The Next Time You See Me by Holly Goddard Jones Page B

Peddler ?”
    “You know, The Olde-Tyme Peddler, ” she said in a stagy whisper, asthough afraid of being overheard. “The personals section. I put an ad in there on a lark.”
    Wyatt felt a surge of admiration for her. He’d contemplated the personals a few times over the years but never had the courage to place an ad or respond to one.
    “I didn’t lie,” she said. “I put it all out there. I said what I looked like and what I weighed. I’ve been down that road before. I got set up on a blind date once by a work buddy of mine, and the guy barely made it through the appetizer before bugging out. He told me he’d forgotten a doctor’s appointment.”
    “I’m sorry,” Wyatt said.
    She waved irritably. “I’ve got thick skin. But this time seemed different. He knew what he was getting into. I thought he might be pleasantly surprised, if anything.”
    Wyatt wondered what he’d have done if this was the woman on the other end of a blind setup or a personals ad. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, his mother would have told him, but the recollection made him feel small and unkind. This woman was sort of a pleasant surprise. Her lips were a pretty bow shape, and her voice was husky and confident, a strange but interesting contrast to the physical girlishness. He liked the way she gestured as she talked: she had this way of throwing her hand open, as though she were tossing rice at a wedding.
    “And what about him? Look at him. He’s no prize,” she said. Wyatt looked. The man was tall and almost frightfully skinny except for a small mound of beer belly, which seemed alien yoked to the rest of him. His dark hair flowed like a grease stain around his neck and shoulders. “Me, I’m a nurse. I probably make twice as much a year as he does. I own my house.” She downed a third of her beer in a swallow.
    Wyatt matched her. “Sounds like you win,” he said. “The guy’s just a fool.”
    “But here I was, ready to buy him beers and dance the night away.” She sighed. “What does that make me?”
    The song the band had been playing ended with a two-note flourish on the lead’s electric guitar, and the slow-dancers started making their way back to the upper deck. The woman’s date was leading his new girl directly toward their table, holding her by the elbow as though this were a goddamn supper club and he a certified gentleman, and Wyatt wondered, suddenly furious, if the guy even remembered the date he’d arrived with.
    “Let’s dance this one,” he said, grabbing those oddly slender fingers and pulling the woman up to a stand before she could argue. They took the long way down to the floor, avoiding the approaching couple, and it wasn’t until they were standing on the slick hardwood, facing but not yet touching, that Wyatt felt struck by the absurdity of what he’d gotten them into. The song was fast-paced rockabilly, the bodies around them kicking and twirling, and the woman—he didn’t even know her name yet—had an inch on him. She tucked the flaps of that too-short bob behind her ears, held her right hand up and to the side expectantly, and so Wyatt closed the gap between them, grasping her open hand with his sweaty left one and putting his arm around her waist, nervous at the sensation of heat and softness so poorly shielded by the barrier of that thin wisp of shirt. They started rocking slowly side to side, ignoring the steady thump of bass that urged them to lift their feet and really move, and the woman didn’t lean her head down to Wyatt’s shoulder—she would have been too tall to pull that off gracefully—or make eye contact with him. She smelled like vanilla and the metallic edge of strong deodorant, and Wyatt wondered if she, like him, had gone on too long in loneliness, too long in disappointment, to let a night like this one get to her. Perhaps that was the saddest thing: not that the disaster date had hurt her irrevocably or that Wyatt’s pitiful act of compassion had redeemed the