Matchmaking for Beginners
Page 67

“Sorry.” I look over at him and think about him listening to Noah and me making love. Fighting. Crabbing about things. Making up again. And him knowing all along how Blix hadn’t wanted Noah there.
Then his phone rings, and he picks it up and says, “Hi, Elizabeth.”
He takes the phone into the kitchen.
“Yeah, I’m thinking the second week in December most likely,” I hear him say as he paces the kitchen. “No, no. I’m renting a U-Haul. Sure . . . No, people do drive in winter. I’ve heard it can be done . . . I think the drive will do me good.”
Ah, his sister. He really is going to Wyoming. With a U-Haul.
I slump down into the couch even farther. I feel exhausted to my very core. My head is throbbing and now my leg aches where I knocked it when I slipped, and I just want to close my eyes and disappear.
And I’m so tired, so paralyzingly tired, and everything I’ve thought and believed here has been wrong. I don’t know what Blix saw in me, but I didn’t help anybody. And I’m certainly not a matchmaker. I’ve lost the one guy who, boring or not, actually wanted to marry me, all because I cheated with the guy who had left me! And I’ve made a mess of things with Lola, whom I like so much, and somehow I feel like I’ve even betrayed Blix, by not protecting her papers. And because of that, her stupid grandnephew and his unscrupulous family are now going to try to get the will changed.
And Patrick, the one person here that I can talk to, who makes me laugh—though he thinks I pity him—is going to move far away. Retreating even farther away from people. So much for Blix’s plan.
“I’m going to drive straight through,” he is saying. He laughs. “Right. It’s not like me to stop. In public.”
And what am I going to do, now that I’m not heading home to marry Jeremy?
Am I just to go back home and face my family’s exasperation? They’ll hear tomorrow from Jeremy what happened. They may even be hearing about it right this minute! He will, of course, move on with his life—so much for the fun little team we were going to create. Working in his office together and being all happily married and going to Cancun when we retire. Why couldn’t I have just done that? What the hell is wrong with me, anyway? I’ll be back in my childhood bedroom once again, seeing the consternation on everybody’s faces as they try to figure out once again what I should do with my life.
Ohhh, Marnie!
What are we going to do about Marnie?
And Natalie—sorry, sis, but I won’t be having a baby and raising it right alongside yours. No barbecues by the pool with our tanned, relaxed husbands. I screwed everything up.
Of course I don’t have to go back there. Once I leave here, having disrupted and/or ruined everyone’s lives, I can pick somewhere else to go. Look on the map and select a new location where no one knows the havoc I can wreak. Honestly, I should be required to have a sign on me: MENACE! THINKS SHE’S GOT MATCHMAKING SKILLS. STAY AWAY!
I close my eyes.
Patrick, as if speaking from a great distance: “Well, yeah. Myself, yes. No—well, not much furniture, of course, but I have the computers.” He laughs. “No, of course I need them! I’m not exactly going to leave them behind.”
I open one eye and see the computers across the room, blinking approvingly as I slide away, down into the darkness.
Later I feel something being placed over me, and I struggle to open my eyes. Patrick says, “Let me make sure your pupils aren’t dilated.” He lifts my lids, one at a time, and says, “Hmmm.”
“Patrick,” I say through a thickness in my mouth. “I don’t believe in magic anymore.”
“Bullshit,” he says.
“No, it’s not bullshit. And I have to go home.” I struggle to sit up. Roy has been sleeping in the crook of my arm, and he jumps off the couch. My head is throbbing like there are a million tiny hammers inside my brain. My eyes don’t seem to be operational in the usual way.
“Absolutely not,” says Patrick. “You need to stay here. You shouldn’t be alone with a possible head thing. Come on. You can sleep in my bed. I’ll get you settled.”
He gently helps me up and leads me to his room, which, even in my sleepy state, I can tell is so spare it’s almost monkish. Hardly any lights. And he draws back the covers, and then he puts his hands on my shoulders and sits me down on the side of the bed and takes off my shoes. Then he sits back on his heels. I feel his eyes on me.
“Hmmm. Your clothes still have turkey stains all over them. Shall I go upstairs and get your pajamas?”
I don’t answer. I just plop down on the bed on my back.
“Right. I know. You can wear one of my sweatshirts.”
“Too hot.”
“Okay, then a T-shirt.” There’s the sound of drawers opening and closing, and then he’s back—I smell his presence more than see him—and he puts something in my hands: a shirt, I realize. “Do you need help? Oh, dear. I hadn’t thought much about this part.”
“I can do it,” I mumble. And then sleep overtakes me again; I am thinking about the computers blinking—but they’re not here, are they? Not in here. Patrick says, “No, no, sit up. Here. Alllll right. I’ll do it for you. Lift your arms. I’m going to slide your sweater up over your head. There.”
The air is cold on my skin all of a sudden. Then he’s sliding a shirt down over my chest and arms. My bra, I think. No one likes to sleep in a bra. Men probably don’t know that. I feel like laughing about that, but I can’t.
And anyway now he’s eased me back down on the bed and is tugging at my pants, which are so tight that he has to yank them, but then they’re off, one leg and then the other is free, and I’m trying not to think of what underpants I have on, that he’s seeing, and then the covers are over me, and there was something else I wanted to say to him, but I can’t think just now of what it is, and anyway, I’m too tired to get the words out. I’ll think about Patrick seeing my underpants tomorrow. And oh yes, I want to ask him not to go. I want to tell him that Blix really wants him to stay. That there’s other art he could do. I want to try one more last, desperate, begging thing.
And I will, just as soon as I can hold my head up again.
Later—how much later?—I turn over, and the cat jumps down off me. I hear Patrick breathing deeply somewhere, and when I open my eyes, he is right there, next to me in the bed. I command myself: touch his arm, but I can’t tell if that really happens or if I am just thinking it, and then when I wake up, there is the smell of cinnamon, and Patrick is coming into the room saying, “How’s the head? Did you sleep okay?”
The first words out of my mouth are maybe not the best ones. “What time is it? What’s that smell?”
Patrick says, “Deep breaths. I made cinnamon buns.”
“Cinnamon buns. I thought I was dreaming. You made them?”
“I made them.” He’s smiling at me. “I also made you some tea, so if you want to get up and come in the kitchen . . . or do you want me to bring it to you here?”
“Wait. Did I sleep here?”
“You did sleep here. You bumped your head, remember? So I put you to bed here.”
“Of course I remember.” And then I remember the rest—how everything blew up, how I don’t believe in magic anymore, or matchmaking, or being extraordinary, and that makes me so sad, because I wanted to believe in Blix and all the things she said about me. I wanted to believe I was here for a reason, but I’m not. I feel tears just behind my eyes, and then they’re rolling down my face, and my nose is running, too, and this is going to be ugly.
“Oh, dear,” he says. “Here, come in the kitchen and have some tea and cinnamon buns. Let’s get you moving again.”
I obediently swing my legs over the side of the bed and look down at myself. Bare legs and a T-shirt I’ve never seen before. Oh God. I look back up at him.
“Yes. You’re wearing my T-shirt. I couldn’t let you sleep upstairs with a head injury. And your clothes had a lot of turkey fat on them.”
Ah yes. Then I sort of remember. Underpants. Being put to bed. Patrick there in the middle of the night, snoring softly next to me. It’s all coming back to me. Oh God God God God. I look around for my clothes, which he hands me, folded neatly in a little pile.