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Photo: © Elizabeth Wellman

MARY ANN RIVERS
has been wearing a groove in her library card since she was old enough for story time. She’s been writing almost as long—her first publication credit was in Highlights magazine. She started writing and reading romance in the fifth grade once she stumbled on the rainbow of romance-novel book spines in the library’s fiction stacks
.

She was an English and music major and went on to earn her MFA in creative writing, publishing poetry in journals and leading creative writing workshops for at-risk youth. While training for her day job as a nurse practitioner, she rediscovered romance on the bedside tables of her favorite patients
.

Mary Ann lives in the Midwest with her handsome professor husband and their imaginative school-aged son. She writes smart and emotional contemporary romance, imagining stories featuring the heroes and heroines just ahead of her in the coffee line
.

Read on for a preview of
The Story Guy
by Mary Ann Rivers

Tuesday, 4 a.m.

I scroll back down through the photos and description again, looking for a reason to avoid contacting the seller, but there isn’t one. Blond, beautifully made, and I can tell, even though the pictures were taken under bad lighting with a shaky hand. I nearly convince myself that this mid-century dresser is exactly what I want, but I don’t click the link to the seller’s email. It’s true that in the very worst case, I drive somewhere unfamiliar and stand awkwardly in someone’s entryway or garage or shed while I struggle to find a polite way to refuse. It’s imagining that potential moment, thick with polite embarrassment, that prompts me to close the listing. The solemn main menu of the MetroLink homepage blinks back.

My cell phone lights up the corner of my bed where it’s slipped under the sheets. There’s only one person who would call me at this hour.

“I think you keep me as a friend so you have someone to talk to when you’re with the goats.”

Shelley laughs. “You’re not wrong. The ladies rarely have much to say, and Will won’t talk to me until he’s had more coffee.”

I stretch out on the bed and watch a moth settle itself into the shadows gathered on the ceiling. I can hear the muffled and mysterious noises of Shelley’s task, a bleat from one of her little milking goats. “I might have been asleep this time, you know.”

“Carrie.” Shelley laughs, sounding a little far away since I’m probably on speaker. “I know you.”

“You do.” She does.

“Yesterday was hard,” she says, her voice gentle. It
was
hard. I am sleepless at an unreasonable hour fit only for happy women and happy men tending their spoiled goats.

“I’m not sure what was so hard about it, exactly.”

“Did you call your parents?” she asks.

“I did.”

“What did they say?”

“Not much. They were disappointed, naturally, but understand. As always. In half a minute they started re-planning the trip as a second honeymoon for themselves.”

“Haven’t they already had, like, four second honeymoons?”

“Six, actually.”

Shelley laughs. “I love that. Your parents are like the patron saints of happy marriages.”

“You’re not doing so bad yourself.”

“Hey Will, didja hear that? We’re happy!” Shelley laughs again, and I hear Will grunt, but then there is also a suspicious little bit of breathy quiet coming over the line.

“Guys! That better be the goats kissing. Jesus.”

“Sorry. Hey, Carrie?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Of course. People have breakdowns at work over nothing all the time.”

“Stop that. It’s not nothing.”

“Then what is it?”

Shelley is my colleague at the Metropolitan Library, where I’m happy, where I love the kingdom of teen collections over which I reign, except today, when in the middle of everything, I wasn’t. Shelley was reconciling my circulation report. Like always. Like every Tuesday. We were talking about me taking vacation time.

“I mean, sure. That sounds nice.” Shelley enlarged my circulation report and corrected a cell in the spreadsheet with an efficiency that reminded me of a wren tucking grass into a nest.

“Nice?”
My thumb painfully picked up a sliver of wood from the teen collections desk, where I was gripping the edge too hard. That must be why my voice had been so hard.

“Yeah, nice. I’ve never vacationed with my parents, but you like yours, right?”

I do like them, actually, but something felt a little numb around the edges of my thoughts. Why? “Yes.”

“Awesome. Block out the days. Go, cruise, take pictures of Alaskan icebergs—”

“Glaciers. Not icebergs. Glaciers.” The sliver was deep and drove deeper as I tried to work it free. I’m certain that’s why there were tears in my eyes. I felt Shelley push in close to me, saw her dark fall of hair in my periphery. But I continued to work the sliver, because I knew if I looked at her, I’d break apart, right there in teen collections, for no good reason I could understand.

“Hey,” she whispered.

I shook my head. Pushed the sliver in farther.

“Carrie. Look at me. Come on.”

“Can’t.”

She laughed, just a little. Because Shelley is happy. Because what else is there to do when you recognize the signs of an inexplicable breakdown? “Carrie. Seriously. Also, there isn’t anyone here right now. It’s okay.”

When I met the obvious sympathy in her gaze, it was how
familiar
she looked that unfastened the sob from my throat. Or at least that’s what I told myself, swiping the tears away. “Fuck.”

“Oh, Carrie.” She gently lifted my glasses away, making it worse. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Is something going on with your parents?”

“No. I just talked to them. They’re great, as usual. Looking forward to the trip.”

“Here? Is it something here at the library—work stuff?”

“No. It’s awesome here.” I stuttered over another sob. “I love it here.”

“It’s my fuckup with the glaciers, right? What’s the difference, anyway? Are icebergs little glaciers, like baby glaciers that will be big glaciers someday but have to heave up on a continent or something?”

My confusion momentarily eased up my breathing. “What?”

She passed me a tissue. “You don’t want to cruise with your parents, do you?”

I looked at my sliver, but couldn’t see it because my thumb was now so mangled and sore. The numb-around-the-edges feeling had spread out over everything. “No,” I whispered. “I don’t think I do.” I looked back at Shelley, who was leaning against the counter, head in hand.

“Finally.”

I sat down on a stool, suddenly exhausted. “What do you mean?”

“What are you going to do about it?”

And I’m still not entirely certain what she meant, except that I couldn’t go with my parents on a cruise to Alaska. Now, I listen to the little sounds raining through the line from Will and Shelley’s tiny milking barn.

“Carrie?”

“I’ll be okay, Shelley. It’s a funk, that’s all. Lady of a Certain Age funk.”

“Hmm. There are certain … cures for such a thing, you know.”

“Oh, I know
you
know, Shelley,” I say, hearing Will laugh in the background, “but I think we’ll save that talk for another time.”

“Try to sleep, Carrie. Really, even just a little before work.”

“See you in a few hours.”

I slide the phone away and try to focus on finding the moth, but it’s hidden itself too well.

All I can hear through my open windows is the hum from the streetlights. The bar anchoring the apartments next door had last call more than an hour ago. It won’t be long before my next-door neighbor, a third-shift nurse, stumbles into her apartment and cranks on her shower, the hot water banging its way up from the basement.

The computer on which I was browsing for furniture I have no room or use for has made my lap hot and my eyes tired, but I just drape my body into a new position over the duvet and adjust my glasses. The breeze is just cool enough to feel good combing through my short curls, luffing the T-shirt I’ve worn to bed.

I hover my arrow over another menu item on MetroLink. Other than “Furniture for Sale,” it’s the only option contrast-shaded purple, proving I’ve visited it before. “Men Seeking Women.”

I love MetroLink personals, but not the way my friends do, as a source of entertainment at the expense of the lovelorn who can’t afford or won’t subscribe to a “real” online dating site. I read only the men’s personals, and I read them the way I might ritually eat a favorite candy bar. I start with the Casual Encounters section and all of the horny out-of-town businessmen and drunk college boys posting dick pictures and rough invitations.

Then, I read the dozens seeking a “BBW,” who are sometimes so achingly poetic in their desire to take tender care of some mythical and kind full-figured woman. I can’t help but think they must be the ancestors of the prehistoric men who carved those pendulous, round-bellied goddesses from cave stones.

I usually skip those of the seniors, who seem to mainly post long and unparagraphed essays filled with ellipses and metaphors about spoiling a mistreated and much younger woman. Even worse are the painfully short single-sentence pleas that manage to cut open the loneliness of widowerhood or divorce after a long life with one woman.

For last, I save those of men my age, thirty to forty-five.

Once, at the urging of friends, I spent a year managing my profile on a dating site that had achieved some kind of epic popularity among friends and co-workers for its edgy, personality quiz–sladens approach. To build your profile you answered questions about music, sex, kinks, commercial jingles, underpants preferences, harmless phobias.

I was never asked to answer a single question about what I was actually looking for in a man, or anything more pressing about myself than my favorite breakfast cereal. The site sent me matches, presumably based on my answers to all of these quizzes.

My matches’ profiles were always so well considered and slick that it made me wonder if my entire generation worked in marketing. The beautiful men’s pictures looked professionally taken at candid events, and every white grin and eye crinkle was perfectly captured in SLR detail. Those less lovely had seductive written pitches accompanied by middle-distance action photography to illustrate their personalities, and I felt to date one of these men was to purchase a new and amazing lifestyle, as if from a catalog.

After days of charming emails and texts exchanged with one of my “matches,” we would meet for coffee, or if one of us had written something a little dirty to the other, drinks. Often, it was one coffee or one drink, less than an hour. Sometimes a few hours would float into a kiss I barely tasted. Always, I didn’t hear from them ever again.

MetroLink lists its posts under every category in real time, so your ad may fall off the end of the white page in an hour or two on a busy night. Everyone gets the same blank white space to write in, the same four-picture limit.

The men here speak in voices I don’t hear from men anywhere else. In my work
as a librarian and its associated schooling, I’ve become familiar with men who carefully discuss their ideas and feelings from well-supported liberal positions. These are the same men from the singles website I tried, men who built pithy profiles with slide shows of slick pictures.

On the other end of the spectrum, my dad, his brothers, my cousins—they are all sort of expansive and rigidly masculine and sound like whoever it is they work with, other men who are electricians or firefighters or salesmen.

But MetroLink men have an entirely different accent, and it cuts into me. It’s what I imagine men might really be thinking and never say. They yell and cry and woo and break themselves open before their post slips off the page.

Tired of the lies
, one of tonight’s reads,
l@@king for honest woman H/W unimportant who doesn’t care about looks or money. I wish I could stop smoking, but for now that’s not possible, 2 much drama in my life, lol. So smokers OK. Age, race unimportant. Must know how to love imperfect men
.

Another loves
women who are fun. So many women don’t let themselves have a good time. Don’t spend hours getting ready to go out with me, just run out the door and we’ll have adventures. I can be discreet. I understand
.

My favorite tonight, this morning, is a post in list form, a rage against his life in all its top-ten sources of misery. He is tired, so tired of his
3) bills I have no hope of paying
and
5) children who get everything they ask for and still hate me
. He wants a woman who doesn’t like to talk. A woman who will hold hands with him on the couch, watching the news without comment at the end of every day. A woman he can share a pizza with and then go to bed with.
A woman
, he writes,
who is exactly like my ex-wife but won’t divorce me just because the economy sucks
.

Some of them have pictures, but most often they tell me
your picture gets mine
. They use their four-picture limit to post images of women from porn so that I will know their “type.” Pictures of themselves always seem blurry, or are taken in a mirror splattered with toothpaste with the flash still on so that their faces are obscured by a glowing constellation.

I’m so tired, my thumb and my heart sore and bothered by their slivers, but I can’t stop compulsively scrutinizing ads for—what? A reason to answer? I clear my throat, my
heart, because I refuse to cry again. My peripheral vision catches the flutter of the moth as it suddenly reveals itself and finds a breeze to follow out the window, into the wee morning light.

As I scroll through the post titles from the last hour, one catches my eye—
Wednesdays
. When I click on it, I’m surprised to find a clear and high-definition picture. It’s a candid of a man with very short dark hair, sitting in three-quarter view at a conference table. His dress shirt is pushed up at the elbows, his legs are crossed at the knee. He’s holding an elbow with an opposite hand, his body language completely closed, but he’s so long-limbed he almost seems loose. He’s grinning at someone off-camera, and it’s his grin, the dimple it sinks into his cheek, that arrests me after reading so many lamenting personals.

The photo doesn’t hide anything about what he looks like, but it tells the viewer almost nothing about him. If he weren’t hugging himself so tightly, I would think he was modeling menswear in a Sunday circular. Blandly handsome.

Except the knuckles of his long fingers are white from the grip on his elbow. The stubble on his sharp jaw is a little too dark and long for a business meeting.