The Match

by Sarah Adams

  I’m mad that she’s right. I’m exhausted and stretched thin. It’s why I decided to cut back my hours, delegate more projects to Bryan and Hannah, and devote more of my time to Sam this summer. But it’s hard. I love my job, and I love giving my brain the ability to create. Forcing it to turn off like this feels like I’m cutting off my leg. I don’t know how to walk anymore.

  “Okay, you’re right. Let me just look at those plans really fast, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  Hannah gives me a flat smile that alerts me to what’s coming. She steps toward me, puts her hands on my shoulders, and physically turns me toward the door. “Go home, Jake. This is your day off. Let us do our jobs.”

  I’m letting her push me through the door, but I’m not happy about it. “But you’re not doing your job; you’re doing mine. I don’t like it, Hannah. I feel like I’m working you guys into the ground.”

  “Neither of us has kids or spouses, Jake. We like being worked into the ground by our taskmaster boss. It gives us something to gripe about when we go home to our families at Christmas,” she says, pushing even harder now.

  “I’m going, I’m going.” There’s a good chance Hannah will kick me if I don’t leave now.

  I get back in my truck and look to Sam, waiting for her to smile up at me like she usually does. She doesn’t, and honestly, it’s the most annoying thing in the world to have a ten year old give me the silent treatment. I let her, though, because I’m not entirely sure I don’t deserve it.

  Miss Jones’s sweet southern drawl pulls at my memory. You’re going to need it when you try to walk out of here with your head shoved so far up your butt.

  Pulling into the driveway at our house, I click the button to open the garage and notice that my sister June is sitting on the front porch swing zeroed in on her phone. I arranged for her to come stay with Sam for a few hours so that I can go to the grocery store and shop in peace. And wow that statement makes me feel like the physical manifestation of my mom from twenty years ago.

  Do I give my man card over to someone directly or mail it in somewhere?

  But honestly, I don’t know what I would have done without the help of my sister (and my other three sisters) this past year. At one point in my life, I lamented the fact that I had four of them—all younger than me. Growing up, it was like I was always sneaking into a sorority house, trying not to get noticed as I tiptoed past each of their rooms. Someone was always crying. Always heartbroken. Always threatening to run some dumb teenage guy over with her little Honda Civic.

  Now that we are all grown adults, living our own lives, I wish they would move in with me and never leave.

  June glances up when she sees us approach and smiles wide. It falters when she sees Sam open the truck door and dive out before I’ve even had a chance to put it in park. It’s as if I’ve kidnapped her and she would rather open the door and hurl herself out onto the concrete while driving 70 MPH down the interstate than live the rest of her life with me.

  Sam’s flip-flops flap angrily, and her ponytail swings like a pendulum all the way into the house. She doesn’t even look back at me—just slams the door shut behind her.

  I wince a little and turn to my baby sister whose eyes are now as wide as saucers.

  “What in the world was all that about?” she asks as I make my way up the front steps and join her on the porch swing.

  “She’s mad at me.”

  June laughs. “Yeah, I gathered that. But why? I’ve never seen her throw a fit like that. Usually, she just goes quietly and hides in her room.” June is the only one of my sisters who isn’t married yet, so she’s been around this past year more than anyone else.

  “Yeah, well. Unfortunately, those outbursts are becoming more normal by the minute. She even slammed her door in my face the other day. Nearly gave me a bloody nose.”

  “Yikes. So what are you doing wrong?” she asks with a playful grin.

  I know she didn’t mean it seriously, but the comment still stings me somewhere vulnerable. I feel so out of my element lately. I’m quickly approaching the years where Sam will enter puberty, and then I’ll have a whole new pile of worries and insecurities on my plate. Right now, I’m just obsessed about making sure Sam doesn’t have a seizure while she’s in the shower where she would fall and hit her head. In a few years, I’ll be worrying about seizures AND the boy who keeps her out past curfew.

  My hands find my face, and I rub my palms across my eyes all the way up through my hair. “I wish I knew. I’m 99% sure I’m failing at this single-parenting thing.”

  June shifts beside me and puts her hand on my back. “Oh, come on now, it was only a joke. You’re doing a great job with Sam.” She rubs circles on my back like I’ve done for her a hundred times. My reply is a half-hearted grunt.

  “I’m serious!” She leans in and lays her head against my shoulder. “You’re the best dad I know, besides our own. Top-notch, really. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who could handle all that you’ve gone through this year with so much ease.”

  With so much ease? Last night, after Sam went to bed, I was so angry with how my life has turned out this year that I tore a pillow in half. I’d never felt so powerful and masculine until feathers went flying everywhere, making it look more like a scene from a 1990’s slumber party.

  I shake my head and sit up straight, dragging a deep breath into my lungs. “I feel like I’m losing her, June. She’s only ten, and she’s gone through so much heartache this year. It’s like I can physically see her shutting down.”

  June wraps her arm around mine, and we start to swing. “You’ve both had a tough go of it. But I think it’s just an adjustment period. As long as you keep showing up and proving that you love her enough to stick with her through her anger and outbursts, she’ll pull through it all. And you’ll both figure out how to live with her seizures. It’ll just take some time.”

  I nod, wondering when my baby sister got smarter than me. Truthfully, though, I think it happened a long time ago.

  “I wish there was something I could do to cheer her up.”

  “Well, maybe there is,” says June, looking up at me as if I’ve never even considered exploring this idea before now.

  “I asked if she wanted to go out for ice cream, but she didn’t seem too thrilled by that idea.” Apparently, when your dad shuts down your masterful plan to con him into getting you a service dog, and then when you have to watch him act like a jerk to a perfectly nice stranger, you don’t have much of an appetite for bubblegum ice cream.

  “Hmm. Maybe there’s something I can do with her while you’re at work. Is there a movie she’s been wanting to see?”

  “No.”

  “Does she need any new clothes? I could take her shopping.”

  “She hasn’t been interested in clothes lately.”

  “Well…is there anything else you can think of? Anything she’s mentioned lately that she really liked? Or wanted? Anything she’s shown interest in that would get her excited about life again?”

  I stop our swinging, and my gaze turns toward the house as if I’ve suddenly developed x-ray vision and can see right through the walls to the stack of pamphlets piled up on the kitchen counter.

  My answer has been in front of me all along, and I dislike the idea just as much as I did yesterday. I am still holding tight to all of the reasons I think getting a service dog would be a bad idea, but I’m feeling just desperate enough to let myself see that maybe it’s exactly what Sam needs to give her something to look forward to.

  But more than anything, I really don’t like that I’m about to have to eat a whole truckload of crow.

  Chapter Four

  EVIE

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to look like this,” I tell Joanna, stepping away from my easel to inspect it.

  She leans around her own masterpiece (literally, it looks like it could hang in a museum somewhere) to look at my sorry painting. Honestly, it looks as if Charlie painted that bowl of
fruit. Not true—Charlie would have painted a better version. His attention to detail is impeccable.

  Six weeks ago, when Joanna announced to me that she was going to be heading into retirement at the start of the new year, she decided that she needed to seek out a new hobby that could help occupy her time when she was a lady of leisure. Not sure why she felt the need to drag me along on her hobby-seeking adventure since I’ll be the one to absorb all of the work she’ll be giving up, but I’ve been along for the ride ever since.

  So far, we’ve taken up power yoga (and then set it right back down), built a raised vegetable garden and planted ten different types of green plants before Jo decided that she didn’t like being in the sun so much and wanted an indoor hobby, and took two improv classes until the guy who never stepped out of his pirate character told me my hair was beautiful and that he’d like to see what it looked like on one of his dolls at home.

  Yeah.

  So, when Jo suggested we take up painting in the comfort of her kitchen while we sip white wine and listen to music, I was all for it.

  Joanna scrunches her nose and shakes her head. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but I think you might be gettin’ worse.” I love her accent. It’s thicker than mine because she’s from the deep south of backwoods Alabama.

  I give a short laugh. “No, don’t sugarcoat it for me. Be honest and tell me how you really feel, why don’t you?”

  Jo flashes me a sassy grin. “Honey, you know I love you more than a stick of butter. I don’t need to lie to you about your artistic abilities to prove it.”

  And I do know that she loves me, which is why her honesty never hurts. It’s why I’m laughing at her comment instead of silently brooding over it like I would if my mama would have made it. Because if Melony Jones would have said something like that, it would have been so I could see exactly where I fell short. Exactly why I needed to either hire the best private tutor and spend countless hours a week perfecting my technique so she could hang the finished product above her mantel for her supper club to ooh and ahh over, or hide it away forever, and for heaven’s sake, never let anyone know I have flaws.

  By contrast, Jo stands up and fluffs her messy top knot—seriously, can I please have long, gorgeous, white hair like her when I grow up?!—and tops off my glass of wine before telling me to paint a line down the center of my orange.

  “Then it’ll look like a big round butt,” she says with a satisfied smirk. “And that, darlin’, will make you laugh every single time you look at it.”

  I nearly spit my wine back into my cup. Drinks are never safe with Jo. You never know when she’s going to say something that makes you shoot it out your nose.

  “Where’s Gary tonight?” I ask later after she and I packed up our canvases and moved to the couch. Her painting looks like a masterpiece of bright, delectable fruit. Mine, a plump booty covered in an orange spray tan. “And why doesn’t he ever get dragged along on these hobby adventures?”

  Gary is Joanna’s husband—and is just as likable as she is. He’s a sixty-six-year-old journalist who can work from anywhere and loves his job more today than he did the day he started thirty years ago. Joanna and Gary Halstead are just the sort of people to make my mama and daddy turn up their noses. Gracious me, do you mean he had to work for his money???

  The Halsteads moved into the Charleston area about five years ago simply because they’d always wanted to live here. That was when Joanna founded Southern Service Paws. These people are as down to earth as the dirt itself.

  I aspire to have what Jo and Gary have—the kind of love where a man will still walk into a room and pinch my butt after forty years of marriage. And I know this from witnessing it a few too many times for my liking.

  A mischievous glint enters Jo’s eyes, and she wags her eyebrows playfully. “Gary’s not invited because I don’t like to mix my hobbies. And he already participates in a very favorite pastime of mine.”

  “Ew,” I say, shoving my face into one of her oversized throw pillows dramatically.

  Suddenly, I’m thirteen, and she’s my mama telling me about the birds and the bees. Except the irony is that Mama never actually told me about the birds and the bees. She gave me a book and walked away, because Melony Jones doesn’t have personal conversations.

  I remove my face from the pillow and toss it at Jo instead. “Gross. I don’t want to know about your nighttime hobbies with Gary!”

  She catches the pillow, laughing. I know she takes great amusement in the fact that I turn red easier than an albino on the beach with no sunscreen, because she always, always, always takes her inappropriate jokes a step further.

  “I never said they are nighttime hobbies. Honestly, Evie, where’s your creativity? Thinking like that is going to give you the most boring marriage on the planet one day.”

  La, la, la, not listening.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love a good inappropriate joke. But from the first day I met Joanna and Gary, they became the parents I never had—meaning, the parents I wish my current parents were. Because of this, I absolutely do not want to hear about my surrogate parents’ bedroom endeavors.

  I curl up in a ball in the corner of Jo’s massive couch and shut my eyes. This day felt way too long, and now it’s catching up to me. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about the creativity in my marriage, because it’s starting to look like I’m going to die a lonely old maid. Just me and Charlie forever.”

  I gaze longingly at Charlie curled up at my feet. There’s so much comfort in him resting. If he is resting peacefully, it means I’m safe too—no danger of a seizure.

  “He won’t live as long as you.”

  My eyes fly up to Jo, and I take in her smiling face. If I had another pillow, I’d throw it at her too.

  She laughs. “I’m sorry! I was just tryin’ to lighten your heavy mood.”

  “By telling me my dog is going to die?!”

  She shrugs. “My humor is dark.”

  I shake my head in a mock reprimand and sink back into my corner. I wish my couch was this big and comfy, but that tiny loveseat was hard enough to fit in my apartment.

  “Joking aside, I have no idea how you’re still single, Evie. You’re gorgeous. Funny. Driven. Leggy.”

  Epileptic.

  “As it turns out, men don’t really like to approach a woman with a dog wearing a bright-blue vest and a patch sewn on that says, “Hi, I’m single, and occasionally I lose consciousness and convulse on the ground.”

  I can see in Jo’s eyes that she wants to make a sarcastic joke about the patch reference, but she refrains and instead says, “I wish there was something I could say to make it better. But I know there isn’t.”

  Reason #12,345 why I love Jo. She understands people because she’s a good listener. She’s been listening to people with every disability under the sun for the past five years of working for Southern Service Paws. She understands that sometimes people just need to talk and be heard—not fixed.

  “Can we change the subject?” I ask, feeling a little too spent from this day to go down a deep, heartfelt tunnel.

  “Sure.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch to mirror my position. I swear she looks closer to thirty than seventy. And yet, she’s sixty-five years old. “Tell me how your meeting went today.”

  I groan. Maybe I should just go home. Apparently, there is no acceptable topic for me and my I-hate-everything mood tonight. “I wished him good luck trying to walk with his head up his butt.”

  Jo’s mouth falls open just as I suspected it would. “Gracious, girl! Why’d you say that?”

  I skew my face up and then shove it into the collar of my t-shirt to hide. What I said to Mr. Broaden was so unprofessional and a drastic overreaction to what he said. Sure, he was a class-A jerk to me, but I shouldn’t have responded the way I did. I should have smiled politely, thanked him for his time, and then went home and stuck a hundred pins in the voodoo doll I made of him. Instead, I cast a bad light on our compan
y.

  “Well, in my defense, he was rude to me first. But still, I shouldn’t have said what I did. And definitely not in front of his ten-year-old daughter.”

  “All right, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to pop some popcorn, and then you’re going to start from the beginning.”

  And that’s what I do. I tell her everything. Well, almost everything. I leave out the part about him being ridiculously hot and me replaying the scene in my head a hundred times, except changing the course our conversation took and ending it with us making out in the corner. She doesn’t need to know any of that.

  When my monologue is finished, Jo laughs and tells me she would have done the same thing. But I don’t believe her, because she treats the company like it’s her baby. She’s helped train over sixty dogs that have literally changed people’s lives—giving them freedom in ways that medicine never could. She would never have let one stinging comment from an attractive guy undo her like it did me.

  Jacob Broaden struck a nerve inside me. It still hurts.

  Before I leave, Joanna and I discuss the plans I made that day for the fundraiser, and then I spend the rest of the night continuing to obsess over that five-minute conversation in the coffee shop. I teeter between embarrassed of my actions and spitting angry that he would say something like that to me, because:

  1) YES, I am hard up for money, and how dare he point that out.

  2) Everyone knows that car salesmen are probably the most annoying humans ever, so I take great offense to that comparison.

  3) He was right.

  I was pushy and obnoxious. I was acting like I would be fired if I didn’t meet my quota, because something in me actually does feel that way—not that Jo would actually fire me, but like I constantly need to prove my worth by helping every single person struggling with a disability. Every time I match someone with one of our dogs, I feel like I’m earning my keep in this world. Like maybe, one of these days, my parents will see the grand total of people I’ve helped and finally say, “You know, Evie, I’m glad you took your own path in life. I’m proud of you!”