Love's Little Instruction Book (3 page)

She held out her hand in greeting. “Denise Johnson. I’m the new deejay.”

“I know. I’m — um — associate sales manager here at the station.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Isn’t your shift until eight?”

She pushed a strand of straight black hair behind one ear with a perfectly manicured nail. “Yeah, but I was dying for a cold drink, so I stuck on ‘Hey Jude’ and set off in search of a soda machine. I was just asking Theresa here if she knew where I could find one. I’ve got — ” she glanced at her watch, “ — four minutes and twenty-eight seconds to find the machine, buy the soda, and get back to the booth.” She smiled down at him.

Dave nodded. “Out this door, go right, then take the second left. It’s in a little nook on the left.”

She repeated the directions to herself and then nodded. “Thanks.” She turned and left the room.

“She’s pretty,” Theresa commented.

“Yeah, T-bird, she sure is.”

Dave was showing Theresa the posters when Denise reappeared in the doorway. “I’ve got two minutes and twenty seven seconds,” she announced. “Do you like chocolate, Theresa? I bought an extra bar.”

Theresa stared at the chocolate with open-mouthed desire. Dave knew that Theresa had a real sweet tooth and wondered why she hesitated. “Tee?” he prompted after a long moment. “You should answer the lady.”

Theresa folded her arms in stubborn resolve. “My mother says that I shouldn’t take candy from strangers,” she announced. “I just met you. You’re a stranger.”

Denise lowered the hand that held out the chocolate. “Your mother is a very smart lady,” she said.

Theresa’s eyes tracked the candy as it fell to Denise’s side, all of the regret and longing she felt easily apparent in her chubby face. Denise’s smile faded and she looked uncomfortable, turning her eyes to Dave in silent apology.

“Hey, Denise,” Dave intervened. “I saw Mr. Lund introduce you at the staff meeting, so you’re not a stranger to me. Can I have the candy bar?”

She cast him a look of surprise and — it seemed to him — dismay. “Okay,” she said with a tad of wariness in her voice as she handed him the brightly wrapped rectangle. Theresa followed the exchange with hungry eyes.

“Theresa,” Dave said, turning to her. “Would you like a candy bar? I’m not a stranger.”

Theresa’s eyes lit up. “I’d like that!” she told him, reaching for the bar. “Thanks, pal!”

Dave smiled at Theresa as she tore off the wrapper. Glancing up, he saw that Denise was smiling, too.

A relaxed, full wattage, uninhibited smile. The ads were wrong, he thought inanely. Prettiest didn’t cut it. She was beyond pretty. When she smiled — he wasn’t sure there was a word specific enough to capture that image.

Denise glanced at her watch. “Whoops! Gotta go. It was great meeting you both. I’ll see you around the station, Theresa.” She gave Dave a grateful grin. “Thanks, Dave.”

Dave watched as Denise left. It was probably his imagination, but he room actually seemed a few watts duller without Denise in it, as if she had taken some of the electricity with her when she left.

“I like her,” Theresa confided around a mouth full of chocolate.

“Me, too,” Dave admitted.

Denise Johnson filled Dave’s thoughts all the rest of the evening, through the night, and into the next day. His short-term goal, he decided as he drove to work the next morning, was to find out as much as he could about her before approaching her, so that he could woo her as effectively as possible.

Dave knew that if he wanted information, there was only one person he needed to talk to: the station’s receptionist, a talkative woman from Brooklyn with the unlikely name of Presley Rosenberg.

Presley had been at the station for three years. To be perfectly honest, Dave found her a little intimidating, with her loud New York accent, her funky sense of style, and an alarming tendency to let her mouth start running before her brain was fully engaged. She was opinionated, assertive, and knew everybody else’s business. If anyone could tell him about Denise Johnson, it was Presley.

Dave stopped into a Mister Donut drive-through on his way into work and bought a dozen doughnuts and a dozen muffins. If he was going to pump Presley for information, then he wanted to get her in a good mood first, and food, especially baked goods, was a good way to get on anybody’s good side. He actually enjoyed cooking and baking, but because it hadn’t occurred to him to ply Presley with pastries until he was already driving on the way to work, he didn’t have time to fix something homemade.

Presley was seated at her desk as usual. She was wearing a sort of a white peasant blouse, gathered at the neckline, and had small gray dolphins dangling from her earlobes. She eyed him as he approached the desk as she talked on the phone, then her eyes lit on the parcels he was carrying and she waved him over. She finished her conversation, hung up the phone, and looked at him speculatively. “You packing any extra doughnuts there, Dave?”

“For you? Sure. Doughnuts and muffins. What’s your pleasure?”

“What you got?”

“Jelly, honey dipped, coconut, plain — ”

“Oooh, coconut,” she announced.

He opened the box that held the doughnuts and set it down on her desk, letting Presley help herself. “So how’s it going?” he asked her casually.

“Same old shit,” she replied, pulling the coconut doughnut from the box. “Vacation season is about to start. When are you taking off?”

“Sometime at the end of July. There’s a family reunion for my Mom’s side up in Maine the last weekend. You?”

“Been ordered back to Brooklyn,” she told him. “I’ll go for the first week, but I think I’m going to just bum around here for the second. Maybe do some day trips, hang out on a beach. I don’t know.”

“Things must be a lot more settled since that new girl started — the
P.M.
commute lady?”

“Denise.” she said. “Have you met her yet? She’s really a trip.”

“A trip, how?” he asked, not certain that Presley’s classification of the new employee was a positive thing.

“She’s just so amazing. Did you know that she used to be married to a guy whose father and uncle are listed in the
Fortune
500?” she asked, referring to the magazine’s annual listing of the 500 wealthiest people in the world.

“You’re kidding,” he asked, feeling a bit stunned. Why would someone like that be working in a Boston radio station?

Presley nodded, her dolphins set into frantic motion once again as her head bobbed up and down. “Seriously. And get this — her mother is Judy Johnson.”

Based on the way she said it, he thought it was a name that he was supposed to know, but didn’t. He racked his brains but came up short. “Who?”

“You are such a guy,” she scolded him. “Judy Johnson, the romance writer. She lives in Cambridge, did you know that? Denise moved back in with her after the divorce.”

“The romance writer got a divorce? That’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“Not her mother, stupid. Denise. Denise got divorced. Apparently that no good louse of a husband started cheating on her, so she left him and moved back in with her mother.”

“What about alimony?” he asked curiously. “Was there some kind of pre-nup or something? Couldn’t she afford her own place?”

“She left the money behind when she left him. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? I’d have wanted to take the louse for every last cent, but Denise says that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him or his money after that — she just wanted her independence back. So here she is.”

“Wow … ”

“Yeah, isn’t that something? I hope she rocks this town. She has integrity, you know? Not many people have that nowadays.”

“Well, having a mother who must be a pretty successful writer — ”

“
New York Times
bestseller,” Presley provided helpfully.

“She must come from a family that has money of its own.”

Presley shrugged. “My impression is that they didn’t have it when she was growing up. Her Mom’s only been writing for about ten years or so, I think. And she said that her father was a produce manager at a grocery store. He died just about the time she went to college. I think she was probably some kind of genius or something. She said that she met her ex while she was studying Art History at the Sorbonne in Paris. A grocer’s kid from Cambridge doesn’t get to go to the Sorbonne unless she’s really got something upstairs, you know? Hard to believe that I actually know someone like this, but she’s a really neat person. We went to see James Taylor together down at the waterfront, and then she took me to a French restaurant down by Copley Plaza. She ordered in
French
, wine and everything and ended up getting this unbelievable meat and pastry thing that wasn’t even on the menu. She is just
so
cool … ”

• • •

Dave spent much of the day processing what Presley had told him. Part of him was delighted. She was everything he’d expected and more — pretty, smart, independent, and best of all, unattached. But a bigger part of him was now feeling a bit intimidated. What would a woman be looking for in a man after she had already had a multi-millionaire? He wasn’t, as a rule, intimidated by successful women, and he took it as a given that a primetime radio deejay would probably make more than an associate sales manager at the same station, but the daughter of a bestselling writer and the ex-wife of a financial tycoon? Damn, but she wasn’t going to be easily impressed.

To his credit, he thought he was what would probably be considered a nice guy. He had his circle of friends, made it to church about half the time, still held doors open for ladies, and was generally a likeable sort. He’d had a couple of long term relationships in his time which had ended amicably, generally when the other partner had relocated due to graduation or changes in her job situation. When he wanted to date, he generally did, so he wasn’t totally repulsive. But how did one go about attracting a supermodel quality woman when one was a Jack Black type of guy?

The more he thought about it, the more hopeless it seemed. There was liable to be stiff competition for this woman’s attentions. Not only was she spectacular in her own right, but she had a whole publicity campaign heralding just how beautiful she was. Damn. An offer of dinner and a movie wasn’t likely to cut it with a woman who could order in French in a French restaurant and get something that wasn’t even on the menu. Damn.

By ten o’clock that night, he had convinced himself that he didn’t have anything that a woman would want. He stood in his briefs in front of the mirror and critiqued himself savagely. He was no longer that firm young body that he had been ten years before when he’d left college. He was maybe fifty pounds overweight — not enough for major love handles or extra chins, but definitely thick in the middle. White threads shot through his curls, giving them a sort of salt and pepper coloring rather than the dark brown that he’d had when he was younger. It was a curse of being Irish, that. His mother had been coloring her hair by her mid-thirties, just about the age he was now. And while he wasn’t exactly a wrinkled old man yet, he definitely had lines creasing the corners of his eyes.

He sighed. Thirty-four years old and already past his prime.

So how did a guy win a girl who was younger, smarter, taller, richer, and better looking than he was?

He didn’t. That was the hell of it.

He needed an objective opinion, but he knew that he couldn’t ask Presley or Diane or his mom or one of his woman friends — they all liked him, and would lie to spare his feelings if they thought he was making a mistake. He needed advice from someone who would pull no punches. Luckily, he knew just who to ask for advice — Kirk and Ghoulie, his two best friends.

Kirk James and Jimmy “Ghoulie” Drumgool weren’t exactly relationship advice columnists. Kirk was too busy having what he thought was a good time to ever want to have a real relationship with a woman. And sure, Ghoulie was married to Shelby, but he’d admitted that marriage had been Shelby’s idea, and that he was just too dazed by the fact that she wanted him to protest until it was too late. Still, the guys had been Dave’s best buddies forever, and if he couldn’t talk about Denise with them, who
could
he talk to?

Saturday afternoons were a habit with the three of them. Hell, after all these years, they were practically a ritual. They were at Ghoulie’s place this week. Shelby was a flight attendant and Dave couldn’t remember where she was this weekend. Probably someplace swell.

Ghoulie had his head stuck in the fridge excavating for cold beers while Kirk rummaged in the drawer for the bottle opener. Dave leaned his arms against the kitchen counter, watching them both and trying to figure out how to work his non-existent love life into the conversation.

“So where’s Shel this weekend?” Kirk asked Ghoulie, coming up with the bottle opener.

“London, Paris, Rome, then home,” he replied, emerging from the fridge with two Sam Adams beers tucked under his arm and a third in his other hand. “I think she’s probably in Paris today. At least, that’s where she’s spending the night.” He handed beers to Dave and Kirk and then went to the cabinet to fetch a bag of nacho chips.

Dave waited until everyone took a sip of his beer and then decided to take advantage of the lull to make his opening. “I met a girl.”

Kirk’s head perked up. “Is she pretty?” he demanded.

Dave drew in a deep breath. “Gorgeous. We’re talking super model quality here, only without the bony look.”

“Where’d you meet her?” Ghoulie asked, helping himself to a handful of chips.

“Down at the station. She’s the new
P.M.
commute deejay.”

“Oh, I heard her,” Kirk interjected. “What’s her name? Denise Johnson?”

“Yeah, that’s her. I was working late last Thursday and she stopped at my office to talk to Theresa.”

Kirk looked blank. Ghoulie looked thoughtful for a minute, then remembered. “The retarded cleaning lady?”

“That’s the one.”

“Yeah, I remember her from one of the times I brought you a pizza up at the station. So what happened?”