The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (5 page)

I grab the broom I keep under my bed for just such an occasion. I jump out of bed with a thud and stomp to the light switch and flick it on, then come around the corner brandishing the broom and shouting, probably for my own benefit, “Get out of here, Mr. Birdy! This is my house!”

And I hit Renee in the face with the soft part of the broom.

“Oh my God,” she shouts. “Oh my God, Lily! You are a psychotic crazy person and I fucking hate being your friend!”

She looks tired and stressed. I know she doesn't mean it, mostly. “I thought you were a bird. Sorry! Are you okay?”

“You hit me with a broom.”

“It was the soft part of the broom,” I say.

Renee looks so mad I am afraid to say more. I can tell she is doing the kind of deep breathing they teach you in birthing class.

“What the fuck, Lily. What the fuck?”

“Well, you broke into my apartment,” I say in my own defense. “I wasn't expecting you.”

“You weren't expecting me? You sent me, like, three insane text messages in the middle of the night and then stopped answering your phone. What did you expect me to do, exactly?”

“I did?” That's right, I did. But why? “What about?”

Renee's eyes leave their sockets for a moment. “Fuck you, Lily. Fuck you. I'm leaving.”

“Wait, no! Hang on. Did I tell you to come over? I honestly can't remember. There was some wine and a bit of crying…”

“You didn't have to tell me to come over. You told me you had an emergency and you were married. I thought you had been sold into white slavery.”

“So you rushed over in the middle of the night?” I am so touched. Maybe I was wrong about our friendship wilting.

“Christ, you basketcase. It's not the middle of the night.” She turns open the mini-blinds, and sure enough, it's not dark out there. “It's eight
A.M.
I'm on the way to work. I worried about you last night and decided I better come check, is all.”

“Oh, Renee. I love you. That is so sweet.” I rush to wrap my arms around her.

She responds with more deep maternal breathing, but eventually hugs back.

“I'm so glad to see you,” I tell her, now that I've fully woken up. “It really did feel like an emergency last night—I was packing up when I found out I'm accidentally still married to that guy I hooked up with at your bachelorette party, remember him? And he's engaged now so I've got to go make this right, and I wasn't thinking straight and imagining all these terrible repercussions but truly it should be okay—probably just a phone call and some kind of processing fee. And then I passed out and forgot all about it.”

Well, not really all about it, now that I start remembering my dream. “And my phone was in the kitchen.”

“I know,” Renee says. “I called it on my way in here. I could hear it buzzing on the linoleum through the so-called door I jimmied open with my credit card. This place is such a dump, Lily. It's good you're moving.”

“That's what I was saying to you yesterday!” I agree.

She shakes her head like I'm the crazy one. “I'm going to work now,” she says. “If you need help getting unmarried, you know where to find me.”

“No, wait! I need your legal beagle skills to help me find this guy.”

“You don't know where
your husband
is?”

“No idea. Some rough guesses, but nothing for sure. I do know his first and last names, both.”

“Well. No wonder you guys got married, with that kind of intimacy.” She heaves a sigh that would be appropriate for, say, when your husband's just surprised you with a boat or your kid brings home a stray dog. “Get dressed. I don't have any clients until ten. I've always said a divorce lawyer's office is the best place to find a husband.”

*   *   *

Besides the police databases, subscription search engines, and private investigators Renee has at her disposal as a litigious and well-compensated divorce lawyer, she also has another asset: she can Internet stalk way better than me. This, I suspect, comes from lots of practice. On her office computer, I show her the Facebook page for Ben Hutchinson, Attorney, and she clicks three times and gets to the spot where it says, “Engaged to Dani Ricthers.” One more click and we see Dani Ricthers.

“Are you one hundred percent sure this is your guy?” she asks archly. Dani Ricthers is a gorgeous man in black eyeliner and frosted blond hair. If they lived in Tulsa instead of Berkeley, Dani would be Danny, but a man this fabulous has no place in Tulsa. There's a picture of him posing with his fiancé in his cover shot—probably an engagement photo. They are hand in hand, Ben Hutchinson's head resting on his future husband's shoulder, absolute adoration in both pairs of eyes. Dani is a blond god in very tight jeggings. Ben is six inches shorter and fat, and also, distinctly swarthy.

“Maybe not him,” I concede. “But then where the hell is my Ben Hutchinson?”

“Maybe he doesn't use Facebook. What happened when you googled him?”

Googled him?
Huh. Why didn't I google him? I stifle a laugh at myself, knowing Renee will not find my Internet quirkiness amusing.

“You didn't google him.”

“Not even on our wedding night,” I try.

Renee just raises an eyebrow, sighs, and shakes her head. “You didn't google him.”

“Google's not so great. Back when we got married, they didn't even have Google.”

“Yes they did.”

“Whatever,” I shrug. “Let's google him! Great idea! Scootch over.”

Renee does not scootch anywhere. She elbows me off the keyboard and clicks over to the landing page where Google's logo is presently a celebration of Frida Kahlo's eyebrows.

.0046 seconds later we have found my husband. And he has a Wiki.

Ben Hutchinson,
37, is the Silicon Valley millionnaire who graduated from MIT and then moved west to start his own app development company, Freep Inc., specializing in so-called freemium games such as Rural Route, GemBash, and Panda Roll. Called “The Genius Who Wasted Our Time” by
The New York Times,
Hutchinson and his games have been met with a combination of devotion and loathing from players. After selling Freep Inc. five years ago, he retired to spend more time with his family.

“Retired?” says Renee. “It says here he's thirty-seven. Who the fuck retires at thirty-seven, I want to know?”

“My husband, apparently. Holy shit, Ren. I knew at the time he was a programmer from California. He didn't say anything about having a million dollars. But then, it didn't really come up either.”

“Are you sure this is him? A guy like this would notice if he had a wife on the books, don't you think?”

“I'm not sure. Can we find any photos?”

There are no photos on Google Images, just stills from the games he created.

“Where does he live now?”

Both of us read the Wikipedia entry again. It doesn't say. We click around Google a bunch. Nothing else. No website, no social media, no nothing.

“God, he's mysterious.”

“Probably explains why he's not on Facebook, though. Those games are the worst. Can you even think of the hate mail he must get?”

“Playing them is totally optional,” I say, though I have never downloaded any such game out of fear. I generally think of my phone as the enemy. Playing games with the enemy would just be silly.

“Sort of. I mean, once you get hooked on GemBash, it's like, thirty hours of your life down the toilet while you wait to get more free Sparkle Points.”

“I guess you could pay for them,” I suggest unhelpfully.

“I've thought about it, believe me. And plenty of people do, apparently, if he has all this moola.”

“Had,” I say. “Easy come, easy go. We spent a lot of cash that night in Vegas, and if that's his style then he's probably broke by now, same as me. Anyway, money didn't seem to mean much to him.”

“Money means a lot to anyone with a lot of it,” she says. “So if you're hoping for a piece of whatever's left, then I think you've got a fight on your hands.”

“Renee! Don't be ridiculous. I just want to find him and get unmarried. No muss, no fuss.” But even as I am saying that, I am thinking,
Wow.
Not so much that I want this guy's money, but that I want to make out with this guy a little. He was so, so hot in my dream last night. I remember how he made me feel in Vegas so long ago. Beautiful. Special. I was trying to have fun at that bachelorette party, but underneath it all I was miserable. I still loved Nic, or at least a part of me did. I was so angry at Renee for dating him in the first place, much less marrying him, much less making me be her maid of honor. And I was mad at Nic for proposing to her when he had told me only a year earlier that he wasn't the marrying kind. I felt betrayed, and terribly alone, passed over, and then there was Ben Hutchinson, stroking the side of my face and saying nice things about me. Was it all wishful thinking then? Was he as cool as I remember, or was he any port in a storm?

The problem is, it's ten years later, and my life is not so different, stormwise. If anything, it's worse. I'm ten years older, dating a man who doesn't always take my calls, about to be evicted, and the friend I sacrificed so much for back then treats me like I'm a troublesome teenager now, not her oldest and closest confidant. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have someone stunningly gorgeous and stupid-rich caress the side of my face before sweeping me off my feet for a night.

A knock at Renee's office door wakes me from my daydream. It's her paralegal. Renee stands up and gestures to her Aeron chair. “I've got to go bill some hours. Stay here and track this guy's address down. When you find him, I can send him something formal on our letterhead telling him you need to renew the annulment filing. Easy as pie.”

I nod. “That sounds perfect. Thank you. You are really saving my ass here.”

“As usual,” she says. She sounds incredibly bored with me. “I'll be back in an hour. Try to find him by then, because my afternoon is booked solid. Oh, and if you have extra time, would you grab me my latte from downstairs? My assistant is out today, and I'm dragging already. The girls don't sleep anymore unless they're in bed with me—us. I have to be refueled every couple of hours or I fall asleep standing up.”

“Of course. Thanks, hon. And sorry I'm so psychotic.”

“You're not psychotic,” she says on a beleaguered sigh. “You're just messy. Your apartment, your hair, your life. Just messy.”

*   *   *

At first I am obedient. I google and google and click and click, looking for some hint as to where Ben Hutchinson might have gone after “retiring” in his early thirties. There's nothing. Then I start looking for the family mentioned in the Wikipedia entry. The family for which he retired. Might he be (illegally) married? But then there'd have to be a wedding announcement online somewhere. Weddings are a big deal. I don't care how private a guy might be, someone in his life—his bride, his mother, even more likely his mother-in-law—is going to take out a wedding announcement.

There's nothing of the kind, and it's a relief to be reassured that I'm not responsible for any bigamy-type issues. I look more closely at his bio. It says he went to MIT, so I search for his name plus “MIT” and find an archived piece about him in the student paper. Bingo. It has his hometown in the copy. Minnow Bay, Wisconsin. Never heard of it. Maybe I could find a family member in Minnow Bay and track him down that way.

A few more clicks and I learn there are roughly four million Hutchinsons in Minnow Bay. They all have superbutch Wisconsin Man names like Justin and Thad and Gus. No Bens whatsoever. I am getting the idea that my Ben is some kind of Internet privacy freak. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no personal details on his Wikipedia page, no way to find him … online, at least. Who doesn't have at least a Facebook page? Animals, babies, and the dead.

Could he be dead?

I really don't want my newfound once-rich and possibly still-hot husband to be dead. I keep looking, focusing my lens on this quaint-sounding North Woods town where Ben grew up. It has a cute little Chamber of Commerce website with pretty lake pictures and a map that shows it is about five hours' drive from Chicago, three from the Twin Cities, four from Milwaukee, and—as though it counts as a real city—two from Green Bay.

There's a guy named Hutch Hutchinson who pops up on the chamber site a couple of times; I find a bar he owns at 44 River Street in Minnow Bay that the “About” page says he bought for $500 cash and a taxidermied Northern Pike in 1962.

I love it.

“Hutch” has an entry on whitepages.com too. According to that, he lives at 44 ½ River Street, which I'm guessing means an apartment above the bar. It's 9:30
A.M.
by now so I pick up the phone and call the number.

“Yello,” says someone who is just old and creaky enough to have bought a bar in 1962.

“Hey, Hutch,” I say, putting some familiarity in my voice. “Is Ben there?”

“Shit, no, why would he be? Is this Kristine?”

“Ah, no, this is Lily,” I say vaguely.
Who is Kristine?
“I thought … he might be downstairs.”

“At 9:30 in the morning? You must be thinking of his brother.”

I laugh, as though I know what that means. As though I know he had a brother, or what his brother would be doing in the bar at this hour. But I do know that there's a Ben Hutchinson in this town, now, thanks to good old friendly Hutch. My pal, Hutch.

“Isn't he at the high school?” says my new friend. “I thought they went back today.”

“Oh,” I say. “Of course. I thought they didn't start up until next week. Thanks!” I hang up before he asks me anything else. Dammit, this isn't good. Is
this
Ben Hutchinson actually a high school student?