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8
It had been morethan a week since Glenn and Bree had moved into the back house and they’d had a movie/pizza night. In that time, she’d barely seen the man. The last interaction she’d had with The Gladiator was at the library after story time wrapped up. She was talking to a parent who was giving her tips on doing voices for next week’s story time—unsolicited advice is the best, right—when he’d walked by, lifted his hand, and said, hi.
That was it. Two letters. One word. Then he was gone.
She had hoped that he might hang out after, like all the other freakin’ parents had done, but nope, he’d gotten the hell out of there. Which she wished she could have done. Audrey did not give her a heads up of just how hard it was to extract oneself from a hoard of parents and five-to-eight-year-olds.
Next week she was going to have a hard out. She was going to tell them that she had a meeting with a potential client for Broken Nail. No one could argue with that.
It had been two days since the Saturday morning run-in and she’d not even caught a glimpse of Glenn. She wasn’t normally a paranoid person, but she had a feeling that he was keeping his distance on purpose. She’d seen Bree playing with her cousins in front of the house. They drew a hopscotch with chalk on the sidewalk, rode bikes, and dressed up Scooby in princess dresses.
Seeing the girls all playing together reminded her so much of her and her sisters at that age. And whenever Viv took a stroll down her childhood Memory Lane, she inevitably ended up on Abandonment Road.
How could her father just leave?
And why didn’t her sisters want answers like she did?
Those two questions whirled round and round in her head.
After applying another coat of lip gloss and mascara, she checked her email to see if she’d gotten any news on the DNA Detective. She’d decided to pay the extra fifty bucks to expand her search, but so far the money had gone down the drain. She was no closer to finding the man whose baby batter created her than she was when she started out on her find-my-deadbeat-dad expedition.
How could someone just disappear off the face of the earth? She was starting to accept the fact that he must have died. That was the only reasonable explanation as to why she couldn’t find the man.
Trying to put her parasite papa out of her mind, she took one more look in the mirror. Not to toot her own horn, but…toot, toot.
Viv wasn’t what anyone would call a workout queen. If she was going to break a sweat she wanted to be doing something a lot more fun than running on a treadmill. But, after the New Year she’d noticed that she had some jiggling going on that she wasn’t a fan of. So, about six months ago, she’d started doing a hundred sit-ups and a hundred squats every day to try and keep things high and tight since Mother Nature or Father Time, one of those parental personifications, had teamed up with gravity and were trying to drive her pinup curves straight to sag city.
For several months she hadn’t really noticed any change. But like the women featured in Chelsea Clinton’s book, she persisted. And tonight, she could see that the ten-minute daily sacrifice of discomfort was starting to pay off. The black bodycon dress that she’d owned for close to a decade had never looked so good on her.
All four of her sisters had inherited their mother’s hourglass shape and, for that, they were all grateful. Viv was the curviest of the Wells girls, Grace was a little taller and leaner, Audrey and Ava were both on the petite side.
Viv had always appreciated her Mae West va-va-voom body type even before J.Lo and Kim Kardashian had made it the beauty standard and this dress put it on full display. To top off the look she slid on her red, ankle strap heels and red clutch purse that matched her red lips.
Tonight, she was pulling out all the stops. She was having dinner at The Cove, a restaurant about twenty minutes outside the small town, that was in the mountains and overlooked the city, with a guy who she matched with on Flirt. Most guys she matched with on dating sites didn’t suggest an upscale restaurant as a first date. He also happened to be a doctor. A pediatric surgeon, to be exact.
She was actually a little excited.
Of course, she’d been excited about Marlon, who invited her to play mini-golf at Putt N Stuff, but when she got there she realized she wasn’t the only woman he’d extended the invitation to. Marlon had brought his mom along on the date. The mother-son duo shared inside jokes, complimented each other’s swings, and even broke out in song on the Dragon’s mouth hole. Viv was all about people being close to their parents, but she drew the line at feeling like a third wheel to someone and their mother.
She’d stayed until they reached the castle and then excused herself by claiming she had IBS and was about to have explosive diarrhea. No one can argue you should stay on a date when you’re about to shit your pants.
Before that, she’d been intrigued to meet Lincoln, a construction worker who also ran a nonprofit to promote literacy in underserved communities. He’d asked her to go to the Bay Area with him to deliver books to East Palo Alto. She’d known ten minutes into the six-hour round trip drive that like the uptight sales reps in Pretty Woman who didn’t help Julia Roberts, she’d made a big mistake. Big. Huge.
Road rage didn’t come close to describing what Lincoln suffered from. She was sure that he was going to have an aneurism from all the screaming that he’d done. Cars were either going too slow, too fast, trailing too close or swerving too much.
Viv was no shrinking violet and she cursed so much that Audrey felt it necessary to invoke a swear jar, but the language that came out of Lincoln’s mouth would make a death row inmate blush.
Then, it was the strangest thing, as soon as they got out of the car at the youth facility, he turned into the same good-natured guy that she’d chatted with for weeks before agreeing to the road trip.
It was a serious Jekyll and Hyde situation.
Tonight, she hoped for the best but expected the worst. She wasn’t a pessimist or an optimist, she was a realist. The chances of her meeting her happily ever after tonight were slim to none, but if she didn’t put herself out there, the chances were less than slim, they were none.
Plus, she needed to get Glenn “The Gladiator” Maguire out of her freakin’ head. He was all she thought about and nothing could happen between them, not that he even seemed that interested in the prospect. Whether he was or not was a moot point. He was off-limits, so she was crossing her fingers, toes, legs, and eyes that Dr. Fine was the cure she needed.
Her phone rang and she saw that it was Audrey. Her sister had been checking up on her at least once a day, sometimes twice.
“Hey, Motorcycle Mama!”
