Dana thinks Anders is Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice? Priceless.
But then she cocks her head to one side. “Still, some assets. What if you could get a house out of it? Or an apartment? It might be worth it. And you’ve always said he’s handsome. Of course, your taste in men is a little suspect.”
“Heisgood looking. He’s like the guy in that movie you made me watch. The one that made me cry.”
“A Star is Born?”
“That’s the one.”
Dana fetches a laptop from the dresser. She opens the lid and turns it to face me. “Show me,” she commands.
The company website has a headshot but for good measure, I also find a photo taken at a game jam showing Anders from top to toe in his habitual black.
“Shit!” Dana swears softly. “How come you’ve never shown me this before? He’s seriously sexy.”
“He’s also seriously eccentric. The man proposed to me out of the blue at our business meeting.”
Showing her the picture was a mistake. She is enlarging the shot and zeroing in on his crotch. “He looks like he’s packing too,” she says. “I take back everything I’ve ever said about him. I think you should give his proposal serious thought.”
No, no, no. Back up. Dana is not supposed to support Anders’s mad idea. That’s not at all what should happen. We’re supposed to roll about laughing, cracking jokes about seeing his estate first or writing it on cue cards, or how he should have stood in the middle of the road in the snow. She is absolutely not supposed to take it seriously.
Sunday Dad
My mouth is open. What has happened to everyone today? Why are they all coming out with the most preposterous nonsense?
“Dana,” I say slowly, as if explaining to a child. “I don’t love him.”
“So?”
The wine must have gone to her head. Dana and I have different attitudes to my love-life. She thinks I need one; I think I don’t. Shortly after Max’s birth, Dana had run into the back of another car at a junction. As she stood shaking in the centre of the road, incapable of stopping the tears streaming down her face, the woman she hit handed her Max, still blissfully asleep in his car seat, moved both cars safely off the road and then sat them all down in a café with a hot, sweet tea.
Two teas, an egg salad sandwich and a chocolate brownie later, she left, having exchanged contact details purely for insurance purposes. The woman texted that evening to make sure Dana and Max had made it home. And she called the next day to checkboth of them were still okay. She had a brother, she said, who would fix her car for peanuts, cannibalising a write-off for parts, so there was no need to go through the insurance. Dana had cried once again. A single mum off work on maternity, money was tighter than skinny jeans after Christmas.
The woman, Fiona, had then offered to see if her brother could fix Dana’s car too. A meeting turned into coffee, which turned into an afternoon in the park until Fiona, a chef, had to go to work. The following week, she cooked for Dana. The meal was divine, as was the kiss that followed. I heard the story as it unfolded. By the time I finally got to meet the fabulous Fiona, I was pre-disposed to love her, especially as she worked Friday evenings.
But ever since Dana found love, she’s been angling to pair me up too. As if her good fortune should naturally extend to me. That must be the source of her excitement over Anders’s proposal. I consider how to make my point, organising my arguments before I start to lay them out.
“You love Fiona.” A simple statement of fact. Dana nods. “But how do you feel when she leaves the cap off the toothpaste?”
“I want to kill her. She knows I hate it.”
“Now imagine that feeling when there isn’t even love to stop you screaming at your partner?”
Dana takes another sip of her wine. “Okay. Point taken. But you could grow to love him. He’d be on his best behaviour during the honeymoon period. That should be enough time to fall in love. And it wouldn’t take long from the look of him.”
Effie comes into the kitchen and looks forlornly at the empty plates. She’s only tiny, but she eats like a teenage boy. It amazes people when she tucks away an adult-sized portion.
“I can’t believe you think this could work,” I say, closing the lid on the laptop before my daughter sees anything.
Effie walks up to Dana. “I’m hungry,” she says.
Dana ignores her and focuses on me. “I can’t believe you think it couldn’t. But even if it didn’t, how would you be worse off?”
Effie, tired of being ignored, raises her hands. They clamp, one on each side, bang on Dana’s tits. Then Effie jiggles them. That gets our notice.
“Effie!” I exclaim, mortified. But Dana looks down and calmly says, “What do you want, sweetie?”
I stop her with a wave of my hand. “No, Effie. You cannot do that. If you need to get someone’s attention, you touch their arm or their shoulder. Nothing else. And most especially not their breasts.”
