Fools Rush in(9)

While seeing Joe with another woman never felt good, it was certainly not uncommon. For sixteen years now, I had watched him with other women, and I didn’t expect that someone as gorgeous, sweet and hardworking as Joe would be alone. Of course, it bothered me a little. He was always with someone like Summer, someone very pretty and not really nice. These relationships never seemed to last.

I wholeheartedly believed that once I had Joe’s attention, he would see in me all that he had been missing with other women. I was smart, nice, funny, undemanding. And let’s not forget I was a doctor, for crying out loud, helping the sick, comforting their families, and, once in a while, saving a life! A pretty cool job, if I did say so. Once I became as attractive as I could become (short of plastic surgery and diuretics), Joe would finally see me as something more than an old classmate and fall in love with me.

Maybe you’re wondering where I got the chutzpah, the hubris, the balls to go after a guy like Joe. After all, the longest relationship I’d had was less than six weeks. The thing was, I’d spent most of my life in love with Joe Carpenter. I would be turning thirty soon. I figured it was now or never, and if I was going to try to get Joe, I was going to give it all I had.

I put the encounter with Joe in the back of my mind…another trick I’d mastered over the decades. Later I would examine every detail with excruciating fervor, rating myself, considering what I could do better, psyching myself up for next time. But for now, I put the incident aside. After all, I was used to pretending Joe was just an ordinary guy.

Joe and What’s-Her-Name were occupied playing pool when Sam and I left a little while later. We strolled down to where we’d parked.

“So, Sam, you’re not going to go home, listen to a Norah Jones CD, get drunk and cry, are you?” I asked as we got into the car.

“Well, I think I’ll probably pass on that one,” he said amiably. “Another time, maybe.”

“You’re a good boy. An excellent role model for my dog.”

“Don’t you dare name your dog after me,” he laughed.

When we got back home, I felt warm and fuzzy, like a good sister-in-law, though officially, I wasn’t one anymore. Sam kissed my cheek, thanked me and walked inside his big house, looking, I believed, not nearly so wicked sad as he had earlier. “Hang in there, buddy,” I murmured, putting my car in reverse. “Life is about to get better.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE NEXT MORNING, I GOT OUT of bed and collapsed to my knees. My God! What had happened to me? Every muscle south of my scalp had seized like a bad engine. Scrabbling with my quilt, I hauled myself up and lurched stiff-legged into the bathroom, swinging my pelvis like John Wayne to minimize any leg extension. Knives of pain shot up my Achilles tendons into my calves. I’d been hobbled. Whimpering, I bent to the faucet for a mouthful of water and gulped down four Motrin.

My pain turned to joy as I mounted the bathroom scale. I had lost not one but two, two whole pounds! Of course, I knew this was just fluid loss from my excessive perspiring yesterday, and that I couldn’t really have lost two pounds of fat in one day, that the complex workings of the human body just won’t allow that, but long before I was a doctor, I was an overweight American woman, and guess what? I lost two pounds, that’s what!

Katie and her sons arrived a little while later. Corey was six years old, Mikey three. Like her sons, Katie had creamy blond hair and sky-blue eyes, making her my polar opposite. Her beauty attracted dozens of admiring men, but Katie…well, since her divorce, Katie had become a bit hardened. Maybe even before that, but since Elliott left her, she just didn’t, as she put it, have a lot of time for crap.

And when exactly had Elliott chosen to leave her, you ask? Why, just after she’d given birth to Michael, after thirty-six hours of labor and three hours of pushing her nine-pound, six-ounce son into the world. Good thing I was there for the birth, because Elliott the Idiot was not. In one of those unbelievable, made-for-Lifetime-television scenes, he arrived a few hours later and told Katie that he wanted a divorce, that he “just wasn’t happy anymore.” And so, as Katie bled from her impressive episiotomy, as her br**sts took on the texture of granite, as her newborn son mewled in her arms, her husband had dumped her for a younger woman.

Katie had become, unsurprisingly, suspicious of men. In addition, she had to work hard to support the boys. She lived in an apartment above her parents’ garage and worked as a waitress at the Barnacle, and while she made ends meet, I wanted more for her. Though she swore the last thing she wanted was a relationship…well, I just happened to know a wonderful man who was recently divorced himself, a man who loved children, especially boys, had a fine son of his own, a man I was very fond of, who would make a perfect husband for my best friend. I had to tread gently here, because Katie would hate the thought of being set up. And Officer Nickerson was still smarting from my own sister’s betrayal. Gently, gently, subtly, subtly…

“I saw Sam last night,” I blurted as Katie and I sat at the kitchen table. The boys were in the dining room, engrossed in the Bob the Builder and Spider-Man coloring books I had bought for them.

“How’s he doing?” Katie asked.

“Sad, for some reason. He’s so much better off without her,” I said, deliberately insensitive, though I did indeed think it was true.

“Oh, come on,” Katie said. “They were together a long time. He must feel pretty crappy, poor guy.” She sipped her coffee with an appreciative murmur.