In Stereo Where Available (3 page)

“How’s she been, anyway?” asked Madison.

“Fine. She’s a good girl. She’s not fighting with the cats anymore.”

Madison reached into the backseat and scooped her up. “Mommy missed you, yes, she did! And Mommy’s going to miss you some more. Poor baby.”

“I’ll take good care of her.”

“You always do.” She held Pepper up in front of her, nose to nose. “Maybe Mommy will bring back a daddy for you. Wouldn’t that be a nice little souvenir?”

“I’ll be rooting for you, Maddie.”

“Oh, I know you will.” She set Pepper back on the seat and took her powder compact out of her purse, touching up the spot on her nose where Pepper had licked her. “How are things going with Bill, by the way?”

“They’re not. He hasn’t called or anything. I kind of wish he would. I’ve got a date tonight, anyway.” I reached into the console for my cell phone. “Whoops, I forgot to turn it on.”

“There’s other fish in the sea.”

“Hold on. I’ve got voice mail.” I handed her my phone. “Dial for me. Maybe it’s him.”

Madison dialed my voice mail and handed the phone back to me. I tucked it up against my ear, turning onto the exit for the airport.

“Hey, Karen, it’s, uh, Jerry again. I haven’t been able to get in touch with you, but I’d, uh, like to. Give me a call and maybe we can talk about this weekend. Okay.” Again, he left his number. I rolled my eyes and hung up.

“It’s the same wrong number I got a couple days ago,” I said. “Some guy trying to get in touch with Karen.
Hello
. I’m not Karen.”

Madison giggled. “I’ve done that before.”

“Done what?”

“Given a guy a fake phone number.”

“Oh.” I thought about that for a minute. “You think that’s it, really?”

“Yeah. Just ignore him. He’ll figure it out eventually.”

“That’s so sad.”

She shrugged, playing with the air vents. “It beats telling a guy to his face that you’re not interested.”

“Maybe I ought to call him and let him know I’m not Karen. I don’t want him to think I’m not calling him back because I don’t care.”

“He’s not calling
you
, Phoebe. He’s calling Karen, whoever she is. And anyway, you
don’t
care. You’ve never even met him, remember?”

“Well, no, but that’s just so sad. He’s sitting there waiting for me to call him back and I’m just ignoring him.”

“Phoebe
. He’s waiting for
Karen
to—oh, that’s my terminal. Just pull up to the curb, I’ll be fine.” She gave me a hug, patting my back lightly with her manicured hand. “Wish me luck! When you see me again, I just might be with the man of my dreams!”

My first Kismet date was one I’d set up myself after e-mailing a guy whose description conjured up Bill’s polar opposite: social, outgoing, well-traveled, fun-loving. He was a thirty-two-year-old Sagittarius named Marty, and, according to his profile, he drove a red Jaguar.

“Bad, bad, bad,” said Lauren, shaking her head in the doorway of my bedroom as I smoothed on lipstick. “You’re going about this
all wrong
.”

“He came up as a match,” I reminded her gamely, stepping into a pair of black high heels—the highest ones I owned. “One hundred percent.”

“You’ve got to look beyond just the Myers-Briggs,” she insisted, rhythmically chopping at the air with her open hand.
“Please
, Phoebe. The astrology is bad, the car is bad, the
date
is bad. Coffee, remember? Go out for coffee. You don’t do dinner and a movie on a blind date. It’s just a bad idea.”

“I’m tired of coffee. Practically all Bill ever wanted to pay for was coffee. I want a
date
. One where you go someplace with cloth napkins and no screaming kids, and then you see a movie where all of the action takes place on Planet Earth. No time travel, no alien life forms.” I picked up my purse from the bed and checked for my wallet. “Maybe even something with subtitles. Ooh.”

“Don’t start going overboard.”

I hugged her and headed toward the door. “Don’t wait up for me.”

She leaned against the wall and sighed wearily as I lifted my keys from the hook beside the door.

“Make good choices,” she called.

Marty was cuter in person than he had been in his picture. He was tall and dark-haired, with a lot of five o’clock shadow and a broad, sexy grin. When I reached to shake his hand, he pulled me toward him and hugged me instead.

“Great to meet you, Phoebe,” he said, and I bit my lip, suddenly shy. He kept his hand on my back as we stepped into the restaurant, slid my jacket from my shoulders, and touched my waist as he guided me toward the table. I kept trying not to flinch.

“So,” he said, pouring me a glass of wine, “ever been here before?”

I glanced around. The restaurant had been his choice—an Italian place with dim lights and waiters in jackets and ties. I had been relieved when I’d flipped open the menu and discovered that it was in English.

“No,” I admitted. “I suppose
you
have, right?”

“Yep, many times. It’s got the most authentic Italian food around. And the best wine list, bar none. Bar none.”

I nodded and rolled the stem of my wineglass between my fingers. “Have you, uh…have you been to Italy?”

“Quite a number of times. Well, you saw in my profile that I travel a lot. And I do.”

I cleared my throat. I hadn’t known if it was acceptable to talk about the profile on a date. It seemed unromantic, admitting that you’d chosen your date out of a catalog.

“For work or for fun?” I asked.

“Both, but mostly for work. My job’s pretty demanding, pretty busy. You’ve got to travel a lot to stay competitive. You’ve got to keep in shape, too.” He slapped his stomach. It made a solid sound, like hitting the side of a briefcase. “Otherwise, you’re done.”

I reached for my wine. “So are you in sales, or business, or…”

“Neither. I’m a professional Santa.”

I coughed, my wine rippling in the glass. I struggled to swallow, then repeated, “A professional Santa?”

“Yep. Since I was twenty.”

“Is that, uh…that’s not a year-round job, is it?”

He leaned toward me excitedly, folding his arms in front of him on the table. “No, that’s a common misconception. There’s the busy season, but the rest of the year I still work forty to sixty hours a week. There’s Christmas shops, Christmas villages, catalog work, theme parks—and private parties, of course. It’s a lot of travel. And then there are the conventions—”

“Conventions? They have…professional Santa conventions?”

“Sure, what’s wrong with that?”

I shook my head hastily. “Nothing.”

“I took first place in the ‘Ho Ho Ho’ competition in Toronto two years ago. I’ve got a trophy for it on my bookshelf.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me suavely over his raised wineglass. “I’ll have to show it to you.”

I smiled quickly with my lips closed. “Great.”

The waiter arrived with our salads. I moved my glass out of the way and looked at Marty’s salad curiously. “They forgot the dressing on yours,” I whispered.

He shook his head and unrolled his fork from his napkin. “No, I didn’t get any. Gotta keep in shape, remember?”

“Right.” I watched as Marty picked the croutons out one at a time with his spoon and set them on his bread plate. “Aren’t Santas supposed to be fat?”

“That’s what the padding’s for.” He smiled at me and shook salt onto the lettuce. “Can’t count on any tips at the bachelorette parties if you’re shaking like a bowl full of jelly.”

“Oh. I guess not.”

“You’d better believe it.” He stabbed his fork into his salad, spearing a tomato at the end of a cluster of green leaf lettuce. “I don’t have to check
those
lists twice, I’ll tell you what. Ain’t
nobody
on the ‘nice’ side.”

“Well, I guess you must like kids,” I offered cheerfully. “I mean, during the, uh…regular season.”

He laughed. “No way. I hate kids.”

I set my fork down and stared at him. “But…you’re a regular Santa, too, right? Like in department stores and all that?”

“Yep. Sure am.”

“So how can you hate kids?”

He rolled his eyes. Through a mouthful of salad, he said, “Get your lap whizzed on as much as I have and you’d hate ‘em, too. Speaking of which.”

“Speaking of what?”

“‘Scuse me for a moment.” He stood up and pushed his chair in. “Pit stop.”

“Oh. Right.”

I watched him round the corner to the men’s room. He was in great shape, all right—no doubt about that. As soon as the door swung shut, I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table and rushed back out to my car, slowing only at the restaurant door to pull off my high heels. As I peeled out of the parking lot, I spotted his red Jaguar parked in a handicapped space, its license plate reading “HOHOHO1.”

The date with Marty gave me new resolve to be absolutely realistic about my expectations for my love life. From now on I would keep the heels low and the gas tank full. I would read between the lines. I would take “fun-loving” as a warning label. Under no circumstances would I again find myself being seduced by Santa Claus.

I deleted my way through date offers and cautiously set up a Starbucks meeting with an Escort-driving Pisces named Sam. The voice mails from Karen’s jilted suitor were still on my phone, and they were bothering me. That woman had some nerve, handing out a made-up phone number to some poor guy. If I intended to be truthful and realistic with myself about dating, then it was my responsibility to help Jerry do the same thing. After I got off the phone with Sam, I sat on my sofa playing with my cell-phone antenna and watching an old episode of
Friends
, trying to work up enough nerve to call Jerry and break the news.

The living room was noisy tonight. Pepper was curled up on the pink-and-purple leopard-print tasseled pet bed that Madison had left for her, but every other animal in the living room was wide awake. Hugo, my guinea pig, was squealing over in the cage he shared with the rabbit. The parakeets, Tristan and Isolde, were chirping and fighting over the mirror. One of the cats—Pippi, the bigger one—bared her claws along the catnip-scented cardboard scratch box, and Socks, the smaller of the two, chased a ball around a plastic ring. Even the iguana was crawling from one end of her stick to the other. Hugo and the rabbit, Cotton, were the only pets I had actually bought—the guinea pig first, and then the rabbit when he seemed lonely. The rest had been given to me by people—other teachers at my school, kids with a box of kittens outside Safeway. The iguana had come from one of Madison’s old boyfriends. He’d gotten tired of it.

An air freshener commercial ended, and the network logo appeared on the screen, along with a couple of teasers for upcoming episodes of the new fall sitcoms.
And beginning Thursday
, said the voice-over,
a reality show like you’ve never seen before—one that will knock your socks off!

I dialed Jerry’s number.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Jerry?”

“Yeah. Hey, how are ya?”

He had a nice, friendly voice, a touch of some kind of an accent. Southern Maryland, probably. A little bit country.

“I’m good. Uh, look, Jerry, there’s been kind of a mix-up—”