“Keri’s a friend. She’s a dermatologist. Really smart. Really pretty.” He started unlacing his skates. “She’s been single for a while and she’s, uh—normal.”
“I appreciate the thought, but—”
“Give me one reason you can’t go to dinner.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
The problem is that the only honest reason—I don’t want to have dinner with anyone who isn’t currently in my kitchen covered in flour—is not a reason I can say out loud without every guy in this locker room losing their minds. And Ollie is watching me with that look, the one that saysI know exactly what you’re thinking and I’m going to enjoy watching you pretend I don’t.
“Fine,” I said. “One dinner.”
“That’s my guy.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Saturday night. I’ll send you the details.”
I tell Sydney about the date on Thursday, casually, while she’s folding laundry in the living room. I’m not sure why I’m telling her. I don’t need her permission. But I tell her anyway, and I watch her face while I do it.
“Ollie set me up with someone. For, uh, dinner on Saturday.”
She doesn’t look up from the shirt she’s folding. “Yeah? That’s great.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. It’ll be good for you.” She folds the shirt—one of mine, a gray henley, and I watch her hands smooth the fabric and set it on the pile—and glances up. “What’s she like?”
“I don’t know. A dermatologist, I guess. Ollie says she’s nice.”
“Nice.” She picks up another shirt. “That sounds promising.”
“Does it?”
“Sure. Go. Have fun. I’ve got the twins.”
She’s smiling. It’s a perfectly good smile. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this smile. And yet.
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says, and goes back to folding my laundry, and I stand there for a second too long before I walk away.
And now it’s Saturday night. The restaurant is upscale—dim lighting, cloth napkins, the kind of place where the menu doesn’t have prices and the water comes in a glass bottle. Keri is tall, dark-haired, and sharp. She asks good questions and listens to the answers and laughs in the right places.
She’s great.
I’m miserable.
Not because of Keri. Keri is doing everything right. She’s funny about her job—apparently people send her photos of theirmoles, and she gets excited about rashes—and she doesn’t ask about hockey except to say she’s been to a few games and thought the fights were the best part, which makes me laugh genuinely.
But my head isn’t here. My head is in a kitchen in Brooklyn where Sydney is probably making the twins dinner and letting Lily put stickers on everything and listening to Luke talk about sharks, and I keep thinking about them.
Keri is talking about a trip she took to Portugal last year, and I’m nodding and making the right noises and checking my phone under the table. Not because Sydney texted. But because she hasn’t.
By nine-thirty I’ve paid the check and said goodnight, and I’m in my car, and the relief I feel pulling out of that parking lot tells me everything I need to know about my first date as a newly single dad.
I drive home. The house is lit up—living room windows glowing warm against the dark street. I park in the garage and come in through the kitchen, and I can hear the TV from the hallway.
I can see Sydney on the couch. In my sweatshirt—the navy Knights pullover she borrowed last week and never gave back. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a knot that’s half-collapsed, and she’s got her legs tucked under her, and she’s watching a cooking show where someone is crying about soufflé.
She looks up when she hears me. “You’re home early.”
“Yeah.”
