“This isn’t LinkedIn, Lloyd. She’s not hiring a vice president of sales. This is about that intangible stuff. Chemistry. All that...” He sighed. “All that crap’s sort of out of anyone’s control.”
“Oh, God. I know, right? Who knows what women want?” Louis complained.
“Obviously not you,” Mike said, because someone had to say it and it was too easy.
Much laughter.
“Oh, man,” Bud sighed. “Eden Harwood is so pretty. If I haven’t been married for a thousand years... but she’s kind of a wild card. Enigmatic women scare me a little. Beware of the enigmatic woman, Gabe.”
“Oh,brother, Bud,” Gabe said. Albeit kindly.
He wanted to say,She’s not enigmatic. She’s self-protective. Iknowher. I canfeelher.
The sort of woo-woo stuff that would almost definitely get him laughed at and might not even be true. The combination of infatuation and lust could do the same kinds of things to a man’s brain as too much tequila did. That much he knew.
But he was older and wiser now. And he’d never felt this way before.
That alone was enough to try to see this thing through.
“You got this, Gabe,” Mike said, and thumped him on the back heartily. As if he was part of a SEAL team going in to rescue hostages. “You don’t need to worry about a plan.”
Gabe treated him to a faint scowl, albeit one without rancor. These scoundrels still treated him with a certain tenderness around the subject of women. Which was touching and kind of funny, but also irritating because it only reminded him ofwhythey treated him with a certain tenderness about women. He was tougher than that, for Christ’s sake. Tough as a catcher’s mitt, as nails, tough as the outside of the Joe DiMaggio baseball his dad had given him just before he died eons ago and which lived on his desk now, tough as Bud’s ugly old toenail they all saw when he wore flip-flops.
“Oh, I have a plan,” Gabe said, and gave the screw one final, satisfying, decisive twist with the wrench, as he was locking it all into place even now. “I always have a plan.”
The plan was, in fact, already underway.
He’d launched it at 6:59 p.m. at Devil’s Leap yesterday.
Eden was shocked to find that she had to actually squeeze her way into the Misty Cat for the Chamber of Commerce mixer, but maybe she shouldn’t have been. The previous winter had worked over everyone’s nerves but good, what with Jamboree Street flooding into the music store, a giant redwood taking out Casey Carson’s chimney during a storm (she claimed skillful Feng Shui saved it from smashing the roof), and the short-lived threat of a nearby dam bursting and washing away neighboring towns.
Getting accidentally-on-purpose a little drunk at the mixer and calling it networking was the only logical response to all of that.
Eden always found the mixer worth her while—it was a great way to learn who was getting married or buried or having a Quinceañera or a Bat Mitzvah or was in the doghouse with a spouse, all traditional flower occasions—even if she had to pay Danny twenty bucks to hang with Annelise for a couple of hours while she socialized and did her homework about all of this stuff.
She maneuvered in past Dion Gomez from Allegro Music who was deep in avid conversation with Greta from the New Age Store, and waved to her dad, who was selling beer to the folks who just couldn’t bear to drink the wine. He was also managing the sound system, currently playing The Baby Owls, the band that had inadvertently given Glory Greenleaf a great big leg up in her career.
She arrived at the food table, helped herself to wine and one of the brownies stacked on the plate, and paused to admire a striking flyer taped to the wall above it—the paper divided into two rectangles, one black, one blue, the wordsBlack & Bluein white across the middle. Beneath that was a date about a month from now. How dramatic. The Misty Cat hosted acoustic sets for a lot of rising bands on their way through from Oregon to the Bay Area.
At one time she would have known all of them. This band rang no bells at all. And that was life as a single mom.
Wine in one hand, brownie in the other, she turned around.
Her heart did a backflip so hard she nearly coughed. (“Hearts don’tbackflip, Eden.”—Dr. Jude Harwood.)
Gabe Caldera was in the room.
Not only that, but he was wearing asuit and tie.
The impact was absurdly devastating. Maybe not better than a stripped-to-the-waist Gabe, but equivalently interesting.
He’d been principal at Hellcat Canyon Elementary for a few years, but she had literally never seen him at one of these events before.
She watched him weave through the crowd, smiling, lifting a hand in greeting at intervals—practically everyone had a kid or a grandkid in Hellcat Canyon Elementary—shaking hands, receiving and administering chummy back pats.
He was turning his head this way, scanning the place. Possibly looking, like all the reasonable adults present, for the wine.
Possibly looking for her.