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“Yes. Ralph. Hi.” She stuck out her hand with a bright smile, forgetting she was supposed to smolder, then tried to smolder, but probably looked like she had something in her eye.
This was a mistake. What had been natural with Abigail, and even with Justin, was foreign and ridiculous with this in-timidating mountain of a person. A person she didn’t know, a person to whom she was broadcasting messages about herself that weren’t true.
“Well, we-e-ell.” He gave her a long, slow once-over that was like getting rubbed with used engine oil. “You are one very hot woman. Am I in luck or what?”
What. Candy kept her smile going, tried to arrange her body in a suitably seductive pose, feeling naked, a ludicrous pretender.
She wanted to go home, change into sweats, bake those cookies, deliver them to Justin and spend the evening consum-ing them in his kitchen over coffee and conversation. What kind of sex kitten did that make her?
Not one. By the end of this evening Ralph would find that out. And who knew what Justin would say to the cookies if they were delivered by a woman in baggy fleece?
Candy should have listened to Chuck who knew her better than she knew herself. Sexy Glamour Girl was only part of her personality in her dreams.
Marie walked down the stairs into the Cellar at Roots Restaurant, her favorite after-work place for a drink and occasionally a reasonably priced and excellent dinner. The restaurant was located in the up-and-coming Brewers Hill neighborhood where Marie had bought a small fixer-upper Victorian. She’d hired a friend to do renovations on the cheap, resulting in a cozy, colorful home that said “Marie” everywhere one looked, and which Marie adored. She and her ex-husband, Grant, had lived in a beautiful Tudor in Whitefish Bay on the east side by the lake, a place she’d decorated the way she thought a wife should decorate a house for her husband. After the divorce, while she’d wanted to stay in Milwaukee where she’d lived all her life, she needed to live somewhere that felt like a new start. Here in Brewers Hill, she wasn’t constantly running 42
into Grant or his new hot-young-babe wife, nor did she risk encountering mutual friends with their tsk-tsk sympathy. This part of the city had come to feel like hers.
“Hey, Marie, how are you doing this evening? What’ll it be today?”
“I’m fine, Joe.” She sat in a tall chair at the long wooden bar set under a dimly lit canopy of tangled brown metal, evok-ing roots, for obvious reasons, and grinned at the handsome young bartender with the eyes of a doe, the mouth of a young girl and the body of an Olympic swimmer. “Let me see. How about a Prufrock tonight?”
“You got it.” He grabbed the bottle of pear vodka which he’d mix with gin, chartreuse and a splash of sour mix at lightning speed. Cellar cocktails were inventive and changed with the seasons. Never a dull moment.
Marie looked around the room, white lights strung in a scattered pattern from the bar overhang, early patrons sitting at some of the tables already, many more to come soon she knew.
“Here you go, one Prufrock.”
“Thanks, Joe.” She unfolded the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, dreading the world’s depressing news, and took a sip of the icy liquid, fruity and not too sweet. Mmm. Her favorite way to unwind at the end of a long day, especially at the end of a long week. Sometimes a lonely person came in, a close or distant neighbor, or someone needing escape to a place with delicious food, great service and a restful view over the Milwaukee River to the city skyline. If that person was in the mood to chat, Marie would have company. Sometimes during the week Joe wasn’t too busy and she’d talk to him—or listen more like it—but most of the time she enjoyed sitting in the bustle of a thriving business within walking distance of her house, indulging in a pleasant buffer between the hectic work day and the emptiness of her home.
She’d adjusted pretty quickly to not being married, but going home to an empty house—even an empty house she adored—still felt hollow and unsatisfying, though after the trauma of her divorce, and the initial joy of her subsequent freedom, she wasn’t looking for a replacement husband yet. If she weren’t violently allergic, she’d get a pet. Pets loved you no matter what, didn’t criticize, were always supportive, and never left you for a younger version.
