and whole grain toast and grits, and she says she’ll have the same. As soon as he’s moved on, she says: “Okay. So we’ve established that we’re both dealing with exes who are in our faces right now, but I don’t really know the story of you and Noah. Before we get to be best friends, do you want to tell me what happened between you?”

  So I haul out the usual story—the wedding, the honeymoon, the walkout, all of it minus the wedding gown dismantlement—and then a waitress comes by and puts two coffees down on the table, and I suddenly know that she has recently broken up with the waiter, and they’ve not been able to put things back together between them, but there’s a guy walking down the street who would be perfect for her. Maybe she should take off her apron and take a few minutes off to go run into him. She could make it look all casual-like. Or maybe the guy will come this way. He needs breakfast. He needs a hug. He needs her.

  At the next table, a couple is falling in love. Outside, a golden retriever has run down the sidewalk and is licking the face of a toddler. A toddler who laughs and says, “Mommy, I want doggie!”

  My head feels funny. It’s like there’s a golden light spreading over everything, like maple syrup poured on pancakes.

  I look up and Jessica is smiling at me quizzically.

  “Jessica,” I say. “You need to get back together with Andrew. You do know that, right?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MARNIE

  The maple syrup haze stays with me. It’s like I’m moving in some sort of glow-filled fog. All the moments stand out somehow. Everything is brilliant and bright and etched in my brain like it will always stay in my memory. Even when Jessica laughs and assures me that she will not be getting back together with Andrew. No thank you, not now, not ever.

  “He. Is. Sleeping. With. Someone. Else,” she informs me icily.

  “But you match,” I tell her. “You both match. You don’t see that?”

  She laughs. And then she pays the breakfast tab, and we walk back to the house—and along the way she says, “You and Blix with your get-back-together-with-Andrew talk! I’m beginning to see why she wanted you to have this house, so you could take up her song and dance about me and Andrew. Come on, tell me the truth. Did she put you up to this?”

  “No,” I say and feel that dazed, shaky sensation again, like the air is wobbling.

  “Well,” Jessica says. “I cannot forgive a man who’s been unfaithful! Sorry, but that is a deal breaker, pure and simple. Period. No excuses. No backsies.”

  I try to remember exactly what Blix had said about all the people in her crazy little community. Certainly she mentioned Lola and Jessica. But she just said that all of them needed love, and all of them were fearful of embracing it.

  But the thing is, I can almost feel her around me just now, feel her thinking that Jessica and Andrew are meant to be together. Maybe that’s what this hazy feeling is about.

  “Listen,” I say, “one day I called her up when I was so miserable, when Noah left. And I asked her to do a spell to get us back together. I could tell she didn’t think it was a great idea. She said she’d send some words for me to have a good life, for energy, for love . . .”

  “That’s because she probably didn’t think Noah was right for you. Also I can’t imagine her agreeing to manipulate somebody’s path that way.”

  “And then—right after that, I lost my job, which sucked, but then I moved back home, and then I fell in love again with Jeremy, my old high school boyfriend. So! That was obviously the spell she sent, right?”

  “Well . . . sounds like it.”

  “Only now! Well, now I get the news that she passed away and that she left me her house, and I come here, and here’s Noah! He’s back in my life. So . . . well, what I want to know is: Is this the spell? Is this what she intended to happen?”

  She stares at me. “Wow. That’s the way this stuff goes. It might be the spell is working. Or not. We don’t know.”

  “I like to think I believe in free will.”

  “I think Blix would say that you have to trust what makes you happy,” she says. “She was always telling me that: trust joy. That’s free will, isn’t it?”

  My phone pings just then with a text message. I’m expecting it to be from Jeremy, but instead it’s from a number I don’t recognize.

  Marnie, this is Patrick. Downstairs. Sorry for the crashes last night. Cat knocked vase over, which fell into computer printer, drowning motor. Flashes of light ensued. Sparks. New printer being delivered next Monday. Cat very sorry. Told him he can’t keep getting by on his looks. He’s looking for new apt.

  Jessica is watching my face. “Patrick,” I tell her. I smile and type back to him:

  Yikes! Just make sure your wallet is safe when he decides to move out.

  And he types:

  Too late. Wallet already missing, and coincidentally, tuna fish cans are arriving by the boxload.

  A few minutes later he writes: By the way, welcome to this house! Blix told me about you. Glad you’re here at last. Hope you like it. It’s crazy but in a good way. I think.

  The golden haze is still around me when I get back to Blix’s house, where I find Noah practicing his guitar in the living room, and the haze is still there even when he sees me and wants to tell me again how he helped Blix over to the other side, and how he knew she should have called on the medical professionals, but instead she turned to him—HIM—and how bad it feels that even doing that for her apparently wasn’t enough. He’s clearly been brooding about this all night long, but I am in this haze like nothing I’ve ever been in before, you see, and everything seems so fraught with meaning.

  The haze stays with me through the thirty-seven text messages (yes, THIRTY-SEVEN) sent to me by my family members and Jeremy, asking what I’m planning to do, if I’ve listed the house for sale yet, when am I coming home, and by the way, don’t even tell them I like it in Brooklyn because we are not New York people. (That, from my sister, who says she is holding the baby while she types, and she just wishes I could somehow hear the gurgling sounds the baby makes when my sister tells her my name.) Jeremy types over and over again: COME. HOME.

  The golden haze peaks when I happen to go outside and see a car pull up next door, and an elderly man gets out and goes up on the porch where Lola is waiting for him. He puts his arm around her, and Lola eases herself away from him, shifts her hip just so, and they walk down the steps together. She ducks into the car without even glancing in my direction.

  Noah goes out alone that night, and I get takeout and eat in my room, chatting with Jeremy on the phone. I tell him Brooklyn is big and dirty and complicated. He tells me that he went running on the beach, that it’s still so warm he almost was tempted to go swimming, and also that he had dinner with Natalie and Brian.

  “And guess what. I was the one who finally got Amelia to sleep,” he says. “She put her little head on my sho
ulder and I walked her around and around the dining room table until she fell sound asleep.”

  “That’s so nice,” I tell him. I want to tell him about the golden haze, but there are no words.

  It might be part of the magic, and Jeremy doesn’t believe in magic.

  The haze has disappeared, though, when Noah and I get to Charles Sanford’s office on Monday morning. Charles Sanford, a very nice-looking man with hair so slicked back it seems like it may have been buttered, studies us sitting across the desk from him and rattles his papers and lowers his spectacles and then says a bunch of words in a very lawyerly voice that confirm the fact that Blix Holliday has indeed left me her house.

  Left it to me. Just me.

  “However, there’s a stipulation,” says Mr. Sanford in a quiet, careful voice, looking at me. “And that is that you, Marnie, will have to agree to live in the house for three months before it is officially considered yours. Meaning that you can’t put it on the market until that period of time is up. Blix did not want you to simply sell the house and leave.”

  Noah exhales loudly.

  “So it’s not mine unless I live there?” I say.

  “For three months,” says Mr. Sanford.

  Three months. Three months.

  “It’s an unusual stipulation,” he says, “but then Blix was not a usual type of person, now was she?” He shrugs. “What can I say? That’s the way she wrote it up. It doesn’t have to start right this minute, of course. You can go get your affairs in order and come back . . .”

  “But whenever I come back, it’s for three months,” I say.

  “Yes. That is correct. Perhaps you need some time to think it over.”

  I become seriously interested in the little hammered gold nails decorating the upholstered armchair I’m sitting in. I run my fingers across them again and again, tracing the indentations. The light in the room is purplish. The carpet is soft underneath my shoes. There’s a tiny spiderweb in the upper left corner of the ceiling, near the window. My brain is ticking off the fact that three months will mean I’m there until the end of the year, pretty much.

  Three months, three months.

  My whole family is going to be so upset! And I’ll miss Jeremy. Taking a three-month break from him is not what I would have chosen. Oh, and Amelia, too. I was just getting situated back in Florida, beginning to feel connected and secure. Damn it, I’ve been happy there . . . and after such a big, huge unhappiness, this has felt like a gigantic gift.

  Blix, what have you done to me? I’ll need a coat. And sweaters. And what will I live on?

  And, oh my God, then there’s Noah.

  I look over at him. He’s holding a piece of paper in front of him, which I happen to know is a checklist of questions that he’s been directed to ask by his mother.

  He starts in, his voice heavy and serious. Might there be another will that’s more current somewhere? How do we know Blix was of sound mind? Can this will be contested? Blah blah blah.

  When he asks Charles Sanford point-blank if I had any input into the terms of this will, and when exactly was I informed about it, I bristle and make a little squawking noise of protest. But Charles Sanford is patient, explaining that I had nothing to do with the terms of the will, but I can tell he’s getting fed up with Noah and his family, and anyway there’s a loud buzzing sound in my ears that means I can barely pay attention anymore to what’s being said. I work on rubbing the little nails in the chair and wonder what in the world Jeremy is going to say when he hears this news.

  Do I even want this?

  Yes. Yes, darling. You want this.

  Somehow while I’ve been consumed with my own anxieties, Charles Sanford seems to have found the combination of words to make Noah shut the hell up, and then we all say more words and apparently I’ve agreed to everything because I’m signing papers, and it is growing darker outside, like the sun has disappeared, which I don’t think has anything to do with the fact that I’ve just signed a scary legal document, but you never know.

  A thunderstorm is coming, LaRue says. Would anyone like some coffee? Or some bottled water? But no, we say we’re fine.

  “Wait. One more question. So what if she doesn’t live here for the three months?” Noah is saying in a voice that feels like it’s coming from the bottom of a well, distorted and strange. “What happens to the property then?”

  Charles Sanford clears his throat and starts looking through the papers. “She was actually quite certain that Marnie would meet the stipulations. You know how your great-aunt was. There’s hardly anything that she had doubts about. But in a separate document sent in right before she died, she said that if Marnie didn’t accept the terms, the house would go to several charities she named.”

  “To charities,” says Noah flatly. He glances over at me in shock. I shrug.

  “Yes, Mr. Spinnaker. I know.” Charles Sanford clears his throat again. “She did leave you a bit of money. Not what you’re hoping, I’m certain, but still . . . your great-aunt did mention once that you’re the heir to a rather large family fortune, so perhaps she didn’t think it necessary to provide for you in her own will.”

  “Well. That remains to be seen,” says Noah in such a small, defeated voice that I feel sorry for him. I see him as a boy with his hand tucked into his great-aunt’s hand, and maybe she is telling him something, and he is gazing into her face. Aunt Blix. Kiss your Aunt Blix, Noah.

  Charles Sanford is looking at him kindly. “Please know that this kind of thing happens all the time. There’s no accounting for what people want done with their property when they’re gone.” He turns to me. “And here, Marnie, is a private letter she requested that I give to you, to be opened when you wish. There’s another letter in the vault for when the three months are up.”

  I reach over and take the letter. I still feel dazed. Perhaps it’s not too late to speak up and change my mind. In one second, I could reverse course and my life would go right back to normal.

  Still, I can’t help but notice that I am keeping silent.

  Charles Sanford stacks all the papers, and then he stands up to signal that the meeting is over. “So if you don’t have any more questions, I’ll file the necessary paperwork and get things moving. Marnie, feel free to contact me with any questions you might have, or if you have any problems going forward. Because you’ve chosen to accept the terms of the will, Blix has provided a stipend for you for your living expenses. I would suggest you open a bank account here and I’ll see that checks are deposited to the account as needed. Blix also wanted you to know that she’s paid the taxes on the property for the next five years, and she’s also provided some gifts for the tenants, which I’ll be disbursing.”

  The blood is beating in my ears so hard that I can only barely hear what he’s saying.

  It’s time to go, apparently. Noah, walking along beside me, is reading his phone. “Just so you know, I’m pretty sure my folks will want to contest the will,” he says.

  We’re in the waiting room by then. Charles Sanford frowns. “They are welcome to try, of course, but I assure you it’s a waste of money and time. Your great-aunt was knowledgeable in how to make her wishes known.”

  Just then there’s a huge clap of thunder, and Charles Sanford says, “Hi, Blix,” and everyone laughs.

  “You both have my deepest condolences on her loss,” Charles says, and he shakes our hands, and says we’ll be in touch.

  There is not a taxicab in the world that could contain both me and Noah right after that meeting, so I make sure to turn down the taxi he hails as soon as we get outside. He is a big brown bruise of a man just now, furiously texting with his mom, and I feel like I’m in a dream I can’t wake up from.

  I decide to take my chances with the thunder and lightning and the rain that is splattering all around us. I wave him away and start down the street, pulling my sweater up over my head.

  As soon as I get to a Starbucks—a familiar landmark!—I duck inside and find myself surrounded b
y a zillion rain-soaked people, all tapping on their phones and ordering skinny chai lattes.

  I’m shivering and reading the sign, trying to decide what to get when a woman next to me says sharply, “Are you on line?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said: Are you on this line or not?”

  “Oh, you mean am I in this line? Yes, oh yes, I am,” I say. “I thought you were asking me if I was online, like on the Internet.”

  She stares at me, shakes her head, and then turns away, muttering about some people.

  Huh. So people in New York stand on lines instead of in them. Good to know.

  After I get my chai latte, I find an armchair in the corner that a guy with a laptop is just vacating and sink down into it. I’m going to be living in this city for three months.

  At the table next to me, two women are talking, leaning forward in intensity like no one else in the world is there. One of them has deep-purple hair, and both of them have on coats that look like they’re made of quilted black parachutes. And by the way, they’re in love, and later today they’ll probably go out and get a dog.

  I need a coat, probably. And a job. A pair of warm gloves. More black clothing so I can fit in.

  I take a sip of my chai. And all of a sudden, just like that, I know that I don’t want to be in Brooklyn. I want to go home.

  This is not a good place to live. It’s dirty; it’s loud; it’s impersonal—and for heaven’s sake, it doesn’t even know how to have a proper thunderstorm! I like my thunderstorms to arrive in the late afternoon after a buildup of humidity and heat so that by the time the storm comes, you’re grateful for it. It does its job, chasing out the sticky air, and moves on, and the sky clears right up. But this—this is a constant gray drizzle with intermittent booms that seems like it could go on all day. Who needs this?

  I tap my fingernails on the table, push all the crumbs into a little pile. Maybe I should go back to Charles Sanford’s office and tell him that I’ve made a horrible mistake. I’ll tell him that I’m simply not up to it.