Send Me A Lover
Authors: Carol Mason
Send Me a Lover
A Novel
by Carol Mason
Copyright 2008 by Carol Mason. All rights reserved.
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hodder & Stoughton. A Hachette Livre UK Company.
Kindle Edition: February 2012
Cover design by
Streetlight Graphics
.
LICENSE NOTES
All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
DISCLAIMER
The characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The Secrets of Married Women
The Love Market
Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.
—From a headstone in Ireland
It’s a steady face, this Roger’s; craggy like a seaman’s. The eyes have softly-changing colour depths, like bottomless wells of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, and they rarely leave my face, only when they need to, when the waitress brings the wine, or he orders pizza for us. There’s something easygoing, too, in the way he listens to me, with his chin resting on his upturned hand. Yep, this Roger looks like a man who could take anything on board.
Even me.
He hasn’t exactly dressed to impress. Which is good, because these days, I couldn’t care less about clothes. In the navy windbreaker over grey crewneck sweater and jeans, which somehow go with the salt and pepper hair, you could mistake him for a soccer coach.
‘You know, you’re my first proper date, since my husband….’
He nods before I finish. I get the feeling that this Roger knows a lot of things without my having to tell him.
‘Well, second date,’ he corrects me, and there is a twinkle of entertainment in his eyes.
He’s referring to last week. It was his idea to do pot luck at the Vancouver Film Festival. We walked into the only show that wasn’t sold out. The movie turned out to be about a young widow whose grief manifested itself in a kinky fixation on her neighbour. She’d spy on him making love to his wife, then wee on their rhododendron to mark her territory. When we came out, I needed one of us to laugh about it, but neither of us did. I thought for sure I’d seen the last of him as he stood there, on the curb, fog circling his head, and he said, ‘Well, goodnight Angela. It’s been…. different,’ and he offered me a handshake.
‘Pizza?’ he said, when he rang me this morning, out of the blue. ‘Safer this time.’
‘Actually you’re not technically the first man I’ve gone out with since Jonathan.’ I take a glug of thin red wine that comes in a yellow jug with a red rooster on the handle. ‘There has actually been one far worse than you.’ I feel the need to be funny. I don’t do widowed very well.
‘Worse? Than me?’ His eyes twinkle again. ‘Tell me about this freak of nature.’ Maybe he’s trying extra hard to be light too because he doesn’t do widows very well either.
I twiddle with my wine glass stem, the familiar tightness back in my chest. ‘Well, I met him in Stanley Park while I was power-walking the seawall. Then the next day I was in Safeway and he was right beside me at the checkout. It was weird. Fluky… He seemed nice really. Not shy. Not pushy.’
Not overly horny
. Because sex is going to be a difficult obstacle for me to circumnavigate.
I knot my fingers in my lap, go for my wedding ring to play with, but realise, with a strange, flat and recently accepting feeling, that it’s not there. ‘Anyway, well, we went to
Milestones
for dinner, and right off the bat he made it known that he wanted to be a father before he was forty.’
‘You gotta love an honest guy!’ When he smiles he has holes up near his cheekbones—dimples, really—only dimples is too cute a description for his weathered, life-beaten face.
‘Oh, it gets worse! There we were sharing a piece of banana cream pie, and then he suddenly changes the subject, looks at me very seriously, and says, “There’s something I have to tell you about my family.” And then he tells me his brother’s a dwarf!’
His brownish, nondescript eyebrows shoot up; he needs nondescript eyebrows on that descriptive face. The mellow, Harvey’s Bristol eyes flare and twinkle. ‘You’re kidding?’ Good God!’ He appears highly entertained. ‘What did you say to that?’ He sits back, slides down the seat a bit, puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets, eyes never leaving my face. He is looking at me as though he has never met anyone quite as unexpectedly entertaining.
‘Well, I said, Oh boy, did I really have to know that on a first date!’
He laughs now: a staggeringly loud belly laugh that turns heads at the next table. ‘You didn’t say that!’
‘I did.’ I’m smiling too now. ‘It really pissed him off actually. He said, You are
clearly
a person with a lot of issues. Then he said he’d bet I believed that blacks should sit at the back of the bus. Then he got up and walked out.’
His head shoots back this time and he roars. He finds it so funny that he slaps his hand on the table a few times as he laughs. I am amused by him. The couple at the next table look at us again.
He’s nice. He’s a fun guy. My old client, Denise, who set us up, said he was. He’s got it all going on. Everything the Second Time Around Club would consider a catch. Attractive. Decent. Divorced. No children. No dwarves. A prominent City Planner and university lecturer. A PhD in his field. He has nice hands. They’re craggy, and steady and sure, just like his face. He’d be a boyfriend a girl could take anywhere.
Boyfriend?
‘Did he at least pay the bill?’ he asks me.
‘Hm? What?’ I am staring at his hands and seeing Jonathan’s.
‘The bill?’ He studies the small change in me. ‘Did he pay?’
‘Erm…Actually, no. He didn’t.’
‘So I take it you didn’t get an invitation to his family’s for dinner?’
I drag my attention back to his face. ‘One hasn’t been forthcoming so far, no.’
‘My brother’s seven feet tall,’ he says.
‘Is he?’ I process this. ‘My Gosh, that’s massive!’
‘Not really. I don’t have a brother. Only one very normal-sized sister in Manitoba, with size nine feet. She’s married to a podiatrist.’
He sees my sceptical look.
‘No, I swear, she really does have big feet. And she is married to a podiatrist. But the two have absolutely no connection. Unfortunately.’
I place a hand over my smile. He holds my eyes. His face is covered with affectionate kindness. The expression, the gaze, lingers.
He would be a keeper.
‘What does it feel like?’ this Roger asks me now, after the bit of ice-breaking humour has evaporated into the pizzeria smells of bologna charring in a wood-burning oven, calamari roasting on the grill.
‘What does what feel like?’
‘Dating again.’ His eyes scrutinise my face.
A startling crash of glass comes from the kitchen. Every head turns, except his. There’s something about that word ‘dating’ that doesn’t sit right. Echoes of Jonathan ride in the air, as though he’s watching me with a mix of frustration, good will, jealousy and regret.
‘I suppose, a bit like being unfaithful.’ It’s an honest answer and I decide that’s just what I have to be with him: honest. Denise will have told him it’s been eighteen months. He’s bound to think I’m a freak.
‘How do you know? Were you ever unfaithful?’
‘No. Were you?’ This change of direction into serious talk blindsides me.
‘No, but I probably would have been if I’d stayed married. Or one of us would have been.’ He shrugs, looks at his fingers that are resting on the base of his wine glass. ‘We didn’t enjoy each other any more. I started to doubt whether we ever had.’