The waiter came back with Rilka’s margarita and she took a grateful sip, trying not to feel like a lush in the face of Marilyn’s abstention. At least Marilyn never judged. She just said,
It’s not for me
. Like Rilka and matchmaking. Rilka and love.
“So how’s your latest project coming?” Rilka asked, happy to move the conversation away from her problems, which were boring in their unchanging sameness.
Marilyn shrugged. “Wish I had more time. If I could just work! Instead of working all the time.”
Rilka had known Marilyn long enough for this sentiment to make perfect sense to her. Marilyn was a sculptor, but it was harder to make a living as a sculptor than as a matchmaker. So Marilyn worked as a bartender to pay the rent — and the insurance — on the warehouse where she lived and did her real work, the sculpting. She worked in metal, which gave her a sinewy strength that awed Rilka, who had trouble opening jars.
Marilyn’s problems also had a boring sameness. Two stuck people, spinning their wheels. Maybe Marilyn could create a work of art on that theme. They could give out anti-depressants at the show.
“How’s Henry’s? Have you seen my client yet?” She’d sent Jeremy to the bar where Marilyn worked so that there’d be at least one friendly face around to make him feel comfortable.
“Jeremy? Guy in the wheelchair? Yeah. He came in a couple of nights ago with a buddy.”
“That was probably his brother. How’d it go? Could you tell?”
“I don’t really pay attention to the customers.” So much for the friendly face to make Jeremy feel comfortable. Rilka should have remembered that Marilyn didn’t pay attention to much, except sheet metal. Maybe she should send Marilyn a man who was good with duct work.
Marilyn finished her sandwich and licked her fingers. Her face brightened. “Although you should stop in sometime,” she said. “That always makes the time go faster.”
Rilka thought of Marilyn tending bar, aware of the hours stretching ahead, hours she had to get through before she could go back to her real work. Killing time when what she needed was more time.
Rilka sighed. Marilyn needed a patron and barring a patron, she needed a sugar daddy. Someone who believed in her, would free her from tending bar. What did other artists do? Probably the exact same thing Marilyn was doing. But if anyone was entitled to a fairy tale, it was Marilyn.
“You need a Prince Charming,” Rilka said, taking a healthy swig of her margarita. It was a very good margarita.
“I had a Prince Charming,” Marilyn said gently and now she looked sad again.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean — ”
“I know you didn’t. Bill was the only man I’ll ever love.”
Bill had been dead for ten years.
“I know,” Rilka said hastily before Marilyn could get started.
But it was too late. Marilyn had a dreamy half smile on her face, not attributable to the iced tea. “When I saw him, I knew … and so did he.”
Marilyn had told the story so many times that she believed it. But Rilka remembered it differently, although she would never have the courage to tell Marilyn so. What the hell, let Marilyn have her story. It was all she had left of him.
“So how’s it going?” Rilka asked. How many times had she asked that question lately?
“How many times have you asked that question lately?” Jeremy asked.
Rilka looked up, startled, from moving the kitchen chair out of the way for him.
“A lot,” she said. “I need a new line.”
She moved away from the table to put a bagel in the toaster, saying over her shoulder, “I missed breakfast.” She lifted the coffee pot in Jeremy’s direction. He shook his head and she brought her brimming mug to the table.
Fortunately, and unlike Marcus, Jeremy didn’t mind sitting in the kitchen. Today the sun was out, so the room was cheery and bright, the way it was supposed to be. And if she had to have someone in her kitchen, at least it was Jeremy. He was poking a daffodil blossom with his finger.
“My mom used to love these,” he said.
“Daffodils are my favorite.”
“She called them jonquils.”
“That’s the high-class version.”
“Well, Mom was a high-class broad,” he said.
“Had to have been, to produce you,” she said and that made them both smile.
The bagel popped up, and Rilka got up to butter it and bring it over to the table.
“I didn’t feel like eating earlier,” she said. Why was she explaining her dietary habits to a client?
“I thought you looked like you have a hangover,” Jeremy said, picking up half the bagel and taking a bite.
“I don’t have a hangover. I would have made a bagel for you if you had asked.”
“You could have offered,” he countered, once he’d swallowed. “That’s tasty. I missed breakfast, too.”
He was probably the one with the hangover, but she didn’t accuse him of it. If he was a closet alcoholic, she’d find it out soon enough. Probably the way she found out everything — at the worst possible time and in the worst possible way.
“You have any juice to go with that?” he asked. Then, with an unrepentant grin, “You did say I should ask.”
An unwilling smile crossed her lips as she walked over to the refrigerator and got the orange juice out. She poured him a glass and then because it looked good, poured one for herself, and brought both glasses over to the table.
“Thanks.”
He hadn’t answered her question.
So how’s it going?
She supposed she knew the answer. She took a sip of juice and said, “If you’d gotten laid, you wouldn’t be here. You would have accomplished your mission and our work would be done.” Although it was Jeremy, and he was a man, so he’d probably want to repeat the experience. She had a sudden image of the two of them sitting here forty years from now, Jeremy saying, “I want to get laid again.”
The idea of Jeremy still sitting across from her forty years from now was not as depressing as it should have been. Although if he were still saying, “I want to get laid,” she might have to kill him.
Jeremy didn’t answer, just chewed another bite of bagel. All right, so she’d answered the question for him. She needed to try another one. Coaxing information from clients was about as annoying as listening to them spill their guts, but it had to be done.
“Did you go to Henry’s last night?”
“No.”
Rilka nodded, and ate her own half of the bagel. Now what? She kept quiet.
“I was pretty tired after work, didn’t feel like going out,” he said, taking another swallow of juice.
“Sure.”
“Then I had trouble sleeping,” he said, which matched Rilka’s experience of life perfectly. “I finally fell asleep at dawn and when I woke up it was time to get over here for my appointment.”
Rilka nodded again. She’d visited a couple of websites after their first meeting, to learn a little more about people in his situation. Pain was a common problem, as was depression, not to mention other causes of insomnia. She didn’t think Jeremy would be impressed with her research, so she just said, “I hate insomnia.” She had experienced it herself a time or two, especially lately. “But it gives you a good excuse to watch the home shopping network.”
Jeremy grinned and she could feel his mood lighten. It was hard to have a dark night of the soul in front of a sarcastic bitch, she knew. Probably explained why she was such a sarcastic bitch: self defense.
“Can never have too many automatic slicing machines,” he said.
“Exactly. Why use a knife when you can clutter up your counter with an appliance that’s hard to use and hard to clean.”
His mouth was full of bagel, so he just nodded without responding. Then he slurped more juice and said, “So have you got me a date?”
“Not yet,” Rilka said, sorry they had to move on to business when she wanted to keep talking about something else.
Jeremy did not seem impressed by her industriousness, so she added, a little waspishly, “Give it a chance.”
“Patience shall be rewarded?” He was back to being a pain in the ass. Not that she really minded. She preferred Jeremy’s pain-in-the-assness to Deputy Deane’s disagreeability or Marcus’s pained smoothness. She wondered what that said about her.
He shifted in his chair and looked at the bagel crumbs on the tabletop. He reached over and picked up her plate and napkin and used the napkin to sweep the crumbs onto the plate. She was pretty sure he wasn’t being an OCD housekeeper, although you never knew.
Then he unlocked the wheels on his chair, put the plate in his lap, and brought it over to the counter. Rilka didn’t say
I can do that
, because obviously he knew that and she didn’t say
My house and my dishes to deal with
, because frankly if he wanted to come and do her housekeeping every day, she wasn’t going to kick.
He kept his back to her and said, “Is there really someone for everyone? Even me?” He said it lightly, like a throwaway line, but she could tell it wasn’t a throwaway.
His words echoed Duncan’s so closely she was tempted to tell him the same thing she’d told Duncan.
One day, you’ll see her and you’ll know
. She realized suddenly that she’d gotten that insanely irresponsible line from Marilyn. It hadn’t been true for Marilyn, despite what she wanted to believe. And it wasn’t true for other people, either.
And Jeremy was not Duncan, readily reassured by platitudes and aphorisms. He was a grownup, despite his obsession with getting laid. He would know a lie when he heard one, and then he wouldn’t trust her. And there might come a time when she needed him to trust her, and so she did something unprecedented in her entire matchmaking career: she told the truth.
“I haven’t got the slightest damned clue.”
• • •
Jeremy hoisted himself into his truck, then folded the wheelchair and stowed it behind him. How many weeks had it taken him to perfect the art of getting from chair to truck and from truck to chair? A lot. And Nate saying,
Why not use the prosthetics?
like you just popped them on and everything went back to normal. And yet you couldn’t go back to normal. You had to find a new normal. Only he was having trouble adjusting to a normal that didn’t have companionship in it, the kind of companionship he wanted.
He didn’t know why he went back to Rilka’s. She was not exactly a shoulder to cry on. Although, see, Rilka had never wondered why he didn’t use prosthetics, at least not out loud and within his hearing. She almost certainly didn’t give a rat’s ass why. Or maybe … she knew it was none of her business. Did him the courtesy of assuming he’d fucking heard of prosthetics and had made an informed decision about them.
He didn’t really think Rilka would find someone for him. The right someone. Someone who treated him like she’d treat anyone. Only not the kind who’d pretend it was all right that he didn’t have legs. It wasn’t all right that he didn’t have legs, that he’d gotten blown up in some stupid Middle Eastern war and then people acted like he deserved a medal for just doing his job. People did their jobs. If he’d known what was coming, he’d have called in sick that day.
So. It wasn’t that he wanted someone who pretended. Hell, that was half the reason he preferred the wheelchair. No pretending. What he wanted was for someone to like him anyway. For it not to matter.
He’d gone to Henry’s like Rilka had suggested, and met her friend Marilyn tending bar, and the evening had gone fine. The first time had been harder than the second, and he’d seen Rilka’s point. The more he went the less they stared, and the less uncomfortable he was.
But so far none of the people he’d met interested him half as much as Rilka did.
• • •
“My name is Daphne,” the slender brunette said, her voice tremulous. She stood awkwardly on the other side of Rilka’s door. She fingered her long hair, pulling it across her cheek in an unconsciously defensive gesture. She had startling blue eyes, exotic, romantic, but she hunched her shoulders, trying to hide.
They’ll find you anyway
, Rilka resisted saying. Although that would be one way to solve her inability to be an effective matchmaker, start running the clients off as soon as they showed up at the door.
She went with, “That’s a beautiful name,” taking in the scar on the woman’s face but not lingering on it. “I’m Rilka. Please come in.”
Rilka brought her into the kitchen where Daphne winced at the brightness of the sun. Rilka adjusted the shades, then fumbled with the tea, spilling water across the counter, distracted from what she was trying to do. The woman’s disfiguring scar was obviously the reason she was here. She would want someone who could see past the disfigurement. Honest to God, Rilka had once believed such people existed, but it seemed like society had become so youth-and appearance-obsessed that it was no longer true. The content of your character didn’t matter half as much as —
Gran would have told her she was being ridiculous, that society had always been appearance-oriented and if finding The One were so easy there would be no need for matchmakers. But it wasn’t wrong for Rilka to wish there were no need for matchmakers, was it? Wouldn’t it be nice if people could manage on their own? And then Rilka would … clean houses for a living. Sack groceries. Something. She brought the tea over to the table.
“So tell me how it’s going,” she began.
The young woman gave a shaky smile and accepted the mug of tea Rilka offered, focusing on her mug and not looking at Rilka. Rilka sat down opposite her and gave an encouraging smile. Not that Daphne, head determinedly lowered, could see it. But it was the thought that counted, right?
“This is hard,” Daphne whispered, still staring at the tea. Rilka was used to people not looking at her when they spoke. Somehow it was easier for them if they acted like she was just another piece of furniture and they just happened to be sharing their thoughts aloud. Sometimes she amused herself by guessing what piece of furniture she would be. Sofa, armoire, kitchen pantry.
“I’m a virtual assistant,” Daphne confided finally. “Do you know what that is?”
“You do administrative work for clients? Using the phone and internet to get and deliver assignments?”
“That’s right. I don’t — since the incident — ” She made a gesture toward her face. “I stay mostly at home. I have a cat.”