Chapter 1
“This one is going to be successful,” Minnie said as she and her two friends, Sookie and Dotty, got in line to go through customs so they could board the cruise ship. “I can feel it in my bones.”
Minnie was just under six feet tall and had gray hair that she kept cut short and blue eyes set in a bed of wrinkles in her slim face.
Built on the slender side, she hated anything that made her sweat and loved good food.
Her motto was that she would eat what she wanted and die when the good Lord saw fit to take her, and bless her heart, she never gained a pound.
“You said that last time, and it was our first failure in six months, but then it could be your arthritis talking to you, not your intuition,” Sookie told her as the three of them moved forward a few feet.
Today’s group moved along at a pretty good clip, but it still seemed to take forever to get to the customs desk.
Boarding and then deboarding was the only bad thing they’d found about living on one cruise ship after another since they had sold their homes and refused to go to an assisted-living center.
“Oh, hush that kind of talk.” Minnie shook a finger at her friend. “You’ll jinx our next mission, and we depend on you to make the plan once I spot a target.”
“I already see my target,” Dotty whispered and nodded toward a tall, dark-haired man in the line next to them. “He looks absolutely miserable, doesn’t he?”
Dotty’s green eyes sparkled with orneriness.
Her honey-blond hair did not have a single gray in it because she was as careful to keep them plucked out as she was to keep her light-brown eyebrows.
She claimed that good genes and DNA kept her round face from being wrinkled, but if the truth were told, it was the fact that she loved food as much as Minnie did and carried around twenty extra pounds.
Her theory was that if she ever got sick, she could depend on the extra weight to keep her from dying.
“So does that cowboy over there…” Minnie started and then shook her head when a tall blond joined him and planted a kiss on his lips.
“I’d say that he’s taken,” Dotty said with a giggle. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they’re on their honeymoon.”
“I see a sparkling new ring on her left hand and a wide gold band on his.” Minnie sighed. “I guess it’ll have to be Mr. Tall, Dark, and Lonesome. I don’t see a wedding ring on his hand, so you’re off to a good start, Dotty. Maybe we’ll have good success on this trip.”
“I see a white ring around his left ring finger. He could possibly be ready for a rebound,” Dotty whispered as they moved forward in the line.
Sookie eyed him closely. “I’m not sure about him, my friend. We like to see more than rebounds. We want the cake, the dress, and the whole thing when we put a couple together. It’s like half the job is done if it’s nothing but a booty call.”
“And you’d know a lot about those booty calls,” Minnie teased.
“Of course, I would. Being middle-aged doesn’t mean I’ve already got one foot in the casket.
” Sookie tucked a strand of brown hair—compliments of the hair stylist on whatever ship they had been on when she needed her roots touched up—back behind an ear.
Cut chin length, her hair matched her milk-chocolate-colored eyes.
She had jogged since she was a teenager and had a firm body to prove it, and nowadays, she always spent an hour every morning in the ship’s fitness room and then jogged up and down the staircases several times.
“Middle-aged?” Dotty snorted. “Seventy-five is a little past that.”
“Not if I plan to live to be a hundred and fifty,” Sookie eyed Mr. Tall, Dark, and Lonesome out of the corner of her eye.
“Well, we’ve got eight days. If we can’t make a match in that time, we should give up our snowbirds-in-residence status and check into an assisted-living place,” Minnie said. “Looks like we’re next in line. Are we ready for another cruise?”
“Hell, yeah!” Sookie and Dotty high-fived each other.
“Are we ready for another challenge?” Sookie asked.
“Damn straight!” Dotty and Minnie gave her the thumbs-up sign.
“Who’s ready for a drink at the launch party?” Dotty asked.
All three hands went up.
“Next.” The lady at the front of the line motioned for Sookie to go to the left.
While she handed her passport to the woman behind the computer, Dotty was sent to the right and Minnie to the left.
The three of them were veterans at this business, so in just a few minutes they were on their way up the ramp and onto the ship.
This time Minnie and Dotty were bunking together, and Sookie had a room all to herself.
Minnie and Dotty had a balcony, and Sookie got an inside room, but for the most part, she would only be sleeping and changing clothing in the smaller cabin anyway.
That’s the way they had been handling things from the beginning when the three of them had decided that living on a cruise ship wasn’t as expensive as an assisted-living care center.
All cabins were double occupancy, but having a stranger for a roommate wouldn’t be much better than living in assisted living.
To save money, one of them took the inside room on each cruise, and the other two got a balcony room.
That way, no two of them would get tired of living together, and to make it fair, they added up the cost of the whole trip and split the price between them.
“We’ll get our luggage in the room and meet you for the safety event, and then we’ll head on up to the lido deck for the launch party.” Dotty hit the button on the elevator to take them up to their deck. “And no letting Henry talk you into sharing your room with him on this cruise.”
“Not a snowball’s chance in hell, but Mr. Tall and Dark might be a different story altogether,” Sookie said with a broad wink toward both other women.
“I bet I could teach that hunky young man a few things that he would never forget, and all the women he’d spend time with after that would drop down on their knees and thank me. ”
“Good God!” Minnie gasped. “He’s young enough to be your grandson, if you had one.”
“Yep, and I bet he wouldn’t break a hip if he fell out of a bed,” Sookie winked again and stepped out of the elevator when the doors slid open. “And I’m the one with a big bed. Y’all have to sleep on twin beds this go around.”
“Remember you’re seventy-five years old, so you might be the one breaking a hip while you’re trying to keep up with a thirty-year-old man,” Dotty said as she and Minnie got out of the elevator.
“Like I told you before, old don’t mean dead,” Sookie teased.
“No, but it means we’re supposed to show good common sense.” Minnie sighed.
“I’ll pay him when the cruise is over.” Sookie’s deep southern voice sounded like she had been a long-time smoker, even though she’d never smoked either cigarettes or weed.
Her friends didn’t know that she did occasionally eat a gummy bear—for medicinal purposes only—when her knees hurt from exercise. “That’s good common sense, isn’t it?”
The three of them rounded a corner, and only a few doors down, they found their rooms were right across the narrow hall from each other and just a little way from the laundry.
“We decided we were done with men,” Minnie said as she rolled her luggage out of the hall and into the cabin.
“Done with them forever, amen, or just done with marrying one?” Sookie asked.
“Forever, amen,” Minnie and Dotty chorused together.
“Well, then I guess I’ll have to just dream about that pretty boy.” Sookie opened the door to her cabin and flipped on the light.
“Go on and get your stuff put away,” Dotty said. “They’ll be calling our floor for the safety thing soon, and we’d better not find a scarf tied to the door when we come back.”
“I’ll use the Do Not Disturb sign if I snag a little young thing who needs some training.” Sookie tried to get in the last word.
“A young guy could kill you, woman,” Minnie said.
“But what a way to die.” Sookie closed the door before either of them could smart off again.
***
“You’d think as many cruises as we’ve been on that we could just show them our green card and skip this part. I could put a life jacket on with my eyes closed,” Sookie muttered as she rolled her suitcase into the tiny closet area.
She enjoyed every third cruise when she got a room to herself.
She had always been a night owl, and she treasured those couple of hours in the evening when she had complete peace and quiet.
By the end of the cruise, she’d be ready for a roommate for a couple of cruises, but for this weeklong trip to the Caribbean, she was grateful for time alone.
After this one they’d fly to Seattle, spend a day seeing the sights for the third time, and then board a ship headed for Alaska.
She would have ten days to plot out a matchmaking plan then, but this time she would have to get the job done in only seven, or else they’d have two failures in a row—and they had never had that much bad luck.
She opened her suitcase, hung up her clothing, and put her underwear and nightshirts in a drawer.
Then she took her toiletries into the small bathroom.
She didn’t mind living out of a suitcase—it was really kind of exciting—but she did miss her huge, oversized bathroom in the house that she had sold six months ago.
That’s when she, Dotty, and Minnie hatched this plan to be snowbirds in residence on cruise ships instead of going to a senior independent living place.
Just because they had all turned seventy-five didn’t mean they were ready for a rocking chair.
Sookie remembered the conversation that they’d had when Minnie and Dotty asked her to join them. She’d already been trying to think of ways to have more fun than moving into one of those assisted-living homes, and their idea seemed to be perfect.