“I’m sorry,” Joan said now.
“For what?” Paige asked.
“For causing a scene. For ruining your date.”
“We’ve been over this. You didn’t ruin my date. As a matter of fact, if it’ll make you feel better, you probably saved me.”
“Saved you? From what? I thought you liked Sam.”
“I do. That’s part of the problem.”
“Liking him is a problem?”
Paige shrugged.
“I’m sorry, darling. It’s none of my business.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I made you worry for nothing.”
“I’m just happy there was nothing to be worried about.”
“Bev calls it the age of hypochondria,” Joan mused aloud, thinking of her sister-in-law.
“Is it a headache or is it a brain tumor? Is it a muscle spasm or the first sign of ALS? Is it a heart attack or is it gas?”she heard Bev say in her breathy whisper. “I mean, this should be the best time of our lives. The kids are grown. We have money. We have freedom. And yet, there’s this constant specter of death sitting on our shoulders, just watching and waiting…”
“Which reminds me,” Paige said, interrupting the soliloquy in Joan’s head and sending Bev’s words scattering in all directions. “She phoned while you were sleeping, said to give her a call.”
“Okay.”
Bev was probably the last person Joan wanted to talk to. While their relationship had always been cordial, they’d never really been close, and since Heather had absconded with Paige’s live-in boyfriend, they’d been even less so. Bev alternated between apologizing for her daughter’s behavior and trying to excuse it. Joan wasn’t interested in either apologies or justifications.
“What are you going to do for the rest of the afternoon?” Paige asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe go for a walk.”
“Nothing too strenuous.”
“Nothing too strenuous,” Joan repeated. “Now go to your interview. Knock their socks off.”
“I’ll try.” Paige leaned over to kiss Joan’s forehead. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.” She watched her daughter walk from the room, not moving till she heard the door to the apartment close behind her. Then she reached for the phone on the night table beside the bed, punching in her sister-in-law’s number, then hanging up before it could connect.
Was there somebody else—anybodyelse—she could call? A friend, maybe? Except she really didn’t have any friends. Not anymore. The bulk of her friends had been Robert’s friends, and those friendships had pretty much disappeared in the months after Robert died. The truth was that her daughter was her best friend, and that wasn’t fair to Paige. It put too much responsibility on her slender shoulders. And the last thing Joan wanted was to be a burden.
She pushed herself off the bed and retrieved her purse from the mint-colored, overstuffed chair by the window, fishing inside it for her cellphone. She pulled it out and clicked on Autumn Romance, scrolling through the long list of available seniors for her profile.“Oh, my goodness,” she said, noting that she had two recent responses.
The first was from a man calling himself Lonesome Dove. The accompanying photo was of an elderly gentleman with gray hair and a shy smile. He gave his age as eighty-two, and said he was a widower who liked opera, traveling, and detective fiction. Joan also liked the opera and traveling, and while she’d never been into detective fiction, she loved novels, so it would seem they had a few things in common.
Still, he was eighty-two.
Not that the twelve-year difference in their ages was insurmountable or even particularly relevant at this point. They were both adults. But he waseighty-two! Two years older than her brother-in-law, and four years older than her husband had been when he died. How many years—how manygoodyears—did he have left?
She wasn’t young anymore. Selfishly, she didn’t want to spend whatever time she had left playing nursemaid. She’d already seen one man through the last year of a fatal illness, watched helplessly as his once-strong body and formidable will succumbed to the merciless assault of his disease. She’d watched as pain replaced hope in his eyes. She couldn’t do it again.
She swiped left, watched Lonesome Dove disappear.