And he was great with Mattie. Sitting at the lake-view table, Susan had her beautiful, blessedly quiet son in a booster seat on one side, and her gorgeous, charming potential boyfriend on the other side. Mattie got a special kiddy meal while she and Jack each enjoyed a glass of merlot. Then their salads arrived.
And then Mattie kicked the table.
Jack went to grab his wineglass and knocked it over. Merlot spilled into his pear and butter lettuce salad, across the white tablecloth, and onto Jack’s lap. “Shit!” he hissed.
“Oh, my God,” Susan murmured, steadying the table—and then, Mattie’s leg. “I’m so sorry—”
“Shit, my good khakis,” he muttered, dabbing his trousers with the cloth napkin. “Goddamn it….” He stood up.
Susan started to stand, too. “Maybe some club soda from the bar will get out the stain—”
“Just—just—never mind, okay?” he growled, throwing his napkin down on the wine-soaked tabletop. “Be right back.”
Biting her lip, Susan sat back down and watched him hurry toward the restaurant’s bar. People were staring at her. Mattie started to whine, and she patted his shoulder. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she murmured.
Susan managed to flag down a busboy. “Could you please take that away?” she whispered, nodding at Jack’s salad—swimming in merlot. “And could you have our waiter bring my friend another salad and another glass of the merlot?”
But the waiter didn’t do that. Instead, he brought their dinners. By then, Mattie was crying—quite loudly. Susan politely asked the waiter to check on her dinner companion in the men’s room. She knew what had happened before the waiter even returned to the table. Her charming, handsome potential boyfriend wasn’t in the restroom— or the bar, or anywhere else in the restaurant. He was gone.
Five minutes and $135 later, Susan made the walk of shame toward the restaurant door, clutching a carryout bag in one hand, and her cranky, screaming toddler in the other. “Good God, about time,” she heard one man at a nearby table mutter to his date. “That stupid woman’s finally taking her brat out of here….”
She hadn’t quite made it to the door when Mattie spun around and knocked the carryout bag from her grasp. The bag ripped, and two cartons—Lobster Newburg and the garlic prawns and pasta—spilled over the tiled floor. Some of it got on Susan’s legs.
The hostess called a busboy over. Susan kept apologizing. “It’s all right,” the hostess said edgily. Frowning, she opened the door for her. “You can go. We’ll clean it up. Really, just go….”
After slinking out the door with Mattie, she noticed the empty spot where Jack’s car had been parked. What had made her think she’d ever find another nice guy like Walt?
Susan couldn’t help it. She started crying before she even got her car keys out. She strapped Mattie in his child seat. Before climbing in the driver’s side, she tried to wipe off her hands with a Kleenex, but they still felt sticky. As she scooted behind the wheel, Susan noticed all the lawyer’s documents on the front passenger side, where she’d left them. She blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and then turned the key in the ignition.
“Oh, no, please, God, enough already,” she murmured. She turned the key again and stepped on the gas.
She tried two more times, but nothing.
“Damn it,” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes again. She rested her forehead on the top of the steering wheel for a moment.
A knock on the passenger window startled her.
Susan gaped at the handsome man with the wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He gave her a shy, friendly little wave on the other side of the glass. “Need some help?” he called.
Wiping the tears from her eyes, Susan stared at him.
He walked around to her side of the car and then twirled his finger to indicate she should roll down her window. Susan lowered it about two or three inches. She realized her door was still unlocked.
“I don’t know much about cars,” the man said. The cute scar on his cheek looked like a dimple. “But I have a cell phone and Triple A. Do you want me to call them for you?”
“It won’t do any good. I don’t have Triple A,” Susan said through the window gap.
“But I do,” he replied. He pulled out his wallet, then checked a card he had in there. “If I tell them I’m a passenger in your car, you’re covered.” He took out his cell phone and made a call. He stepped back from the window. “Hi, my name is Allen Meeker, and I’m with a friend who’s having car problems….” Susan couldn’t hear any more because he wandered away from the car for a few moments. She wasn’t sure about this guy. He seemed too good to be true. And his timing was almost too perfect, showing up exactly when he did.
In the backseat, Mattie yawned.
“What’s wrong with the car, they want to know,” he asked through the gap in the window.
“It just won’t start,” Susan answered. “When I turn the key in the ignition, it makes this weird, clicking noise—and nothing.”
He turned away and talked into the phone again. She watched him finally slip the phone back in his pocket, and then he lumbered back to her window. “It’s going to take them forty-five minutes to an hour to come out here.”
She smiled politely. “Well, I couldn’t ask you to wait here all that time. I’ll call a tow….”
He nodded at the mini-marina complex. “I was about to have dinner. Ruby Asian Dining is where I always go for Thai. Hi there, sport!” He smiled at Mattie in the backseat. Then he pointed to the stack of papers on her passenger seat. “Better move those so when Triple A gets here it’ll look like I was riding shotgun. What is that, legal stuff? Are you a lawyer?”
“No, my lawyer gave me these documents today,” Susan explained. She rolled down the window a bit farther. “I’m involved in a lawsuit right now.”
“Is somebody suing you?” he asked with concern.
“No, just the opposite,” she admitted. Susan didn’t know why she was telling him this, and she didn’t know why she was starting to tear up again. She’d told others about what had happened to Walt and Michael without getting all weepy about it. Maybe she was just feeling terribly vulnerable tonight. “My—my husband and older son were killed when they were on this balcony that collapsed…and…and two others died, and several people were injured. Anyway, there’s this lawsuit, and I don’t give a shit about the money. I just miss my husband and little boy….” She was sobbing now. Turning away, she opened her purse and tried to find another Kleenex.
“Mommy’s crying,” Mattie announced.
“That’s right, sweetie,” she said. She turned toward the man again. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I—why I’m unloading all this on you, a perfect stranger….”
He offered her a handkerchief through the car window opening. “My name’s Allen Meeker,” he said. “So I hope I’m no longer a stranger. I was just about to have some Thai food by myself. You and your son have probably already eaten. But as long as we’re all waiting for your car to get fixed, I’d really enjoy your company. Maybe you could have some coffee or dessert.”
Susan wiped away her tears with his handkerchief. She managed to smile up at him. “As a matter of fact, I—I haven’t had my dinner yet.”
In the Thai restaurant, Allen paid for dinner and Mattie’s ice cream. He also tipped the man from Triple A, who had to tow Susan’s car. Allen gave them a ride home.
Ever since that night, he had been there for her. Even when he went out of town for his job—selling hospital equipment—Allen still called her practically every day. He was good with Mattie, too. So what if Susan didn’t see skyrockets every time they made love? That was okay. She cared for Allen and was beholden to him. Since meeting him, every few weeks she’d put away another photo of Walt. It wasn’t premeditated. It just seemed the right thing to do as Allen became more and more a part of her life.
He hadn’t come with much baggage. His mother died in a car accident when he was eleven and his father passed away a decade later. He had a stepmother and a younger stepbrother he wasn’t close to at all. There was also an ex-wife from six years before, whom Susan had no interest in ever meeting.
They’d been seeing each other for seven months when Allen paid for their trip and accompanied her and Mattie to Vero Beach, Florida, to visit her parents—a gesture that, in Susan’s opinion, made him a candidate for canonization. He kept Mattie entertained during the duration of the seven-hour flight, and then won over her
