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“Your toss doesn’t have to be perfect,” Hannah says, “but it can’t be awful, either. If it’s really low or super far away from my head, I won’t be able to get there in time.”
“I’ll do my best,” Mom says, grabbing a fistful of popcorn.
“That’s all anyone can do, Momma Carol,” Hannah says.
Mom vibrates happily at Hannah’s endearment and then takes a deep breath like she’s poised to throw out the first pitch at the World Series. Finally, after a slow and steady exhale, Mom lobs a popped kernel into the air—and nowhere near my adorable, bespectacled girlfriend’s face. Hannah gamely lurches toward the kernel, trying to snag it with her gaping mouth, but it’s futile. Superman couldn’t have caught that sorry-ass toss.
“I’m so sorry!” Mom says.
“No worries. Try, try again!” Hannah replies.
Another toss. Same result. Rinse and repeat. Until finally, Mom’s toss is only sort of terrible, and Hannah deftly scoops up the kernel with her mouth.
“Amazing!” Mom shouts gleefully. And that’s it. The ladies are off to the popcorn-catching races in earnest now. In fact, Mom can’t get enough. For the next several minutes, I watch from the entryway on the far side of the room, undetected, as Mom tosses kernel after kernel at Hannah, who leaps, zigs, zags, and dives to retrieve anything even remotely near her head. Finally, in a shocking twist I didn’t see coming, Hannah coaxes Mom to give it a whirl, despite Mom’s protestations that she’d be horrible at it.
“The fun is in the trying,” Hannah assures Mom. “Not the actual succeeding.”
“Oh, I love that,” Mom says. “I should cross-stitch that onto a pillow.”
Away they go. For the next few minutes, Hannah throws popcorn kernels at Mom, who misses every single one. And yet, both women guffaw throughout the entire exercise, proving correct Hannah’s cross-stitch-worthy comment.
After a while, Hannah moves ridiculously close to Mom and aims a kernel at her gaping mouth with the precision of a sniper, and Mom miraculously catches it, at which point, the women whoop and cheer and hug and then breathlessly tumble into their chairs at the card table.
As the ladies roll to see who’ll go first in their backgammon game, I slip into the hallway and head to the guest bedroom, feeling a bit choked up. In the shower, however, I’m able to pull myself together.
Dressed in pajamas, I slide into bed with a laptop, figuring I’ll look at some long-ignored Bluebird stuff. With all the fun I’ve been having with Hannah lately, not to mention all the packing and preparing for her move—and now, this fun road trip—I’ve barely worked lately, other than doing an incognito favor for Kat’s younger brother, Keane, at the request of Josh and Ryan Morgan a few days ago.
I look at the time. With Hannah occupied for at least the next half-hour, maybe even more, now would be a good time to finally poke around the devices of one Greg Smith aka Angus Wellborn aka Sean Goodman. Out of an abundance of caution, I didn’t dive in right after the Climb & Conquer party, but instead performed the hack, gathered some basic data to ensure future access if he upgraded devices or whatever, and left it at that. Now that a month has passed, however, I think it’s safe to go back in and take a long look around.
There’s a laptop and iPad connected to the guy’s phone. Click. Click. I’ve now got access to everything. I scroll through his emails and texts and quickly surmise he’s been doing what he did to Hannah to countless others. The dude is the second coming of the Tinder Swindler. The good news, of course, is that he’s firmly moved on from Hannah. In fact, based on the sheer volume of his atrocities, I think it’s fifty-fifty he wouldn’t have even recognized Hannah as one of his past victims if he’d seen her at the Climb & Conquer party. Not that I ever would have taken that chance, since Hannah surely would have recognized him and possibly had a massive panic attack.
I poke around some more and determine the target is a personal trainer who works at various big-box gyms under various names. Looks like he’s usually the dude assigned to welcome new members, at which point he tries to convince them to buy a package of one-on-one training sessions. When he’s successful at that task, some new clients—married women, dudes, law enforcement officers—get nothing but the services they’ve signed up for. But some of them—young, single women—wind up falling in love and getting scammed. As a side hustle, he also steals credit card numbers from the gym’s membership database.
Moving on.
Wow. Greg Smith loves him some conspiracy theories. In fact, he can’t get enough of them. He also spends a shit-ton of time playing Call of Duty and watching any video with a “sensitive content” warning. If someone is dying or getting the shit kicked out of them in a video, this idiot wants to see it.
