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  “Your new office is right next to Kurt’s,” Laura J. added. Someone else in her family was named Laura, so she’d come through life as Laura J. (Although I’d known a few HR managers who used middle initials. Maybe they fancied that the extra initial made them sound important?)

  “Next to Kurt’s?” Lydia piped up, and I could tell she wasn’t entirely pleased about the whole turn of events. In fact quite the opposite.

  I, however, was elated. “My own . . . office?”

  “Right down the hall,” Lydia muttered in her trademark annoyed fashion.

  I walked down a few doors, reading the little signs with the names, and there he was. Not Kurt—David Hasselhoff. My poster, plastered on the front door of my new office. Kurt pushed off from his desk and spun around in his chair.

  “Hey, neighbor.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Think we can not have that poster there so I don’t have to look at it first thing every morning?”

  “I think not,” I said, confusing Kurt.

  “You think we cannot have the poster in here . . . or we cannot not have it there?”

  “He’s been here longer than you have, Kurt.”

  “Okay, that’s cool,” he said. “Had to try. It kind of creeps me out.”

  “That’s the point.” I nodded.

  I got settled at my new desk in my new office and the first thing I did was pick up the phone and call my machine at home to replay the cute message from Travis. Then I hung up and watched the clock while I calculated exactly when I would call him. Ten A.M. was way too early. Eleven? That was manageable. Not like I called the second I got up, but not like I was waiting all day to make him wonder. I decided to wait until eleven—11:30. . . 11:20. No, 11:30.

  I picked up the phone at 10:47 and dialed.

  “This is Travis,” he said, when he picked up.

  “This is Jordan,” I replied.

  “Jordan. Jordan—hey!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know. I’m just cookin’ over here.”

  “I love a guy who can cook.”

  “That’s me. Wearing an apron and a smile.”

  “That’s quite a visual,” I said, picturing it in my head.

  “I’m actually fully clothed. Last time I showed up for work in an apron I got called in to human resources.”

  I laughed a little too hard at his joke. Then I rolled my own eyes at myself.

  “When can I take you out?” he said.

  Direct. I liked that. Then again I liked everything about him. What? You like to club baby seals? Me too! Let’s book a charter flight.

  “I’m pretty flexible.” Shit. Play it cool.

  “That’s promising,” he said. “We’ll get to that later, though. Now, when can I take you out?”

  “Aren’t you clever . . .”

  “How about tonight?” Hmmm, let me think about that. I was flexible but not totally available. In fact, I was practically unattainable. Not in his dreams! But tonight. Was there something I had to do tonight? Other than play hard to get?

  “I’m yours.” Shit.

  * * * * *

  We decided that he’d pick me up straight after work. This could have taken on nightmare ramifications had I not anticipated the same-day date in my best-case scenario when I called him. I might not have shaved or I might have carelessly dressed, not worn a good bra and a top that would show off the effects of the good bra (thank you, Victoria, and all of your many wonderful secrets). But the new Jordan dressed on offense, not on defense—as though I were always anticipating that something good might happen, rather than something bad—and taking a little extra time every day to look nice. And I’d gotten up an hour earlier that particular morning to make an extra-special effort, just in case. So it was all working out according to plan. Nothing had ever worked according to plan for me before. I didn’t even have a plan before. I was starting to love my life.

  I darted out of Splash at 6:20 P.M., and as I started down the steps, I saw Travis sitting on my bench across the street. My stomach did an entire gymnastics routine and my knees felt wobbly. My heart pounded as I walked down the steps, and all I could think was, Please, God, don’t let me trip and fall. And thank you, God, for introducing me to Travis. But next time, maybe we can skip the hospital part and maybe try a run-of-the-mill bump into in the grocery store vegetable section. He crossed the street to meet me.

  “Hi,” he said. “You look beautiful.” And my face felt hot again.

  “Hi, yourself,” I said, and then we stood there awkwardly for about an hour (probably eight seconds in actual time). “So what’s on the agenda?”

  “Well, I was thinking that we could go to that new indoor games place and ride bumper cars . . . in honor of our meeting.” I was smiling so big my face hurt. “And then, if it doesn’t blow a diet of some sort, hand-mixed ice cream.”

  “Sounds like a blast.”

  “Until I ram you off the road,” he ribbed.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” I taunted back.

  “Ouch!”

  * * * * *

  We had one of those near-perfect movie-montage first dates that you think doesn’t exist in real life. We sped around in our bumper cars and yelled obscenities at each other.

  “Payback’s a bitch, baby!” I called out as I crashed into him.

  “Women drivers!” he shouted.

  “Oh, did I hear someone whining helplessly?”

  We smashed each other up but good. And then when the novelty wore off we found ourselves with two impossibly large frozen ice cream drinks in front of us. I had a vanilla and he had chocolate.

  “And what else?” Travis asked.

  “That’s it,” I gurgled with a mouth full of ice cream.

  “I want to know more about you. I want to know everything about you.”

  “Well, so do I! But I’m at a disadvantage since all I can tell you about me has happened since the day we met. Or should I say, first ran into each other.”

  “Rub it in, why don’t ya?” he said with the cutest little pout, inspiring an incredible urge to lick the ice cream off his lips. I managed to resist.

  “No, not at all. I was just saying . . . Tell me about you. Where’s your family?”

  “My mom lives upstate. My sister is married and lives out in Portland. And my dad died when we were in college.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, he was a terrific guy.” He looked straight ahead, and it felt as though we’d stumbled onto something tender. “He was a lighthouse keeper.”

  “Really? That’s not your average, everyday profession. Where?”

  “Out on Long Island. But it doesn’t work anymore. It’s in desperate need of restoration.”

  “I’ve never even seen a lighthouse close up.”

  “They’re . . . majestic. Wonderful, wondrous.” Travis thought about this. For a second he was a million miles away. I guessed he was thinking about his dad, and I wanted to climb across the table and hug him or touch him or do . . . something. But he snapped out of it just as soon as he’d disappeared and changed the subject. “What else? Let’s see. I don’t believe in the colorization of old black-and-white films, I do believe in Santa Claus . . . ”

  “And you don’t believe in artificial turf and the infield fly rule, I gotcha.”

  “Oh, that you remember,” he said. Our eyes locked.

  “Go on . . . tell me more,” I said. The old Jordan would never have had the confidence to flirt this way, but it felt good to speak so freely.

  “Okay,” he went on. “I like André Three Thousand better than Big Boi, prefer running outside along the river over inside on a treadmill, phone calls instead of text messaging . . . and I can do wonders in the kitchen.”

  “Like levitate?”

  “No, but I’ll make the best damn whatever you like that you ever ate.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be hard since you’ll be competing with memories of food that go ba
ck about two months,” I said, giving him what’s known in the airline business as the wave-in for approach. “And most of that was hospital food.” He made a guilty face. He felt bad. Then I felt bad. “Seriously? You’re a good cook?”

  “That’s something I don’t joke about.”

  “Then I’m going to have to taste this cooking.”

  “How’s Friday night?” he asked, as if on cue.

  “I happen to be free,” I said. For the rest of my life, my giddy mind shouted, in case you’re not doing anything either.

  19.

  slim-fast is a lot of

  things—“yummy” isn’t

  one of them

  Cat asked me to go to speed class with her before work. I feigned ignorance when she mentioned that we’d gone before and I’d loved it, and somehow locked myself into doing it again. Speed was a class kind of like spinning but you’re on treadmills power-walking instead of on bikes. The only saving grace is that you’re in a class full of other people doing it too, because—like black rubber bracelets, blue eyeliner, and crimped side ponytails—speed walking is one of those things that should have been confined to the eighties.

  Cat wasn’t spinning anymore because of the pregnancy, and better speed than spin, because the techno music that accompanied spinning made me want to kill someone.

  “What does cloud nine mean?” I asked Cat as I increased the incline on my treadmill per the instructor’s chirped order.

  “It means you’re happy as hell. You’re in la-la land. You’re a pig in shit. You’re Dirk in a titty bar.”

  “I know what it means, silly. But where did the saying come from? Why cloud nine? Why not cloud eight or cloud seventy-two?”

  “That I can’t help you with.”

  “I could really like Travis.”

  “Sounds like you already do.”

  “I know. He’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. He seems really genuine, you know?”

  “Genuine,” she echoed. “That’s important.”

  “Not like most of the losers I’ve dated. And, boy, I’ve dated my share of losers!”

  Cat stepped up onto the sides of her treadmill and stopped walking, eyes wide. “Jordan! Who do you remember? Are you remembering stuff?”

  “No! I mean . . . from what I can tell of Dirk . . . it doesn’t lead me to believe I was very discriminating.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, stepping back onto the still-moving rubber belt. “He’s a total waste of skin. He’s actually being more attentive to you since your accident. I mean, you wouldn’t remember, but he was way worse.”

  “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Believe me. He treated you like crap. Frankly, I don’t get the turnaround.”

  “Probably because I’m not letting him walk all over me. All of a sudden I must seem exciting or something.”

  “You see?” she said. “I’ve always said that. You’re nice to them, and they shit on you. You act like a complete bitch, and they worship the ground you walk on.”

  “Now that’s some messed-up logic. Anyway, he’s making me dinner tonight.”

  “Dirk?”

  “No! Travis.”

  “Well, look at you. Juggling men. I hate to say it, but I think that accident was the best thing that could have happened to you.” I couldn’t have agreed with her more.

  “If you can carry on a conversation, you must not be working hard enough,” scolded the instructor. “Don’t make me separate you two ladies! Move your legs instead of your mouths!”

  Being there was bad enough, but getting yelled at by the teacher made it worse. “I liked this last time?” I asked Cat.

  “You loved it!”

  “No, I think I’d remember if I loved it.”

  “You did,” she said.

  “Really? What did I say exactly that gave you the idea I loved it?”

  “Ladies, perhaps you should take your conversation outside the classroom,” said the instructor.

  “Sorry,” said Cat. “We were only talking about how much we loved—”

  But before Cat could get out the rest of her sentence, I’d dismounted. Cat looked at me, perplexed.

  “I love it so much,” I said, “that I’m overwhelmed. I don’t want to overindulge . . . seems almost selfish.”

  “O-kay,” Cat said. I could tell she was annoyed that I wasn’t sticking it out, but after the last class we took, I could barely walk for two days. Why did I have to do something I didn’t enjoy?

  “Meet you out front,” I said, and hightailed it out of there.

  Cat came out a few seconds later.

  “I was too embarrassed to continue,” she said, intimating that it was my fault.

  “Sorry,” I said not so apologetically as we headed outside into the freezing cold. “I need to go home before work. You?”

  “No, I’m gonna shower downstairs. I brought clothes. I don’t have a date tonight like you,” Cat said with raised eyebrows.

  I smiled at the thought of it. My date with Travis. He was cooking for me. Then I spotted a cab. But there was a woman standing in front of me—maybe ten or twenty feet—arm raised nearly out of its socket. I didn’t see any other cabs up the avenue, and I really needed to get going. So I did something I’d only had done to me before. I stepped into the street, directly in front of her, and stole her cab.

  * * * * *

  I was taking one of those amazing showers that you just don’t want to get out of. I stood under my domestic waterfall, daydreaming about Travis, water beating down on me at the perfect temperature, and I swear I could have stayed in there forever—but through the pleasant, dreamlike gurgle began to intrude an angry buzzing. I had at times during my spell of amnesia—or what passed for it—started to sense that my little psychodrama was becoming psychosomatic, that my body had started to believe what my mind was shoveling. So I stuck my head out of the shower to be sure, and what a relief: It was the angry buzzing of someone downstairs, wanting to come up. So I stepped out, sopping wet—and good thing, because I was dangerously close to becoming beef jerky.

  I got out, wrapped one towel around my head and another around my body. But before I could get to the intercom to ask who it was, I was startled by a knock at the door. A precise knock that could belong to only one person: my mother. Now, we had a fairly good understanding among the residents of my building about letting in nonresidents, stemming from one unfortunate incident with a lovelorn girlfriend who pushed her ex’s flat-panel TV out his fourth-story window after being given access by his sympathetic neighbor. So it was a major accomplishment now to beat that system—but child’s play for my smilingly insistent and cloyingly concerned mother. I clenched my teeth hopefully and peeked through the hole on the off chance that it was someone else arriving unexpected, uninvited, and unbuzzed in, with a big present.

  But, no, it was my mother.

  When I opened the door, she looked me up and down and her face twitched. Twitching is involuntary, right? Because, for some reason, that one tiny movement managed to exude pity, condescension, and disdain, and drum up about a thousand feelings in me—inadequacy at the top of the list.

  “Mom. What a nice surprise.”

  “Hello, dear,” she said and sniffed around almost like she was checking to see if I’d been smoking pot, but actually in an attempt to make me feel like my place wasn’t clean enough. Or anything enough. Like me. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to see how you’re doing.” She did the two-second once-over of my apartment and I swear she twitched again. Was she developing a tick? Was she allergic to me? She looked at the pile of clothes on my floor. “What’s the laundry plan? Let the pile get so big you can’t fit it through the door, then you do a bonfire and buy all new?”

  “No, I’m going to do it. Although I was trying to go for a record.”

  “That’s not funny, Jordan, it’s just plain disgusting. How can you live like this?” In my defense, which is usually my place of choice when around
my mother, the pile of clothes she was referring to was not all dirty clothes. Anyone knows a woman has to try on many, many outfits sometimes, just to find the one that works. This is on a regular day. Throw in PMS and you could go through ten outfits before you find the one that you are the least hideous in. This outfit is generally the first one you tried on, but that’s another matter entirely. My point is that a lot of these clothes were clean. Just rejected. And because I’d spent so much time trying to pick an outfit I didn’t have time to put them away. With someone else, I might have tried explaining all this. But none of it mattered to my mom, so I didn’t bother explaining. I just nodded in agreement. How could I live like this?

  “I don’t know how I live like this,” I said.

  “I don’t either.”

  “I know.” I shook my head and shrugged, as if it wasn’t me that we were talking about. And I was just as disgusted as she was.

  “Well, at least it’s more like the Jordan I know and love. Have you begun to remember anything yet?”

  “No, not really.” Yes, I remember the last time you stopped over uninvited and said the exact same thing. Why not just make a mental note that Jordan is a heathen and lives in squalor? Then you won’t be so utterly shocked when you see it, and you won’t have to bring it to my attention every time you invade my personal space.

  “I brought you some goodies,” she said, her tone now upbeat. I’d noticed the grocery bag in her hands, but I didn’t want to ask. At least she came bearing gifts. Free food is always appreciated when one is living on the traffic salary and drowning in debt. My junior copywriter position came with a slight pay increase, but all it really did was allow me to eat albacore tuna fish sandwiches every day instead of the other kind. Still, like so many before me in a similar predicament, I hadn’t gotten around to depriving myself of much yet. But the new Jordan looked around at her former life and knew somehow it was time. Stifle the occasional impulse purchase of the thing you didn’t need and would certainly chuck in the garbage in six months. Have a bank balance climb into the triple and perhaps even quadruple digits. Have a plan.