by Cara Bastone
“Oh.” John frowned. “That...actually sounds pretty accurate.”
“It’s like the difference between watching a circus dude juggle fire and watching a dragon breathe fire,” Richie mused. “One of them is doing it for a show and one of them is doing it because he was born that way.”
“Are you telling me that I was born a dick?”
He felt his phone buzz in his pocket but ignored it.
Richie tipped his head from one side to the other. “Well, the jury’s still out on nature versus nurture. All I know is that scowl of yours isn’t there by choice. You’re a dick, John. Accept it.”
John shook his head good-naturedly and let the conversation move on to bigger and better topics.
I was expecting someone younger.
His own words played in his head and he was grateful that Richie and Marissa had one another’s attention and didn’t see the grimace his face pulled into when he remembered what he’d said to Mary when he first met her. What an idiot.
John wasn’t sure that he’d ever had reason to talk to someone like her before. Women of her caliber were rare and exotic, spotted occasionally hailing cabs in DUMBO or brunching in Park Slope. Everything from the gold of her hair to the cut of her dress had screamed money. No. Not screamed it. Screaming implied gaudiness and she was anything but gaudy. No, Mary’s appearance merely whispered money. It was the quiet, soothing melody behind her entire countenance. People as rich as Mary seemed to move through the world with their own soundtrack.
He was obviously not worthy of the brilliant gold gloriousness of someone like Mary Trace. He’d known that the second she’d walked into that restaurant. And he’d known that she would know it soon enough as well.
But he’d have liked to have lasted more than a single sentence before he’d ruined his chances. Pleasant conversation and a good-night kiss on whatever picturesque stoop led up to her home would have been nice. It wouldn’t have been long before she realized that dating a defense attorney who lived in a studio in Bed-Stuy meant weekend trips to see his aunties in the Bronx, not ones that landed them on the beach in the Hamptons. She was sharp, so it wouldn’t have been long before she realized that his desire to cook for her would have been fueled mostly by his inability to pay for fancy Brooklyn brunches. She would have no doubt tired of waxy carnations and started to wish for lilies and orchids.
His phone buzzed one more time and he ignored it again. Texting her back when he was in this mood was a bad idea. No. Better to just leave it alone.
No question the whole thing had been doomed from the beginning.
Still. He wouldn’t have minded that good-night kiss.
* * *
“GOT ANYBODY GOOD on the line?” Mary’s best friend Tyler asked from where he lay on his living room floor, a couch pillow under his blond head and his feet crossed at the ankles. He had his eyes closed, so Mary wasn’t positive how he’d even known she was texting someone.
“No. Just struck out again, actually. My friend set me up with this guy, but apparently he’s a drug dealer.”
Tyler cracked a navy blue eye. “Some friend.”
Mary laughed and waved a hand through the air. “She’s well-meaning. Just a little...out of touch. I think she’s probably late fifties and a little bit on the optimistic side. She’s one of my artisans.”
“Who are we talking about?” asked Serafine St. Romain, or Fin for short, as she sauntered in from Tyler’s kitchen. Fin was a singular presence. She was tall, spooky-eyed and blazingly beautiful. Plenty of people doubted Fin’s skills as a psychic and energy reader, but Mary wasn’t one of them. She fully believed in Fin’s clairvoyance.
Fin plunked down on the floor next to Tyler, curling up like a clumsy kitten next to him. He hummed in pleasure, eyes still closed, and absently played with Fin’s long dark braid.
Mary smiled at the sight the two of them made together. Preppy Tyler and hippie Fin. Such a strange pair, made all the more interesting by how blisteringly in love they were with one another. Mary envied them in a good-natured way. Though it might have bothered some people that her entire group of close friends had paired off together, first Sebastian and Via and now Tyler and Fin, Mary was just happy for everyone.
Mostly.
She’d originally been friends with Sebastian and Tyler. If it was unusual to have two male best friends, Mary had never thought much about it. They were good friends, caring, funny, kind. Sebastian had fallen in love with Via, a counselor at his son’s elementary school, and Fin had come along into their group as Via’s best friend and foster sister. Tyler and Fin had had a long road toward finally being together, but when it had happened a few months ago, Mary had breathed a big sigh of relief. She’d suspected all along that the gorgeous and enigmatic Serafine St. Romain had the power to truly wound her goofy, preppy, crude, generous best friend. She was glad it had worked out the way it was supposed to.
It didn’t pass her notice, however, that both of her fortysomething-year-old best friends had ended up with women a decade-plus younger than they were. It wasn’t until she’d learned that Fin and Tyler were truly together did it really hit her. She might be on the losing end of a certain social equation. Because it seemed to her that once over thirty, men rarely dated women their own age. And even less dated older women.
She’d just started toying with the idea of starting to date older men, much older men, when Estrella had come along and proposed her thirty-one-year-old son.
Mary frowned. Her thirty-one-year-old son who found her age so repellant it was literally the first thing he’d commented on. And now Mary was on this strange waterslide, where around every bend, there was Estrella shoving some young thirtysomething guy in her path. She wasn’t going to complain, but maybe she should hedge her bets a little bit and date some older guys on the side as well.
“Hmm?” Mary pulled herself from her thoughts to answer Fin. “Oh. Estrella.”
“I love that woman,” Fin said emphatically.
“Me too. I just wish she had better taste in men. She’s been trying to set me up lately to varying levels of failure.”
“Weren’t you going on a date with her son?” Kylie asked as she ambled into the room and tossed herself into the overstuffed armchair.
This was one of the many things that Mary loved about coming over to Tyler’s house these days. Used to be, in the past, his condo was homey but a little too quiet. It was one-note. Only influenced by Tyler and his presence and his choices. These days, though, since he’d gotten custody of his fourteen-year-old sister, Kylie’s backpack overflowed with textbooks in the corner, her sweatshirts hung on the coatrack. She looked utterly at home as she draped her feet over the opposite arm of the fluffy chair and shoved her face into her phone, barely waiting for the answer to the question she’d just asked.
Mary liked to see Kylie acting like a teenager. When she’d first come to Brooklyn around Thanksgiving, she’d been like a mini adult, all her corners tucked in and nothing-to-see-here-folks. But the other day, Kylie had even been five minutes late for work, and it had thrilled Mary to her core. Not that she rooted for her employees to be late, but that Kylie was comfortable enough to be a little late. That was real progress.
“What’s that?” Fin asked, bolting upright and smiling when Tyler tugged her back down into his side. “You went on a date with Estrella’s son?”
“Date is a relative term in this case.” Mary sighed. She hadn’t told anyone about her mishap with John, but she figured this was as receptive an audience as any. “I arrived at this super fancy restaurant in Greenpoint, he told me he’d hoped I’d be younger, I picked up my jaw off the floor and left. End of date. Not exactly a love story for the ages.”
“You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.” Tyler sat up, a rare anger burning in his eyes. “That’s the rudest freaking thing I’ve ever heard. Mary, I hope you shook it off immediately
.”
Mary avoided Fin’s light gaze, knowing that her intuitive friend was going to see both what she did say and what she didn’t. “It got me down for a few days. But I’m back in the swing of things. Anyways, he came to the shop to apologize, and I think he really meant it.”
“Oh. That’s who that guy was?” Kylie asked, looking up from her phone. “The mean-looking one with Estrella?”
“Yup.”
“What is wrong with men these days?” Tyler groused. “If they aren’t hitting on women in the subways, they’re telling them they look old in fancy restaurants. Would it kill my species to have a little common decency?”
Fin and Mary exchanged wry eye contact. Dating a woman as beautiful as Fin had opened up Tyler’s eyes to some of the cruder ways that men treated women. Especially in a city as anonymous as New York. But Mary suspected that most of his incredulous griping had to do with the fact that Kylie had apparently announced a few days ago that she was going to homecoming with a date. A male date. Tyler had yet to recover.
“You’re a prince among men, my love,” Fin said drily, kissing her boyfriend on the cheek.
“Ty,” Kylie said, rolling to one side, “you’re telling me that you never, not even once, hit on a woman on the train?”
Tyler responded, and Mary let the noise of the bickering siblings fade fuzzily into the background. She picked up her phone and reread the text that she’d gotten a few minutes ago from John.
She pursed her lips. The part about his belief system and innocent until proven guilty, she actually liked. But it was the last line that really irked her. Date him if you want but just remember that I voted to veto.
What a grouch. The surliness rose off each word like curlicues of smoke. She frowned at his text.
Your warning is duly noted, counselor. Consider your duties in this matter to be fulfilled.
She sent off the text with a twisting flourish of her pink-polished finger. There. That would show him that she could be just as snappish as he could be.
But...
The truth was that she couldn’t be that snappish. Not with any level of comfort. She flipped her phone over so that she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Mary smoothed her hair down and grimaced when she found one of her thumbnails between her teeth. No, no, no. She’d just gotten a manicure. She wasn’t going to give in to that old habit.
Ugh. She picked up her phone and glared at the lack of a response from him. But what had she been expecting? Him to immediately respond to a rude text from her? Just because he was naturally rude didn’t mean that he was any good at receiving rudeness from others.
Mary set the phone down again, let a few more minutes pass and then finally gave in to temptation. She opened up their thread, carefully selected a sunshine emoji and sent it off, instantly feeling a little better.
CHAPTER FIVE
“MARY, I HATE every single one of your employees besides Kylie,” Fin groaned as she leaned dramatically against the checkout counter at Fresh.
“I have to say that right now I agree,” Mary replied. Her part-time employee Sandra was currently a no-show for her shift, and Mary was stuck behind the register for the third Friday night in a row.
“Need tacos! Was promised tacos!” a voice, comically weak, called from the floor at Mary’s feet, hidden from view behind the register. It was Via, Fin’s best friend and one of Mary’s favorite people on earth. Mary had invited Fin and Via over to her apartment for a girls’ night complete with at-home pedicures, the aforementioned tacos and—the silver bullet—the promise that she’d let them help set up her new dating profile on an app mostly featuring older men.
They’d both sprung at the chance like hyenas on a limping gazelle. As a member of the chronically single club, Mary had learned that if there was one thing that happily coupled people could never resist, it was playing on the dating apps of their single friends.
“Just let yourselves in upstairs, order some tacos, make some margaritas in my new blender, and I’ll be up in a couple hours when I close up the shop.”
“Yeah, right,” Fin scoffed, resting half of her beautiful face on her closed fist and making her cheek stretch. “No woman left behind. We’ll hang here until closing time.”
“Here, here,” Via called from the ground. “But my feet have swollen from a week of hell at work, and I can’t get my heels back on. So, I’m just going to participate from down here.”
The bell on the door rang and Mary looked up. But it was just a late-night shopper in a long silk scarf, who seemed to be browsing, though Mary would bet a hundred bucks that the woman had already picked out whatever she was there to buy on the website.
Right on the woman’s heels, though, happened to be Estrella. Her face brightened when she saw Mary. “Mary! I didn’t expect to see you here on a Friday night. I thought for sure it would be Sandra.”
“She didn’t show up for her shift,” Mary said gloomily. “What can I do you for, Estrella?”
“Fin, my love,” Estrella greeted her before she turned back to Mary. “I’m just here to drop off those picture frames I told you about.” Estrella held out a tote bag to Mary and grinned over the counter at Via. “I didn’t realize you had a stowaway back there.”
“Hi, Estrella,” Via said with a big grin on her face. “We’re supposed to be having a girls’ night where I’d ideally be draped across Mary’s couch, but I’m settling for the floor until Sandra gets here.”
“I’m sorry your girls’ night is ruined.”
“Oh, it’ll still be fun. Let’s order the tacos now and eat them behind the register while we hide from customers,” Fin said with a little grin on her face.
The one customer in the shop sniffed and didn’t smile from where she stood comparing the embroidery on two separate pillows.
“You wanted tacos from Ish, right?” Mary asked, absently watching the snooty customer. “They don’t deliver, unfortunately. But Rocko’s does.”
“Rocko’s?” Via piped up from below. “No! I refuse! I got food poisoning from there once. I’m on a Rocko’s strike.”
“Ish is that place down by Borough Hall, right?” Estrella asked.
“Yup.”
“Oh, they’ll deliver to me.” Estrella had a glint in her eye that Mary couldn’t quite interpret.
“You’ve got the magic touch?” Fin asked with a wry expression on her face.
“Let’s just say I’ve got connections all over this city.” Estrella wasn’t doing a Godfather impression, but Mary felt she might as well have been.
They told Estrella their order and then Mary worked her own particular brand of magic on the customer. She could clock what kind of shopper a person was from a mile away. And she knew that this particular lady was not one who wanted to interact with the sales staff. But she also knew that once she’d arrived at the shop, she’d started second-guessing which of the side lamps she actually wanted to purchase.
Mary made some subtle changes to the lighting in the store and decided that now was the perfect time to unpack those afghans that an artisan in Boulder had finally shipped to her. Their tones were deep and rich, not her usual summer decor, but they would set off the ruby lighting of those lamps and help make her sale, she predicted. And sure enough, not ten minutes after she’d draped one of those afghans over the armchair next to where those lamps were sold, Mary was ringing up and carefully wrapping the five-hundred-dollar purchase.
Not too bad for a Friday night. If it weren’t for the aching cavern in her belly where food should be, she’d almost be glad that Sandra hadn’t shown up for work. The girl was as likely to people-watch in the picture window as she was to actually try to sell anything.
Once the woman left, Mary briskly folded up the afghans again and readjusted the lighting.
“Didn’t you just set those out, Mary?” Via asked.
“Our sl
y Ms. Trace did that just to make a sale,” Fin observed, never missing a trick. “You must have known how those colors would perfectly offset the lamps?”
“Mary’s mother didn’t raise no fool,” Estrella called from where she leaned against the counter.
Mary laughed, but that simple turn of phrase made something ancient twist a quarter turn inside of her gut. Because according to Mary’s mother, she had, in fact, raised a fool. An aging, single fool who was going to wake up one day soon and realize that she’d prioritized her life in the wrong direction.
The thought threatened to sour the good mood she’d been brewing, her blood still thrumming from the sale, two of her good friends ready and raring to go for a girls’ night. Mary smiled absently and hefted the box of afghans back into the storeroom, where they’d wait until fall, when the colors were more appropriate.
She heard the bell on the door jingle and Via’s faint cry of “Tacos!” Smiling, she emerged from the room. But that smile immediately quirked into a look of confused curiosity.
“John?”
An annoyed, exhausted, semi-rumpled John stood in the front area of her shop holding an enormous sack of tacos.
Mary realized what had happened all at once. “Estrella, you didn’t!”
“Oh, she did,” John grumbled in that two-toned voice of his, a little more hoarse than usual.
“You sent a civil servant to pick up tacos for us?” Mary gave Estrella a hard time.
“He was a taco delivery boy before he was a civil servant, and my son long before either of those occupations. It won’t break his back to bring food to a group of pretty women.”
Aware of Fin’s and Via’s avid interest in the newcomer, which Mary was sure actually had very little to do with the tacos in his hands, Mary strode over to John, her hands out for the food. He handed it over and took a quarter step backward, like he wasn’t sure if, sans tacos, he was officially invited to be inside her shop.
