Page 48 of Second Alarm
"Who?"
"The server."
"No. Why?"
"Nothing." I pick up my water glass.
"I'm just friendly with everybody." He shrugs. "I try to connect with people. I think it makes them feel seen. Service industry — I always try to be nice."
"Mmhmm."
Kevin orders the lasagna. Assertively, in a way that a lasagna has never needed. I order the spaghetti. The gnocchi is for a night when I'm less tired.
We eat.
Kevin isn't bad. Kevin, on paper, is a very good date — employed, healthy, confident, can string sentences together, makes eye contact, laughs at my jokes. Kevin thinks I'm funny. Kevin is enjoying himself. When he laughs, he closes his eyes all the way and tips his head back.
And I keep comparing.
Kevin's hands to Ty's hands, at the salt shaker. Kevin's voice to Ty's voice when he laughs. Kevin's shoulders in his gray sweater to Ty's shoulders in his hoodie on the porch. Kevin's silences, which aren't silences because Kevin is constitutionally incapable of them, to Ty's silences, which are entire languages.
This is not Kevin's fault.
This is the thing I came to the date to prove. I came to prove I could go on a date with a reasonable man and have a reasonable time, and I can, and I am, and it's reasonable, and itisn't enough. By the main course I know that nothing anybody could've ordered at this restaurant was going to be enough, because the person I want to be across from isn't across from me, and there's no Kevin in the world who can fix that.
I think about Portland.
I had a fourth-floor walk-up on Belmont for six years. I had a thing with a man named Theo for two of those years — a middle-school science teacher who kept bees and once almost asked me to marry him in a botanical garden. I knew the question was coming for a full minute before he opened his mouth, and I gave him an out so smooth he thanked me for it in the Uber back, before he got out at his apartment and we never spoke again.
There was Felix, in 2020, who owned a vinyl shop on Hawthorne and made me dinner three Tuesdays in a row before I let him kiss me. A part of my brain that I'd told to shut up kept sayingnot himthe whole time, in Felix's perfectly nice apartment, against his perfectly nice records, and after the third Tuesday I told Felix I was sorry and went home and sold the dress I'd worn to that last date because the dress had been complicit.
There was the lawyer in 2022 — excellent on paper, quoted Tom Wolfe at me at brunch in a way I think he meant as charming — and I never called him back, because there was a way he held a fork that I disliked for no reason I could name except that Ty Brennan held a fork the opposite way.
I had a job offer in Medford in 2021 that would've paid me twenty thousand dollars more a year and I didn't take it, because Medford California was further from Copper Ridge by exactly the wrong number of hours. I had an apartment in 2023 I almost signed a five-year lease on, a view of Mount Hood, and I let it go because five years felt like a sentence I didn't know I'd been refusing to serve until I was sitting in my car in the rental office's parking lot crying about a kitchen I wouldn't be able to leave.
What I had in Portland was a life that looked like a life. I worked, dated, went to the gym, read books, told the women in my Tuesday-night book club every six months that I might move home soon. They told me I'd been saying that for three years. I told them I knew. We ordered another bottle of wine. I came home because I ran out of stalling — because Theo wasn't Ty, and the man at the next table at the wine bar wasn't Ty, and the man at the gym wasn't Ty, and I had spent ten years building a life around the project of not noticing the not-Ty of every man I met, and at twenty-nine I noticed I was tired.
At eight forty-seven, Kevin reaches across the table for my hand.
"Kevin."
"Oh — "
"I'm sorry." I pull my hand back, gently. "You're so nice, and I accepted this invitation because my brother asked me to. I love my brother, but I don't think I'm ready to be dating right now. I just moved back. That's not fair to you."
"Oh." He sits back. "Okay."
"I mean it — you're really nice."
"Thank you."
"Also, you're calling Jen champ and you have to stop doing that."
He blinks. "Who's Jen?"
"The waitress. She's a person. Her name is Jen. Stop doing that."
"Oh." A pause. "Okay."
