Settling Up (2 page)

M
y mouth suddenly dried up
. I realized it was still hanging open, so I snapped it shut.

“Ohmygosh. You aren’t Rachel.” I swallowed, regaining a little of the moisture in my throat.

I blinked up at the sandy-haired serious-faced sentinel on the other side of the table. He shook his head, his lips pulling into the tiniest bit of a wry smile at the very edge.

“And I just showed you my…” My lips pressed into the beginning of a “b”, but I stopped myself from letting that sentence go any further.

My hands covered my face and I listed the Fibonacci sequence in my head to see if I could get control of the situation, or myself. 1…1…2…3…5…8…13…21…

“I’m — I — there’s not usually — I didn’t —” I stammered before stopping the stream of nonsense all together with a hand over my mouth. Nope. No stability gained there. My eyes narrowed at the man that was still silently surveying my slow social demise.

“Wait,” I croaked out, moving my hand away from my face. “Where
is
Rachel?” I scanned the room. I had just seen her. Where had she gone? “Is she okay?”

The man shrugged. “This is only my second day here. I don’t know who Rachel is. My pit boss told me to come to this table, so I did.”

Rachel
had
just been here, hadn’t she? Oh no. Was my eyesight going, too? Rachel was most definitely no where to be seen on the floor of the card room.

Unable to locate her, I focused once more on the man in front of me.

“So you’re…?”

“Your dealer this morning.” The tall blond man nodded. “I’m Mack.”

“Lauren.” I grimaced.

“Shall we get started?” Mack motioned toward the table.

I nodded and tried to get ahold of myself, setting my standard five dollar bet.

As I did, my brain began to get over the surprise of my ready-steady Rachel’s disappearance and the fog of confusion cleared enough for me to really recognize what stood across the table from me.

Now, I was normally a fan of the tall-dark-handsome variety of men, but this buff-blonde had me feeling all the tingles and stomach-butterfly excitement. He looked like a downright Robert Redford impersonator (well, how Rob had looked in his thirties, at least).

You see, my mom and dad were quite a bit older than the “norm” when they had my sister and me. And they were old movie buffs (mainly because they had been impressionable teens when all of those films were released). So instead of growing up on cartoons and shows full of adults wearing large, garish foam dinosaur suits, we were watching
Singing in the Rain, Barefoot in the Park,
and
An Affair to Remember.
(Sure, not overly appropriate for children, but Bets and I didn’t seem to notice. We loved it all. Especially Cary Grant; hence my love of tall-dark-handsome men.)

But this Mack character was testing my love for all-things-Cary quite intensely. His blond hair was on the longer side, swept across his forehead in a way that suggested he had just ridden in on a hulking motorcycle, taken his helmet off, and shaken his head to right his wheat-colored locks. And his eyes were that steel-blue ala Redford or McQueen (I know they weren’t exactly from the same era of classic movies, but there weren’t a ton of blondes back then, so I had to improvise). You know, the kind of eyes that make you feel like maybe bad boys have a softer side under that manly, car-racing, sinewy, studly exterior. They were piercing.

In fact, almost too piercing. Narrowing at me, to be exact. Looking worried.

“You ready?” Mack’s eyebrows shifted together as he frowned and pointed to the cards he’d placed on the table.

Oh goodness! Blackjack! I had yet to look at the cards he’d dealt. Holy hell, I was officially becoming some drooling idiot version of myself over this man.

Pull yourself together, Lauren!
I scolded myself.

I looked down. In front of me sat a four and a seven. His up-card was a two. I normally would’ve doubled down on an eleven, but my brain was feeling too foggy to trust myself at that moment. So I tapped the table with my finger, doing my part in the whole exchange, finally. He put down another card. A five.

I tried to calculate the remaining probability in my head as I always did, but there was something getting in the way (other than the fact that not doubling down was going to ruin the rest of my odds). It was as if a fog had crept into my mind, and my regular thought processes were lost.

I blinked and pulled in a deep breath.

“Um… stay.” I sliced the air horizontally with my hand.

He squinted slightly in a twitch and he flipped over his other card. It was a queen, so he took another, an eight. Crap. Twenty. That definitely beat my sixteen. Why had I stayed at sixteen? I felt my heart rate rise; I was almost sure my neck was turning red again. Great. This damn game, even without the wise advice from Rachel, was supposed to calm me down, not fluster me even more!

I bit my lip and tried to focus as I put out a new chip to replace the one he’d taken. Mack’s hands flipped and flew across the table as he discarded the last set. He was good. Not the skilled master Rachel was, but the woman had a good twenty years on him. The fact that Mack was so good, however, brought something interesting to mind. If he was this good with his hands, that meant he had been doing this whole dealer thing for a while. Which meant that he most definitely did not meet the career checkoff on my list.

I should probably explain the list…

A lot of women I know have lists stored safely in their head about the kind of man they’re looking for. I had lists for just about every decision I made. They were as long and specific as I could possibly make them and were weighted with differing percentages based on the importance of each stipulation (I even organized my shopping list in the order the items best fit into the cart). My Finding the Right Man list was my longest and most specific yet.

I had always felt that these unfailingly high expectations spoke to my rationality and my unwillingness to settle for someone who wasn’t right. Others seemed to have a very different reaction to it, so I kept the list to myself mostly. But it helped me stay on track, helped me focus on finding someone who I was not only attracted to, but with whom I could grow old with, travel the world, spend Sunday mornings reading and discussing the newspaper. Plus, it gave me the power of numbers, facts, to help control a situation which was so often fogged up by emotion.

It usually took about three dates for me to decide whether or not a person possessed the majority of the favorable characteristics I required in a man. However, there had been certain special circumstances in which I was able to tell right away.

I won’t bore you with the whole list (at the time, it stood at nineteen — a prime number!), but to give you an idea, here were my top seven:

1. He must be physically attractive. (I tended toward the stereotypically tall-dark-and-handsome breed. Like I said, Cary Grant)

2. He must be fluent in at least three languages. (I speak three, four if you count mathematics.)

3. He must be at least six feet tall. (I am five foot nine and enjoy wearing heels.)

4. He must read at least ten informational books each year for either professional gain or personal betterment.

5. He must maintain a positive relationship with his family, unless they are crazy or dysfunctional and his removal of himself from the situation only speaks to his rationality.

6. He must be a professional, having maintained a position of employment for at least five years (with timely promotions along the way).

7. He must have started accruing retirement funds as well as a supplementary Roth account or mutual fund holding.

You get the idea. Normal stuff, right? Anyway, once I had crossed off enough that the guy reached my fifty-two percent non-compliance cut-off (certain numbers were weighted higher in percentage as they tended to be the more important concerns), I said goodbye. No thank you. Good luck.

And by just looking at this blonde stud across the table from myself (regardless of the fact he definitely hit full points for numbers one and three), I could tell he was definitely not going to get the points for number seven. Even if he’d been at the whole dealer gig for five years (per number six), nothing about what Rachel had told me about the job alluded to any sort of promotion scale or 401k opportunities.

Automatically, this knowledge lowered my heart rate and I breathed a little easier. Which was good since I was acting like a lovestruck teenager, something I hadn’t done since, well, I was an actual teenager. Blackjack was my reprieve from emotions, from worry. I needed to get back to that calm, controlled place.

Maybe if I could figure out for sure that this guy was no match for me, I would be able to calm down and focus on playing instead of the stormy blue color of his eyes.

So I calculated his percentage of non-compliance, factoring in the tattoo on his forearm (not that I minded it much, but people tend to hide their more intensely-inked sections of skin, which meant I could probably rule out number seventeen from my list: no tattoos or piercings that will be embarrassing when we’re old and on the beach with our grandkids.) And during the next two hands, I had gone through most of the list, coming up with a number that was already past that fateful fifty-two percent mark, even without knowing anything about his family or the number of books he’d read this year.

The knowledge that he was nowhere near a match for me, calmed my sweaty palms, and slowed my hammering heart. After that, I was able to play quite a few more hands with my brain humming happily in numbers and equations and I left there with a five dollar profit (I normally was happy if I came out even or slightly under as I didn’t play as much for the money as I did the distraction.)

And a delightful distraction it had been. I had all but forgotten my evil bald spot as well as the fact that I had bared it so brazenly to Mack.

My mouth stretched into a smile as I clutched my chips.

“Thank you very much, Mack,” I said, standing and grabbing my purse. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

His forehead wrinkled.

“Oh, I come in every Tuesday and Thursday, as well as the occasional Friday. Today was just because I needed a distraction from the…” I cringed and pointed to my head. “You know.”

He dipped his chin. Boy was he a man of few words.

“No offense, but my regular dealer is Rachel.”

He shrugged, still unsure who Rachel was, I guess.

I felt my phone buzz in my purse as I walked out the front door. Rachel had left me a voicemail (she was constantly complaining about how her grown children never called, opting for texting instead, and refused to fall into the trend, so she almost exclusively left voicemails).

“Hey Lauren. I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be in tomorrow for your normal Tuesday. I was at work and got a call that Mama fell and I had to catch a flight down to California. I might be out for a few weeks, at the least. Sorry. I’ll give you a call when I’m settled, when I know a little more about how long I’ll be gone.”

So she really
hadn’t
seen me this morning. I guess the pit boss must’ve pulled her aside during that very rotation. Now that my brain had figured out the timeline of events, it settled on the effect. Rachel was gone.

I called her back when I got to my car and when I finished the call, I sat there for a second in thought. It looked like Mack was, in fact, going to be my dealer for a while. My momentary attraction to him had brought up that “single” word again, and it wasn’t just my taxes reminding me this time.

Thinking of my list had brought to mind that if I was going to have such high expectations of my spouse, I should only expect to have to meet his hopefully equally rigorous stipulations as well. And, as it didn’t seem very likely that I was going to be able to stop the decline of my follicular output, I needed to step up my efforts and put this spouse-seeking-venture front and center before I became completely bald and decrepit.

If I was being honest with myself, it
had
been a while since I’d been on many dates, as my focus for the last two years had been the research and publication of my latest professional manuscript (in hopes it might help me toward my tenure goal). So I resolved to log in to some of my old online dating profiles that night after my classes.

I pulled my car out of the casino parking lot and began the few-minute drive back to my condo overlooking the water so I could change for work. I sighed happily as I drove along the waterfront, the sun reflecting off the glassy surface of the sound.

Sure, I had a good forty minute ferry ride that I could use to log onto some of those dating sites, but even reading was sometimes tough, finding myself happy just looking out at the picturesque landscape of mountains and water that made up where I lived.

I sighed. Yes, the sites could wait until tonight.

L
eaning forward
and propping my elbows up on my desk, I looked around my office in the university mathematics building.

The organized shelves full of books, the perfectly placed posters, and the predictable ticking of my mathematician’s clock (instead of 3 it said -4+7, instead of 7 it said the square root of 49, and so on) calmed the wicked instability the discovery of the bald-spot had brought to my life. Things were going to be okay. I could handle this. If getting a husband and a house had helped Kirsten climb up the ranks in the science department, it was worth a try for me. And I needed to start with the husband first.

I clicked through my email one last time before shutting things down for the night and heading home. Just as I reached to grab my purse, my door opened and Henry, the sitting mathematics department head, walked in.

“Lauren.” He dipped his head in a hello. His gray hair stuck out in odd directions and (as always) a geometric-patterned sweater vest hugged his lumpy septuagenarian body. Wire rimmed glasses perched on his red, bulbous nose. He harrumphed and his wild white eyebrows bobbed up and down as he looked around my office.

“Hey Henry. What can I do for you?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, our new professor will be moving up in a week or so and I was wondering, since your offices will be right next to each other, if you wouldn’t mind showing him the ropes. Becoming a mentor, of sorts.”

I blinked slowly. The weight of one-more-thing pushed down on my shoulders so palpably that my hand reached up to my neck in hopes of relieving some of the pressure.

“Well…”

I really didn’t want to. Besides the fact that I quite liked the whole “being the person who knew more” part about acting as a mentor, it also meant hours of answering questions, tours, and that was if the guy had some humility. From what I’d heard about him from my colleagues that sat on the interview team, he was some hot shot from California who probably thought he was the best thing since the Pythagorean theorem. Those kind of guys didn’t want mentors. They just wanted people to stroke their enlarged egos, and I didn’t have time for that.

My fingers kneaded into my neck as I looked up at Henry. The man was retiring this August after forty years in the business. His department head position would become available at that time, as well. I really
should
do as much as possible to be involved in everything the department had its hand in if I wanted to be a viable candidate for his job. Plus, there was the fact that this new hire would become part of my competition for said job, and sitting on the hiring team would allow me to learn as much as I could about him (know what I was up against).

But as I looked down at my desk, I saw a rogue hair, another escapee laying lifelessly on top of my desk calendar and my spine straightened in remembrance.

“Henry. I can’t. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now and…” I stopped, hating that I felt weak and that I somehow should be able to handle everything all at once.

My fingers smoothed the hairs covering the bald spot at the top of my head.

“I can’t,” I finally finished.

Henry rubbed his wrinkled hand across his gray-stubble-covered chin. “Alright. Just thought I’d check.” He backed out of my office, letting the door latch quietly behind him.

I let my head fall forward onto my desk. Yipes. This was a catch-22 if I’d ever been inside one. In order to get the job I wanted, I needed to show them I was settled (husband, house, maybe even some sort of clichéd breed of dog). But the stress of busting my butt at my job was causing me to lose my hair. Something that would definitely
not
help me in the husband department.

Lifting my head, I pulled in a deep breath to steady myself, always one to stay focused on the task at hand. I didn’t know if it wouldn’t work, yet. Heck, there were women out there that really dug bald guys. Who was to say that there weren’t guys that dug balding women.

The clock reminded me that if I was going to catch my usual ferry back home, I needed to leave, now. I grabbed my things, headed out the door, and decided I’d have to wait until I got home to find out.

I
closed yet
another dating site, my face heating up in frustration.

Four online dating sites with an average of one hundred forty three possibilities, shaved by two-thirds when I apply my most highly weighted search criteria, which was shaved in half again when you factored in the ones who were obviously lying. Even though my statistical brain knew it wasn’t true, it felt a lot like I was pushing further and further into the negatives.

I used to love these internet dating sites. They were a great way to eliminate certain people before even having to meet them. The control-freak part of my brain absolutely loved that feature. But I seemed to have remembered them differently. There used to be people who I didn’t screen out, who I actually went on dates with. Had that much changed in a few years? (My accounts reminded me that it had been close to twenty months since I’d last logged in.) I closed my laptop and sat back, shutting my eyes for a minute.

But “for a minute” turned into “all night” and I awoke the next morning with a crook in my neck and a distinct lack of hope in my heart.

Checking the clock, I realized it was time for my Tuesday morning Blackjack date and even though Rachel wasn’t going to be there, I needed to keep it in order to maintain balance (plus, after all of this searching I could really use a brain-break). Over the years, I had found that when I stuck to a certain schedule each day and each week, that I was the happiest and most productive version of myself.

So I got my purse and headed to the casino.

And boy did it seem that they’d just slipped this Mack character right into the gap left by Rachel. He was there, during her normal time, standing at our normal table.

“Hey.” I plopped my butt down on the chair in front of him, hoping he wouldn’t cling to the fact that I’d been so positive yesterday that I wouldn’t be seeing him much after that because “Rachel was my regular dealer” and all.

“Hi,” he said. His eyebrows rose as he watched me.

“So, apparently Rachel is gone for a little bit.”

He nodded. “Heard that.”

“Oh, found out who she was then, did you?”

“When they told me I was going to take over some of her shifts, yeah.”

“So you’re going to be my Rachel-replacement, then?”

Mack shrugged.

“Well, you’re going to have to talk a lot more, if that’s the case.”

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he asked, “Really?”

“Yeah, Rachel and I chat, she helps me figure things out, deal with problems.” I paused, feeling silly. “You know, like the bald spot.”

“Okay. And what would Rachel have said about the bald spot?”

I put my hands up. “I don’t know. Maybe she knows of a shampoo to use or some kind of oil to rub on it that would help. Or she might just tell me that it’s not noticeable and my comb-over technique is working magnificently.”

Mack nodded. “It’s not noticeable. Unless you dip your head forward and part your hair directly in the middle.” He locked eyes with me. “So, probably don’t do that. Again, that is.”

I smiled. This Mack wasn’t so bad after all.

“And I do like to talk, by the way.”

“What?”

“You said
I
was going to have to learn how to talk more, but I
do
like to talk. I didn’t talk much yesterday because you seemed embarrassed and flustered. You weren’t talking much, either. I was reading my customer.” He smirked at me.

“Oh. I — well —that’s.” I nodded. “Well, good.”

“So what can we talk about today?” His fingers started flipping cards over the table as he started our first hand.

“Dating.” I sighed as I lost that first hand and was reminded of the losing I’d already been doing looking online that morning.

Mack’s face lit up, intrigued. Not in a way that looked like he was thinking about me and him dating, no, he could obviously see as well as I saw yesterday that we were no match at all. Ever. It was more of a “hey, this might be an interesting topic to talk about” kind of a look.

“There are officially no men left out there in the proverbial ‘ocean’ that is the dating pool,” I said, setting another chip in the betting circle.

“None?” He quirked an eyebrow at me.

“I waited too long, I suppose. All the men left appear to be either twelve, seventy and trying to pass as fifty, or were greased up so much I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to date them or stick them in the oven for the afternoon, giving them a hearty hourly basting.”

Mack laughed, a deep and rumbling sound that escaped from his throat, his eyelids closing a bit. When he looked back at me, there was a light in his blue-gray eyes that made me smile, too.

“That’s pretty funny, Lauren.”

“Well, when it’s not the burnt and scattered remains of what’s left of your love life, yeah, I suppose you could see it as funny.” That damn smile kept creeping back onto my face as much as I tried to contort it into an indignant scowl.

Mack cleared his throat. “Sorry. Sore subject, I see. And does that bald spot you showed me yesterday have anything to do with this recent man-search?”

I tipped my head. “Possibly. I just thought I had more time to find someone. But I don’t want to find just anyone, I want to make sure I’m with the right person, someone who will last. My parents have the perfect relationship and that’s because they’re so compatible; they’re perfect for each other. I guess my search for perfect has impeded my results a bit. Well, that and my job has been pretty darn stressful lately.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a professor at a university. I teach Statistics.” My cheeks flushed a bit. I loved telling people about what I did. Each time it made my heart swell with pride all over again. But regardless of the fact that I was proud of my job, I had never wanted it to become my whole life. I realized that in the hubbub of the last few years, trying to prove myself and establish my career, I had lost sight of that.

Mack nodded. “That would take up a lot of time, I imagine.” He gathered all of the cards from the latest round (which I won, by the way) and added, “Add that to the large greasy guy population on internet dating sites and you have a real problem on your hands.”

I nodded, glad to see he was recognizing my struggle.

“What about you?” I asked, watching him. “You found that perfect someone yet?” I hadn’t noticed a ring on his finger, but you never knew; some people were against symbols like that.

At my question, the smile slid from Mack’s face, his jaw tightened, and those gray eyes clouded over like a storm at sea. He cleared his throat. “I — that’s…” Head shaking, jaw clenching.

“Sorry, I didn’t — that’s probably none of my—”

But I didn’t get to finish because the pit boss called for a rotation. Since Mack hadn’t started another hand after the last one, he shrugged and said good bye, cleaning up the table. I cringed and waved, sad that I’d ruined the good vibe we’d had going.

I held my hand up to Ginger, the dealer rotating to my table to show her that I wasn’t staying, grabbed my remaining chips, and went to cash them in.

As I walked out to the car, I listed digits of Pi (I was up to forty-seven) to help me clear the fog of emotions about how our session had ended. I did my normal kick-check of all four of my tires and squatted down to make sure that there was nothing under or behind my car, then I got inside. Sitting for a few seconds, I started to see the morning for what it really was. Regardless of how Mack had seemed upset at the end, we had a great conversation (almost Rachel-worthy) and I wasn’t feeling so worried about her absence anymore.