Chapter 7 #2
He was smooth, changing the subject so that she wouldn’t drool on herself.
She joined in the weather chat as they finished preparing the meal.
She said that torrential rain sucked because she’d hoped to sit on the deck and paint like a real artist and she didn’t believe the snow.
He asked what made a real artist. She said sitting on a deck and painting scenery, or at least that’s what all the art magazines showed her.
“Steaks are ready,” he said. “I’ll let them rest a couple of minutes.”
Her phone pinged. Amy glanced down at the screen.
Can I go with the guys to McKinney to hang out
Jonah. She sighed softly and texted back.
Ask your Dad. She put the phone down and went to get Duchess. She brought her into the kitchen, then took a few things out of the fridge to feed her. Boiled chicken. Broth. Carrots. A bit of kibble. Harrison watched curiously as she mixed it all together and fed it to Duchess.
“No wonder that dog is stuck to your side.”
“She’s old and has special dietary requirements.”
Harrison looked at her skeptically.
“Maybe not this particular diet, but she can’t eat as much kibble as she wants.” Because the vet had told her to cut back on account of Duchess getting fat. So Amy supplemented her reduced kibble intake. Was there a creature on earth who appreciated calorie cuts? No, there was not.
Harrison asked about Duchess’s sight. Amy explained that the old girl had cataracts. He told her about a dog he’d had as a kid that had gone blind, and how another dog in the neighborhood would come to play and lead his blind dog around.
Her phone pinged. She picked it up, noticed another cat video from Ethan.
She put the phone down, took Duchess outside, and while Harrison finished plating the dinner, she settled Duchess on her blanket on the end of the couch.
Duchess turned three times, four times, five times, and finally sat.
And then stood up and repeated the process in the opposite direction.
Amy noticed Harrison watching Duchess. “She’s a finicky sleeper, too,” she explained. She came back into the kitchen to fetch the salad just as her phone pinged again. “Good Lord,” she muttered. A text from Ryan.
Jonah wants to go to McKinney with his friends. Is that okay? Which was followed by a man shrugging, a thinking-man emoji, a giant question mark.
Amy fired off her response. IDK, Ryan. You decide.
Jonah said the period at the end of your sentence is passive aggressive. Are you mad
Please just take care of it
She did not use any punctuation to be misinterpreted as anything other than proper punctuation and put the phone face down on the counter with a thud.
“Everything okay?” Harrison asked.
“Nope. My patience now has big gaping holes in it. My children are with their dad. They all understand that I have this opportunity and agreed I should take it and agreed that I needed a break. But they clearly don’t think that the break applies to them.
” She paused and glanced off for a moment, trying to comprehend how they could have missed this important detail.
Sometimes it felt like she was shouting into a void.
“I get it. There have been times in the last few years I’ve felt like I was doing what my sponsors and my manager and my agent and the tour officials wanted. Not what I wanted.”
Interesting. Amy glanced at him. He looked like a confident guy, the sort who would be in command of his place in the world. “What did you want?”
Harrison shrugged. “That’s the million-dollar question.
I’m still trying to figure it out. And until I do, my manager won’t leave me alone.
I told him the same thing, that I needed a break.
He’s called twice today after I specifically asked him not to.
” He paused and waved his cooking tongs around.
“Who does that? Who keeps calling when you’ve asked them not to? ”
“Bad boyfriends and family, that’s who,” Amy said with a snort of confidence.
“And managers.”
“And managers!” Amy agreed, getting on board with this gripe. “I have told my kids no less than four times today to ask Dad. Just ask him! Ask him,” she said pleadingly, bending backward and shaking her fists to the faceless gods of parenting. “But then you wouldn’t believe what happened.”
“Oh, I bet I can,” Harrison said confidently. “Dad contacted you to ask the same thing, am I right?”
Amy gasped with surprise. “Yes! How did you know that?”
“I’m a guy. We can be dense.”
“So dense! I mean, present company excluded, of course.”
“Of course. But in our defense, males are missing an important gene or something. It’s not our fault.”
She laughed. “Thank you for understanding how impossible you all are. I’m going to set the table.”
Over steaks, salad, asparagus, and another round of martinis, and with two red taper candles in little wreaths burning in the center of the table (she might have overdone it, but it felt festive), Harrison and Amy talked.
Their conversation was easy. She didn’t feel any pressure to be unnaturally interesting, which she’d felt on each of the two dates she’d been on since her divorce.
She asked him about golf and appreciated that he didn’t get deep in the weeds about it.
She said she liked sports but had never gotten into golf because it took too long to play or watch.
He said he liked to cook but never got the chance because golf took too long to play.
He learned she was two years older than him, and he said he didn’t believe it, because he looked so much older than her. He didn’t, but Amy was ridiculously flattered all the same. He’d grown up in Southern California, and she’d grown up in the outskirts of Dallas.
When cold rain was sluicing down the glass panes of the windows, he asked her about the art competition, and she told him about her dream of being an artist. “In college, I had a job in an art store. I sold paints and canvasses and attended their free art classes,” she said.
She laughed sheepishly. “I thought I’d live in that tiny garage apartment, and when I wasn’t there, I’d be going around the States in a pop-up camper to find new things to paint.
I really thought I would be that artist all my life. ”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, just life,” she said with a flick of her hand.
“I was tired of being hungry. And scrounging for rent. I sold a couple of pieces, but not for much money. And then I fell in love and biology kicked in.” She moved some salad around her plate.
“Funny how that works. Funny how young love can make you toss everything out the window in favor of kids and a house. Funny how that seems better than anything else in the moment.” And funny how often she looked back at that and wondered why she’d been so ready to toss her dreams aside for a man. At this age, it baffled her.
“It didn’t quite work that way for me,” he said. “In college, I was kind of a dick when it came to girls.”
“Oh,” Amy said.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said with a charming smile. “I’ve changed my ways, hand to God,” he said, holding up his hand. “I was like a kid in a candy shop—I’d never had girls that interested in me, but in college, the groupies started to come around.”
“Wait…what groupies?”
“Collegiate and professional golf has groupies. You didn’t know that?”
“Does anyone know that?”
“Probably not,” he admitted with a grin. “We call them the PGA—Player Groupie Association.”
“No wonder you like golf.”
“That is definitely not the reason,” he said. “I loved golf from the time I could hold a club. My dad is a golf fanatic, so I had a set of clubs practically before I could walk. I was so focused on it for so many years that no relationship I had ever made it very far.”
Jonah had a golf set before he could really walk, too. Big, brightly colored golf clubs and plastic balls the size of melons that he used to whack against the patio doors, no matter how many times she told him not to.
“I remember being at the club with my dad, running around the practice green while he and his friends chewed cigars and putted,” Harrison continued. “Must have been destiny.”
“Destiny,” she mused. “Do you really believe in it? Like the preordained kind?”
Harrison appeared to think about it. “In some ways, I do. I can look back on my life and see how certain events might not have happened had I not been in the place I was. Usually because of golf. This dinner, for example.” He cast his arm over the table and the food. “Golf.”
“That’s so weird. I thought it was art,” Amy said.
But was this destiny? This dinner, which was as close to a date as she’d had in a very long time?
She watched him cut his steak. He looked even more fit and handsome with the lights of Christmas twinkling behind him.
It was probably the martinis, but she never felt so warm and fuzzy toward people she’d only just met.
Especially men. Wow. She really was suffering some midlife thing, wasn’t she?
Yeah, and so what? She’d gone through a divorce where the one guy who promised to be faithful and always there for her wasn’t.
No wonder she was having a small crisis of confidence.
She really was entirely too cynical when it came to men.
“It’s not their fault they were born with a penis,” Julie had said to her once. “You can’t hate all of them.”
“Don’t you believe in destiny?” Harrison asked.
“Umm…”
“Wait…you have that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“Like you think I sound like someone who lives in a yurt.”
Amy laughed. “Nope—I haven’t picked up any yurt vibes yet.”
“Thank God. Not that there’s anything wrong with a yurt. Except…it’s a yurt.” He grinned. “So, destiny? Are you a believer, or no?”