30 First Dates (15 page)

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Authors: Stacey Wiedower

BOOK: 30 First Dates
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I digress. The date was actually a double-date. My roommate came and brought her boyfriend-du-jour, and we went to dinner at a restaurant in Addison and then to a club in Lower Greenville, and that was all fine. After we left the club my roommate's date, Brad*, drove us to this bar near SMU. It was crazy crowded, and we were right in the middle of it. I noticed Brad had started slamming back drinks, to the point that I was worrying about how we were going to get home. We were talking about Elvis's band—he plays drums and writes some of the songs, and he was born on Elvis's birthday and wrote a song called "Hounddog Hell." Anyway, Elvis made some comment about music—I didn't even hear it—and then Brad was yelling at him. As in, pissed off yelling, because he was offended by something Elvis said about Pearl Jam. By this point Brad was trashed off his ass, which was a buzzkill for the rest of us. He shoved Elvis in the arm, and Elvis stood up and pushed him off his chair, and then some guy from another table yelled, "Hey, watch it," and
he
got up and pushed Elvis, and Elvis pushed him back into a chair, which fell over, and by then it's this whole huge deal and everybody's going crazy in the place. The bouncer who'd been outside comes over and, just like in a movie, grabs Brad and Elvis by the backs of their shirts, guides them to the door of the bar and pushes them through. They literally got kicked out. Meanwhile, my roommate's picking up the chair that fell and apologizing 15,000 times to every single person within hearing distance, and then we look at each other, wondering how the hell we're going to get back to our car, which is still at the club on Greenville, parked next to Elvis's bike.

 

We called a cab. Once we got to the car we drove back to the bar to look for Elvis and Brad, but neither of them was there. I didn't know what had happened to them until the next day when my roommate called Brad and found out he'd just gotten in his car and driven home. Needless to say she won't be seeing him again. Elvis, on the other hand, walked off, and we found out later he'd gone to another bar, gotten in another fight and wound up spending the night in Dallas County Jail. Thirty dates with thirty guys in 14 months means life is never dull.

 

Erin shook her head, thinking about Robby (Elvis's real name) and wondering what he was up to at that moment. She felt guilty that they'd ditched him, but she didn't think they'd contributed too much to his downward spiral that night. From what Sherri said, it wasn't the first time he'd been in trouble with the law—which was why she'd thought he'd make an interesting blog post. She was right, but Erin told her she was on match-making probation until further notice. Meaning, until she got desperate again.

Despite all that, Erin was sad she didn't get to end the night with Robby. She'd wondered all night what it would feel like to kiss him, maybe run her fingers along the planes of his structured jaw. Considering his musician status and overall bad-assedness, though, she'd likely have just been in over her head.

She had bigger things to worry about, at any rate. She'd set a date with the
Wake Up, DFW
producer and was appearing on the show in less than a week. She had to decide what to do between now and then about her hair, which was starting to sprout dark roots, and she had to figure out all those small details that felt huge—what to wear, what to say, how to sound like she had any idea what the hell she was doing.

She'd run the analytics on her site just before posting the entry about Robby, and to date she was at 12,274 subscribers. Her readers were now regularly leaving tips on how to find dates or trying to set her up with people they knew. She was scheduled all the way up to date twelve, and one reader had given her a built-in way to knock out another item on her list—he owned a tattoo parlor and had offered to give her a free tattoo. That was a relief, since she'd just made a payment to her credit card company that was barely more than the minimum. At this rate she'd be paying off her Paris trip well into her thirties.

Along with the positive comments, the blog was getting negative attention, too. One reader in particular, a New Jersey-based blogger named Marissa Spiegel, had turned 30 First Dates into her own personal scapegoat for all that was wrong with the feminist cause. Just that afternoon she'd Tweeted, "Hey, @30dates. Ever think u might not NEED a man to make u special?" The day before it was "I hate the message @30dates sends. Aren't we past this cinderella/prince charming crap?"

Beside her, Erin's phone began belting out "Beautiful Dreamer," which meant it was her mom. For one second she hesitated, considering chickening out and letting the call go to voicemail, but then she changed her mind and clicked accept.

"Hi, Mom."

"Hey, Hon." She paused as if expecting Erin to speak first. "I got your voicemail. So you're coming by this afternoon?"

"If you'll be home, yeah."

"What's going on?" Erin could hear the curiosity raging behind her mother's disinterested tone.

"Can't a girl just visit her mom and dad without an ulterior motive?" Erin answered, wrinkling her nose at her own obviousness.

"Your message just made it sound like you had something important to tell us," Joanne said, leaving Erin to wonder how her mother could still hear what she didn't say when they hadn't been witness to each other's day-to-day lives in eleven years.

Must be a mom thing.
She certainly wouldn't know anything about that. She picked up her Diet Coke and took a sip.

"Is it about the blog?" her mother asked, and Erin almost spit out her drink.

"You know about the blog?" she sputtered.

"Honey," Joanne said, and her tone was pragmatic. "Everybody knows about the blog. I heard about it from Cindy, and I've been reading it for weeks…I just wish I'd heard it from you. I've been hanging out here, wondering if you were ever going to say anything about it."

Erin pressed her eyelids shut and suppressed another wave of guilt. She should have figured. 12,000 subscribers—why wouldn't her own mother be one of them? She just couldn't believe her mom had held the knowledge in this long.

"All right, now I feel like a really bad daughter," she said, and paused. "Does…Dad know?"

"I don't think so," Joanne said, and Erin blew out a breath in relief. "At least I haven't mentioned anything to him about it. Your love life isn't really a topic I figure you'd want to share much about with your dad, and vice-versa. Though why you want to share it with the world at large, I'm having a bit of trouble understanding."

"Hold that thought," Erin said. She took another sip of Coke and reached over to shut down her laptop. "I'm coming over."

 

*  *  *

 

Forty-five minutes later, Erin was seated on one of the big, upholstered swivel barstools at her parents' granite breakfast bar while her mom bustled around the kitchen preparing a meatloaf for dinner. Erin's stomach growled in anticipation. Neither she nor Sherri was much of a cook, so a homemade meal felt like a treat. She watched as her mom began peeling potatoes. She'd asked about five times if there was anything she could do to help, but Joanne denied her. She knew all about Erin's hopelessness in the kitchen. Erin figured her mom would rather she stay out of the way.

Joanne had dipped straight into the blog conversation as soon as Erin stepped through the back door. Erin thought that was just as well, because her dad was out golfing and would return home any minute. The last thing she wanted was for 30 First Dates to become her family's main topic of dinner conversation.

"So that's how it started in a nutshell," Erin said, watching her mother's hands glide deftly through potato skins with a small, sharp knife. The scraps peeled away in a spiral trail that dangled into the sink, and water ran in a thin stream that pinged off the stainless steel surface. Every thirty seconds or so, Erin's words were punctuated by the thud of a potato landing in a large pot.

Joanne had listened without commentary as Erin explained Hilary's betrayal, the students with the
Bachelorette
ad, and the conversations with Ben and Sherri that had helped launch the idea for her blog. Now she paused in her work and eyed Erin as she asked, "What are you hoping to achieve with the blog?" She paused, and when Erin didn't answer she went on. "I get it—you're feeling lost and you're floundering right now. Believe it or not, I remember being your age, and I do understand this fear you're experiencing that maybe you haven't made all the right choices."

Erin almost laughed at how quickly her mom cut to the meat of the situation, and she forgot sometimes where she'd acquired that trait. She was also acutely aware that she'd left some key facts out of her recap—her suspension from work, for one—and she wondered exactly how much of the blog her mother had read.

"Well, that's the thing. I'm really not sure. When I started doing it, it was just an item on the list, you know? I was just having fun and not taking any of it too seriously. But then when the blog got me in trouble at school—
might as well own it
—it wasn't fun and games anymore." She paused. "This might sound silly, but I still didn't regret doing it. It just felt like there must be some purpose for it. Like something is going to come of it and that something might help me pull myself out of this rut I feel like I've been swimming around in. I didn't even realize I was in a rut until I got suspended, and until mine and Sherri's trip."

Erin cringed internally as she dropped the bomb about her job, but her mother looked more concerned than upset. And maybe a little less surprised than Erin had expected.

"Suspended?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

"I've been reinstated," Erin said, explaining briefly the situation with the newspaper ad and the way she'd been questioning her career path. Joanne listened, for the most part without passing judgment. Erin had expected her to, really—her mom was understanding to a fault. Erin figured it was the should've-been therapist in her coming out.

Joanne finished peeling the last potato and hefted the pot over to a rear burner of the cooktop, where she swung out a small copper faucet from the wall and began filling the pot with water. She reached up and pushed a clump of fuzzy, gray-streaked brown curls away from her face.

"Your trip sounded amazing," she said.

"It
was
amazing." Erin's voice faltered at the end as she thought that she had the debt to prove it. That wasn't an issue she wanted to broach with her parents. Apart from the car, she'd paid her own way since college and wanted to keep it that way.

Joanne swung around so her left hip was leaning against the countertop and surveyed Erin thoughtfully.
Uh-oh, here it comes.

"I think you should just keep doing what you're doing," she said, as Erin stared at her, not completely understanding. She didn't reply.

"Just keep blogging, keep dating, keep having these experiences you've never had before," she said. "I tell you, I don't regret a single thing about the way my life has turned out—your father, you, my job. But if I could go back and do one thing over while keeping you and Bob in my life as you are, I would have had a wider range of experiences while I was young. I think what you're doing is…fantastic."

Erin's eyes widened as her mom continued. "You're young, you're smart, you have every single opportunity in the world out there waiting for you to grab it. You aren't tied down to a mortgage or a husband or even a job anymore. And so you
don't
have any of those things. So what? You still have time to create yourself, to figure out what you love to do. A lot of people recreate themselves over and over again. If you don't experience new and different things, how can you even begin to know what's right for you?"

Erin felt a surge of love swell through her, and she knew that even if her mother's advice were the opposite, she'd done the right thing by coming here. She was suddenly unsure why she hadn't wanted to tell her mom about the blog from the outset.

As Joanne returned to the sink, rinsed her hands, and picked up a towel sitting between them on the peninsula, Erin wondered something again.

"How much of the blog have you read, exactly?" she asked, her eyes narrowing.

Her mother grinned. "Enough to know that Pete sounds
hot
. You need to work on clearing up that little mistake and get him over here for some meatloaf."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

High-Profile

August: ten months to thirty

 

Erin watched nervously as Annette Friendly, whose name was too fitting to possibly be real, licked her lips and waited as the cameraman counted down the seconds until they were back on the air. Her megawatt smile returned half a second before the red light blinked on, indicating it was showtime.

"And we're back with local blogger Erin Crawford, who's creating quite the buzz in the online dating scene. Erin, with your blog, 30 First Dates, you seem to have invented your own, personal singles website. As you told us in the last segment, the site is now generating your dates for you. You're basically a self-made reality show. Was that your intention all along?"

"It's funny that you say it like that, Annette, because it was a reality show that sort of served as my inspiration. I got the idea for 30 First Dates while watching an old episode of
The Bachelorette
." Erin smiled an impish smile.

Annette laughed, and it sounded entirely natural, like they were two girlfriends having a conversation on a sofa that
wasn't
being broadcast onto tens of thousands of DFW-area TV screens.

"Ryan and Trista?" she guessed.

"How did you know?" Erin answered, laughing in reply. "I guess they got me thinking about the concept of 'happily ever after' and how it's never seemed to have much to do with my own love life."

Annette instantly appeared concerned. "On that note, I'm sure our viewers would be interested to hear that you once dated Dallas' own Noah Bradley, known around the world as the man who stole away Colin Marks' fiancée. As a matter of fact, did I read correctly in a recent entry on your site that you're the one who pushed Noah into Amelia Wright's arms?"

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