In two days it’ll be Sunday, and I’ll be due to visit my mother. Am I really going to tell her on her deathbed that I’m not even trying to find someone to be with, even if it’s too late for her to get to see me married and settled?
My mother has tumors all over her body. The least I could do is make an effort.
I pour myself a glass, open my internet browser, and pull up the dating sites I bookmarked right after her diagnosis. My message boxes have filled up with pending requests to chat, to meet, and yes, to hook up. Something about a man who lives on a mountain must appeal to primal instincts because I’ve had no shortage of women wanting to date me.
What I have had is a shortage of things to say to them over email and in person. And those who managed to put up with that quickly realized I’m pretty much an in-shape office shirt who happens to live an hour away from the closest department store or cosmetics counter who drives thirty minutes to pick up his mail.
I lean my elbow on my desk and put my head in my hand. The idea of going out with any of these women and trying to piece together a relationship close enough to sell to my mother makes me feel ill, but so does letting her die with the only thing she’s wanted for me left undone. I’m beginning to seriously consider hiring an escort to pretend to be my girlfriend—the doctor did say that my mother might be out of it so she might not notice anything wrong.
Just as I’m about to close out of my internet browser, my eyes fall on an advertisement to an “international dating” site in the sidebar.
It’s a polite way of saying mail order bride.
I close my eyes.
I’m not seriously considering this, am I?
Yet it makes sense. The women who’ve left me over the years have given many different reasons, but when you look closely at them, it all boils down to the same root cause.
I’m too distant.
I’m too busy.
I don’t really listen, don’t pay enough attention.
I’m too serious, too distracted.
Or my favorite from a woman I dated for six months when she broke up with me over text message: At first I thought you were just slow to warm up, but now I’ve realized you don’t have a romantic bone in your body.
In the end, I decided they were right. Why even try?
But the women who look for husbands on those kinds of sites—I’m not naive enough to think they’re looking for romance. They want someone who will take care of them, lift them out of their circumstances, and give them a comfortable lifestyle. I have all that, and really even if she didn’t want to stay with me long, if I was just married before my mother passes, everyone wins.
I click through the descriptions of the process, the interviews, the background checks, the fees and the forms before I’m intrigued. It takes me two hours and half the bottle of whiskey, but I make myself a profile and apply.
2
Sophia
I look up from straightening a pile of oranges to find a customer quite literally waving a banana in my face.
“What is this?” she asks.
I look over to the display from which she has plucked said banana and see the rest of the bunch—only slightly green—sitting atop the mound of other neatly-stacked bunches.
“It’s a banana, ma’am,” I tell her.
She narrows her eyes at me, pointing the offending banana like a revolver. I take a quick step back, wiping my hands on my apron. “It says that your produce is organic and locally grown,” she says, pointing to the sign. She brandishes the banana at me. “How is it exactly that you’re growing bananas in the middle of Dublin?”
I take a deep breath. This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this, but it’s the first time I’ve been asked at banana point. “Our produce is sourced as locally as possible,” I explain. “Our meat comes from only a few miles outside the city and our cabbage only a bit farther than that.”
The banana draws closer, almost brushing the ends of my red hair, which hangs past my shoulders. “But the sign doesn’t list those foods. It says all of your produce is local and organic.”
“The bananas are organic. And they’re imported from Spain and grown in the Canary Islands. Most of the bananas you see at other stores are grown in Latin America and—”
The lady snorts. “You call that local?”
I intentionally lower my voice, because this conversation is ridiculous. “As local as possible, ma’am.”