Page 21 of Matchmaking On The Menu

I lean back, dragging a hand through my hair.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Great plan. Isolation. Really working out for you.”

Silence stretches out around me. I feel like I’ve imposed my own solitary confinement. Well, I have, haven’t I?

Maybe I need to get multiple cats. Call them all Thing One, Thing Two, etc. And when I go stir crazy and start making wigs out of noodles, they can all band together and put me out of my misery.

Right, that’s it. Even though I’ve only been back in my apartment for a few hours, I’m already stir crazy. I need to get out. I grab my jacket.

“Yeah, we’re going outside for a walk before this gets weird. Weirder, I mean.”

The road is narrow, quiet, and endless. The kind you find in low-budget horror movies where the new guy in town suddenly becomes the town scarecrow. I’m contemplating turning back when I spot a middle-aged woman in a business suit, her hair in a perfect bun, holding her phone in the air as if summoning a signal from the almighty. She looks like one of those Stepford Wives.

I slow down. “Uh… excuse me, are you okay?”

She spins toward me. “Oh, thank heavens! I was starting to think I’d die out here.”

I glance around. It’s a road, not the Sahara. Then I remember it was just a few moments ago that I was starting to draft the first lines of a psychological horror.

“Anything I can help with?”

“I have a flat tire,” she says, lowering her voice like it’s a scandal. “And there’s no reception.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Isn’t that always the way?”

She blinks at me. All right.

“Where’s the car?”

“Just around the bend.” She points at it with her cellphone.

I nod. “Let me take a look.”

I fall into step beside her as she starts talking. And… doesn’t stop.

She chats the whole way to the car, which, to be fair, is only a short walk, but still she has impressive stamina.

She tells me about her dogs. One of them had to have three teeth pulled, and the other sleeps with his ball in his mouth like a pacifier. I’m about to offer myself as a sacrifice to the scarecrow gods when her cherry-red BMW X5 comes into view. She preens when she sees her “made it” car. Where I come from, people buy their kids this as a starter car when they first learn to drive, only to upgrade them to a G-Wagon six months later.

There’s something almost… fascinating about the disconnect. The way she carries herself like she’s top of the food chain, like this is peak success. Not that I say any of that.

She starts telling me how her husband got a promotion, and her daughter got a great job that got her out of the sleepy town, so the car was an empty-nest present. I just nod where it feels appropriate and let her keep going, because cutting her off would take more energy than I’m willing to spend right now.

Still, there’s something about the tone, the cadence, the way she fills every second of silence like it’s something to be avoided at all costs. It reminds me a little too much of LA. If I wasn’t already halfway committed to helping her, I’d probably find a polite way to excuse myself. But I am, so I don’t.

“Do you have a spare?”

The look she gives me says I may as well have asked if she’s carrying the cure for cancer.

“I don’t know?”

“Okay,” I say. “Pop the trunk.”

A couple of minutes later, I’m crouched beside the car. “Hand me that?” I say, nodding toward the jack. I start loosening bolts. The motion comes easy, automatic like muscle memory. For a second, I’m not here. I’m back in a cramped garage, the air thick with oil and heat, my dad leaning over my shoulder.

“Don’t force it. You’ll strip it. Feel it first.”

That’s what he always said when I tried to muscle my way through.