Chapter Four
Elle
Elle,’ my mom called over the top of people’s heads as soon as she spotted me through the wire mesh, just outside the entrance to the parking lot.
She waved her arm violently, knocking my eldest brother Tim – I have a lot of brothers – in the head.
Her voice was accustomed to being pitched above the din of over half a dozen kids squabbling at home, so it carried like a football announcer across to me.
‘Over here, honey. I left your ticket on the door.’
“The door” was a grumpy-looking teenager with a book of raffle tickets at the barrier. The place wasn’t exactly sold out.
My family took up the entire back row on one side of the bleachers, which had been brought in.
Mom, Dad, Tim and his girlfriend Delia, Sam – another brother – Daisy, my brother-in-law Quinn who must’ve been roped in because my eldest sister Lucy was staying at home with the baby, my aunt and uncle and my parents’ neighbour.
It was a full house. Wherever we went, we went in force.
It was like mobilising an army for every extracurricular activity.
‘Here she is finally,’ Uncle Joe cried. ‘Better late than never as always, eh Elle?’
‘Better never than late when it comes to you, Uncle Joe,’ I quipped in response and flicked the brim of his baseball cap as I did the awkward side shuffle past them all to the space they’d left me between Daisy and Tim. I heard him laughing as I sat down.
‘We’ve just been staring at concrete anyhow,’ Daisy told me under her breath, referring to the asphalt stage with its bare-boned props of broken wooden crates and bald tyres.
She wasn’t great at sitting down at the best of times.
Daisy was always most comfortable when she was active but being parked here with the sun shining was especially painful for her.
‘Where’s your sun hat?’ I asked.
‘Oh, don’t start fussing.’ She groaned. ‘I left it in my kit bag, is all.’
‘She can use some of yours, can’t she?’ Tim commented, trying to rearrange his shoulder around my, admittedly, rather large white hat.
I made no apologies. When you’re red-headed, you don’t sit out in the sun for two hours without protection unless you want to end up with skin the colour and texture of a red M that’s just good theatre etiquette.’ Not to mention that’s how I liked it in general.
‘Yeah, yeah, what did the guy do this time, Elle?’ Tim chipped in, with a teasing grin. ‘Order your dinner for you? Put the jelly on before the peanut butter? Which interview question did he fail?’
‘I wish I’d never told you about that.’ I scowled at him.
After the first couple of months of online dating, I’d devised a list of preliminary questions I needed to evaluate guys on before I even agreed to going on a date with them.
Pretty obvious stuff. If I couldn’t pick up on red or green flags from their profile, I needed to ask directly.
What was the point of meeting up if I knew our politics were completely incompatible or they never wanted kids, or they thought that writing wasn’t a real job?
Made sense to me but Tim had taken every opportunity to wind me up about being picky and high maintenance, ever since.
What was worse, the list of questions didn’t even help. Sure, I went on fewer dates, but they were equally pointless because the men I did meet up with had either lied their socks off, been strategically dishonest, or I had zero chemistry with them.
I was sick of it. And sick of being the butt of my family’s dating jokes.
Lucy had found her soulmate, Quinn, in high school; Tim and Delia had been together since college and for some (sexist) reason, my brothers’ love lives were never of much interest; and Daisy was too young for them to even contemplate having romantic feelings for someone, so I got the full brunt of it.
They even had labels for the types of men I apparently went for, with equally disastrous results. Was it a Type A failure or a Type B?
Mom shook her head a little and relaxed again, now she was convinced there was no threat to one of her children for her to worry about. ‘I don’t understand online dating. Whatever happened to just letting fate take a hand? What’s the rush?’
I made a vague sound. In principle I agreed with Mom.
I knew at twenty-nine I wasn’t old. I knew that even if I didn’t meet someone for another decade it needn’t mean my hopes of starting a family of my own were scuppered.
Mom had fallen pregnant with Daisy when she was thirty-nine and I’d delivered many a baby to healthy, happy new mothers in their forties.
But.
My record for meeting good people through a dating app was so dire, I’d chosen to delete them all.
My prospects of finding that needle-in-a-haystack person the old-fashioned way was even harder.
When you work from home and have ninety percent of your free time taken up by events where you are surrounded by relatives, it doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for meet-cutes. I hadn’t been on a date in months.
‘You know what you should try,’ Tim announced, no doubt about to gift me with some classic mansplaining. I loved him but as the eldest brother he had this way of thinking he knew best, even though Lucy and I were older than him. ‘Blind dating.’
‘I know a guy. Is he allowed to bring his guide dog?’ Uncle Joe joked, always eager to bust someone’s balls.
He meant no harm, it was just his way, but I was feeling too crabby from my bad editing news, and bad dating memories, and the heat, so I didn’t even bother to retort.
Choosing to put this show on in a parking lot was a nice, gritty touch but my God it was baking hot.
‘All right, Joe, put a sock in it. Elle will find her guy soon enough,’ Mom said. ‘Now, sweetheart, have you got Brigid’s christening in your diary?’
‘Of course. August 18th.’ I’d had it in the diary since she was two weeks old. I was going to be godmother, but I appreciated that Mom’s change of subject was to help me out.
‘And you’re coming to my softball jamboree next Sunday?’ Daisy asked.
‘Definitely.’
‘And the week after that we’re having a barbecue. To celebrate the end of school,’ Mom added.
I nodded, suppressing a sigh. I wanted to do all those things with them.
But there were so many things to go to and do when it came to my family.
It was like an exponential growth of obligation.
As soon as I attended one event, I got invited to three more.
Every moment I wasn’t doing something to fix my book made me panic.
And if dating was a mess that I was just going to have to leave to serendipity, then my writing career was all I had. I couldn’t lose my grip on that.
Maybe it was a good idea to meet up for drinks with Keisha. If I ever made it out of this car park and I hadn’t been fried into a walking piece of bacon, some alcohol and a sense of perspective were definitely in order.