Arranged (2 page)

“Good point. Maybe if I get really desperate, I’ll call and find out.”

Sarah blushes. “You don’t have to be desperate to use a dating service.”

“Have you . . . used one?”

“No, but I was thinking about it before I met Mike.” Sarah smiles the way she always does whenever she speaks about him. He’s a stockbroker who works in her building. They met six months ago at a cocktail party. So far, he’s disproving my theory that men who are still single at thirty-five are single for a reason.

As for me: newly single at thirty-three? I’ve got all kinds of theories.

“You’re lucky to have him,” I tell her.

“I am. And you’ll be lucky too, Anne.”

“Yeah, maybe. But for now, I think I’m going to be alone for a while and see how that feels.”

I try to sound like I mean it, even though being alone has never been my strong suit. Not the old Anne’s, anyway. But the Anne who was strong enough to walk away from Stuart today
is
going to be on her own for a while. At least she’s going to try to be.

We finish our drinks, pay up, and head out into the night. Fall’s settling in, and it’s cooler than it was a few hours ago. I stick my suddenly cold hands in my pockets, hugging my coat around me. Sarah hails a cab and climbs in.

She rolls down the window. “You’ll be fine, Anne. Just believe it and it’ll come true.”

As her cab disappears into traffic, I wonder if she’s right. Can I really make myself better if I wish it hard enough?

I close my eyes and slowly click my heels together three times. I will be okay. I will be okay. I will be okay. I open my eyes and look up to the North Star shining brightly above me, the only star visible in this city sky. Feeling silly, I seal my wish on it and head home.

Back in my new apartment, I walk around the empty, echoey rooms, trying to decide where I should sleep. The guy whose lease I took over left his couch and his bed. I’m not sure which would be less creepy to sleep on. I pick the couch and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I clean the loose change out of my pockets, along with the Blythe & Company card. I brush my fingers over the raised lettering and feel a prick of curiosity. “Arrangements Made.” It seems so formal, old-fashioned.

Should I call and find out what they do? If it’s a dating service, should I use it? No, that’s silly. Didn’t I just decide I needed to be alone? That’s right, I did. So, I’ll be alone. And then I’ll find a new man, the right man, on my own.

I throw the card in the direction of the wastebasket in my old bathroom. It hits the tile with a sharp
click.
I pick it up and read it again. I feel the same thrill I did earlier. Something about the card feels lucky, like the fortune cookie I once got that said, “You were born to write,” which is now hanging, framed, in my cubicle at
Twist
magazine
.

I need something lucky right now.

I tuck the card into the black rim of the mirror above the white pedestal sink.

It couldn’t hurt to keep it for a while.

Chapter 2

Just a Little Bit of History Repeating Itself

I
call Blythe & Company two months and seventeen days after I find their card on the street.

Why oh why do I do this?

Well . . . remember all that wishing and hoping I did on the North Star? Turns out it did change my luck. For the worse.

It all started when I ran into my ex-boyfriend, Tadd.

It was about six weeks after the breakup. Through a supreme act of will, I hadn’t spoken to Stuart since I left. I’d worked my way through the first three stages of breakup grief—Good Riddance; I Did the Right Thing, Right?; and Maybe I Should Call Him to See if He’s Okay?—and settled on I Should and Will Be Alone Forever.

I spent the weekend revising the book I’m writing, after receiving a bunch of comments from my literary agent. I was having trouble making the changes she wanted, and by Sunday, I was feeling down on myself and disconnected. The cold, steady rain—and the fact that I’d spent the entire weekend in pajamas—wasn’t helping. When the weatherman said it might snow, I decided to go shopping for a new winter coat. My old one seemed to have gone missing in the move. Hopefully, this was the last time I’d have to send two burly men to pack my stuff in absentia.

Strike that. I will
never
have to do that again. You got that, Anne? Good. Continue.

Anyway, I was walking through Banana Republic when I smacked right into Tadd. Winded, I looked up into his blue, blue eyes. I took in his features, the way the gray crewneck he was wearing hugged his straight shoulders, and I felt my stomach whoosh. Then I realized who it was. Or, to be honest, I realized who it was when Tadd said, “Anne, hi!”

How did this beautiful man know my name? I looked closer. “Oh. Hi, Tadd.”

“It’s been a long time.”

It had been. We’d met when I was twenty-four. I was working at a small weekly paper. The owners hired Tadd as their lawyer when a large company offered to buy him out. Tadd spent a couple of days at the paper to learn the business, and I was assigned to show him around. He was the best-looking thing I’d seen since I graduated from college, and I made sure he knew I was interested and available. We dated for over a year, and then I broke up with him, though the precise reason why was fuzzy to me at that moment.

“Yeah, it has.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” I said after an awkward pause, “what have you been up to?”

“Life . . . work . . . working out . . .”

As Tadd droned on, I remembered why I’d broken up with him. He’s the most boring man on earth. In fact, if I’m being totally truthful, the only interesting thing about Tadd is how good-looking he is.

Oh my God, how did I go out with him for over a year? Was there really nothing that connected us except his looks? What the hell was wrong with me?

Through the haze of his boringness, I heard him say, “And I got married last year.”

“What was that?”

“I said, I got married last year. My wife’s trying on clothes back there.” He motioned toward the fitting rooms.

“You’re married?” I felt funny, like I’d been winded again.

“Are you all right?”

I tried to seem calm. “I’m fine.”

“You look pale.”

I guess I failed. “Just store disease, I guess. I hate shopping malls.”

“You do?”

Crap. Tadd loves to shop, and in the first flush of love, we spent many weekends in stores like this one, trying on clothes and smiling when the shopgirls said how good we looked together. Tadd looks even better in a store mirror than in real life, and I loved looking at him in that slightly distorted way. But there was no point explaining this to him. I can’t even explain it to myself.

“I do when I’m tired. It’s been a long week.”

“Oh, sure.”

“So, how did you meet your wife?”

His face lit up. “She’s a lawyer in my office . . .”

I tried to look interested, but all I could think was that the King of Boring was married and I was still single. Well, maybe she was into his money. Oh, right, she was a lawyer too, she had plenty of money of her own. Well, maybe she was equally boring and didn’t know any better. Yeah, that had to be it!

Not wanting to find out, I said goodbye to Tadd and left the store in a daze, forgetting all about my new winter coat.

I still felt unsettled later that night when I met my friend and editor, William, for a drink at a divey bar downtown. He lives a few sketchy blocks away from the bar in an ultramodern condo built in an old meatpacking plant. He keeps insisting his neighborhood is about to change for the better. Since it hasn’t yet, I made sure the cab dropped me at the bar’s front door. I tried to ignore the slouching teenagers in oversize sweatshirts and droopy pants as they scanned the street for the Five-O.

Inside, the bar was dark and slightly honky-tonk. A Steve Earle song was playing on the fifties-style jukebox, and the tables were made from rough-hewn pieces of wood. A beefy man in his fifties with a full sleeve of blurry tattoos was tending bar. There were a few half-empty bottles of hard alcohol on the ledge behind him. The air smelled like peanuts and stale beer.

Next time, I was meeting William in my neighborhood.

I ordered a pint of Harp and carried it to William’s table by the jukebox. He was wearing a navy sweatshirt with white lettering across the front. As usual, his bright yellow hair was sticking straight up.

“Yo, A.B., what up?”

“Are you still allowed to talk like that at your age?”

He rolled his kelly-green eyes. “Geez, thanks for making me feel all good about turning thirty-six.”

“Shit, was it your birthday?”

“Pretty sure I saw you eating two pieces of cake at my office party two days ago.”

I smiled. “It was three pieces, actually.”

“The girls must hate you.”

“Sometimes.” I took a long drink and wiped the foam off my upper lip. I stared into the amber liquid, watching the reflected ceiling lights float gently on its surface.

“What’s up, Anne? You seem . . . gloomy.”

“I guess I’m feeling my own age these days.”

“Because of the Cheater?”

That’s his name for Stuart since the breakup.

“That, and . . . I don’t know . . . do you ever feel like you’re going to be single forever?”

William sighed. “I know I’m going to regret this, but . . . what’s really going on?”

I thought about the disoriented, winded feeling I had when Tadd told me he was married. How I’d felt that feeling before. How maybe it was the reason I’d stayed with Stuart longer than I should have.

“I guess I feel like I’m never going to meet the person I’m supposed to be with. I keep thinking I’ve met him, but it never seems to work out.”

“How many times have you thought that?”

“Four.”

“That seems like a lot.”

“I know, right?”

William dug a handful of peanuts out of the bowl in front of him. “Can you explain something to me? Why do women always think there’s one particular person they’re supposed to be with?”

“Men don’t think that?”

“Um, no.”

“Huh.”

“So,” he asked again, “are you going to enlighten me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what anyone else’s excuse is, but I blame my mother.”

He laughed. “Of course you do.”

“She
is
the one who named me after the main character in
Anne of Green Gables.
”

“So?”

“So . . . being named after a character in a made-to-be love story is a recipe for thinking that life should imitate art, particularly when you look just like her.”

I said this in a mocking tone, but sad to say, it’s pretty much the truth. I do look just like Anne of Green Gables (red hair, green eyes, pale skin, a smattering of freckles across my nose), and I did grow up thinking the perfect man for me is out there, that it’s only a matter of time until I meet him.

“It’s a book, Anne,” William said practically.

“I know, but . . . don’t you think those kinds of things happen in real life sometimes?”

“You’re hopeless, you know that?”

“Don’t remind me.”

D
espite my best intentions, I never quite managed to shake the feeling that my life isn’t what it’s supposed to be. And it got worse when I ran into John, the guy I’d been trying to get over when I met Stuart.

John and I met when I started working at
Twist
magazine
six years ago.
Twist
is a monthly city-based magazine. John was the hotshot features writer. I was happy to have my own desk. I noticed him on my second day, when we crossed paths in the fax/copy room. He looked so much like the potential James Bond actor on that month’s cover that my heart skipped a beat. A few weeks later, I did some research for him on an article about the mayoral candidates. We hit it off, falling into an easy, flirty banter, and started dating soon after.

He broke it off two years later. On my birthday. Apparently, commitment wasn’t his thing. In fact, he never dated anyone for longer than two years, his “best-before date,” as he so charmingly called it.

It was a messy breakup, one of those heaving “But whyyyy???? I donnn’t underrrrstaannd!!!” moments. He didn’t have any answers other than “I told you I wasn’t into long-term relationships.” “Buuttt you saiidd you loovveeddd meee!!!,” etc., etc., until he convinced me he wasn’t going to change his mind, and I moved out and onto Sarah’s couch. Not long after, he got offered a column at the
Daily Chronicle.
I hadn’t seen him since.

It was a few weeks after the Tadd sighting, and I was behind on a deadline. I got my own column a year ago, covering consumer products. The article was about the latest in ebook readers. I was having trouble finding an angle. Truth be told, I’m still waiting for life to look like it did on
The Jetsons.

I ran into John outside the coffee shop on my corner. I was wearing beat-up jeans, an oversize wool sweater (an old one of Tadd’s, I think), and a baseball hat. This time I was the one who did the recognizing.

“John! Hi!”

He took a moment to connect the dots. “Anne . . . I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Why oh why did I have to run into him looking like this? Of course, he looked perfect in his camel-colored hunter’s jacket.

I adjusted my baseball hat nervously. “Oh, I just popped out for a coffee. I’m in the middle of writing. Anyway, how are you?”

“I’m good . . .” He raised his left hand to run it through his hair. He has great hair, black and thick. I followed the path of his hand through it. It was then that I noticed a glint of platinum.

“You’re married!?”

“Sure. Aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not married.”

“Oh, sorry. I thought I heard you were.”

He heard I was married! Maybe he heard that, and it broke his heart, and he married the first girl who came along, out of misery and spite, and—

“Earth to Anne.” He waved his wedding-ringed hand in front of my eyes.

“Sorry, I spaced for a moment. How long have you been married?”

“Three years.”

“Three years!?”

Several people on the street turned around at the sharp tone of my voice.

“Anne, calm down.”

“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I said, just as loudly as before.

His powder-blue eyes clouded with annoyance. “What’s your problem?”

“
What’s my problem?
Mister I-Break-Up-with-People-on-Their-Birthday is asking me what my problem is?” My voice rose with each beat of my heart.

“Will you keep it down?”

“Jesus Christ.”

He looked ashamed. “Look, Anne, I’m sorry if I hurt you, and I’ve had regrets about the birthday thing, but it wasn’t right between us. Not like it is with Sasha. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but it’s true.”

I knew immediately what he meant. I didn’t know Sasha or anything about their relationship, but we weren’t right together. Not past the surface. Which is my problem. Those damn handsome surfaces that make my heart race and my brain turn off.

“So you met the right woman, and you were suddenly ready to settle down?”

“Yeah.”

“It was that simple?”

“Love doesn’t have to be complicated, Anne,” he said, trying to look worldly and sage.

Hell, maybe he
was
worldly and sage. Or maybe he was full of shit. But his wedding band was real. He was really married.

“There’s someone out there for you, Anne.”

“Sure. Right.”

His cell phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and looked at the number. And then he smiled this devastating, happy smile. I actually felt my stomach flutter, even though the smile was clearly not for me.