MAKE ME A MATCH (Running Wild) (10 page)

Hatched, matched, and dispatched

Simon and Ian met Eric at the door on Friday morning. It was barely seven, and they were still in pajamas. Simon’s were blue with Spiderman, Ian’s yellow with Power Rangers. They each took one of Eric’s hands, jumping around with excitement.

“Uncle Eric, guess what?”

Eric waited for them to tell him, trying to figure out how to answer.

Simon didn’t wait for a response. “Auntie Sophie’s taking us to Science World. There’s a big mouth that you climb in and slide down into a stomach and then you get to come right out the bum part. Just like poop.”

The two of them laughed uproariously.

Simon added, “And Mommy said a policeman came here. He said my daddy died. We won’t be seeing him anymore. You don’t see people anymore when they get dead.”

“Yeah, your mom told me. I’m sorry, guys.” He herded them down the hall and into Simon’s bedroom. He’d spent half the night awake, wondering how to talk to the boys about this. It was a traumatic moment in their young lives. He’d decided that honesty was best, although he wasn’t sure what to do when they asked about heaven. It was tough to imagine Jimmy in anything resembling heaven.

He sat down on the bed and they leaned on his knees and looked up at him, all innocent eyes and auburn curls.

“How do you guys feel about that, about your daddy dying?”

“Okay.” Simon shrugged. “He didn’t live here with us, not for a long time. And Mommy can get a new one. Jenna’s mommy got her a new daddy.”

“Get a new one,” Ian echoed, nodding sagely and swinging on Eric’s leg.

“Yeah, well, that does happen, guys, people do marry again.” Usually not before the body’s buried, though. “After a while, that might be the case, but not now. Not for a while.”

Simon was already off in another direction.

“Did he had ’surance, Uncle Eric? My friend Kyle’s daddy got ’surance, and if he dies Kyle gets to have lots of money, maybe even a hundred dollars. Kyle’s gonna buy a new Game Boy.”

Eric felt a little dizzy. How had this discussion gotten so far off-track?

“I don’t know about insurance, Simon. I don’t think so. But it’s not good to just think of money when somebody dies.”

“Why not? Our teacher said dead people can’t use money anymore, so other people gets to use it for them.”

The kid’s teacher obviously was the down-to- earth sort. “Yeah, well, that’s true, but it usually makes us sad when people die, so we feel sad more than wondering about their money.”

“Are you sad ’cause my daddy died?”

He’d talked his way straight into that one. Lucky there was a time and place for lies. “Yeah, I am.”

“Now we don’t have to watch for him through the pee hole, right?”

“No more pee hole,” Ian agreed emphatically, and both of them burst into helpless giggles.

God. Eric rubbed a hand over his eyes. His heart felt like a bucket of rocks, lying in his chest. How come he’d never talked to the boys before about Jimmy? He should have tried; these two had picked up some really strange ideas. He’d try again, but right now he couldn’t take anymore of this, not on an empty stomach.

“Did you guys have breakfast yet?”

“Nope, Mommy made us wait for you. She’s making blueberry pancakes. And we got maple syrup, and real butter.”

“Let’s get you washed and into your clothes, so we can eat.”

“Auntie Anna’s here. She and Uncle Bruno brought us maple syrup. Auntie Sophie’s coming, too. Last time she brought us ice-cream bars. Did you bring us anything, Uncle Eric?”

The best of intentions, guys
. I was going to explain about your daddy dying and feeling sad and how life goes on. I was going to sugarcoat it all for you. How could I forget about not being able to fool kids ?

“I didn’t bring anything, but tomorrow I’m gonna take you guys to the park so I can show you how to throw a football.”

“We don’t got a football.”

“We’ll go buy one.”

Screams of joy.

Hello, football, good-bye Jimmy Nicols.

Monday morning, Tessa decided it was time to say a firm, kind but definite good-bye to Alistair Farnsworth, the dot-com millionaire she’d been out with Friday and Saturday evenings. It was either that or die young from terminal boredom, in spite of Clara’s enthusiasm.

“He’s wealthy, he’s attractive. He’s got to be smart to have made all that money,” Clara had enthused. “He seems sincere, committed to finding a mate. Give him an honest try, Tess. What have you got to lose?”

At the moment, her right ear. Tessa balanced the phone on her shoulder and sorted through female profiles, searching for someone to sacrifice to Eric as she listened to Alistair bemoan the fact that one of his company shares had dropped from four figures to something behind a decimal point. They’d been on this news flash for over seven minutes before he switched gears, if you could call it that.

“Byron Burbank, the North American expert on blue chip investing is in town tomorrow, Tessa. He’s giving a lecture at the Hyatt. I picked up tickets for us. It’ll be very enlightening. You’ll get good advice about where you could invest that divorce settlement you mentioned. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

“Thanks, Alistair, but I can’t make it.”

What was wrong with the man’s head—besides thinning hair—thinking she’d want to go with him to listen to some poor unfortunate soul named Byron Burbank go on about the market’s ups and downs? She might be able to pretend a smidgen of interest if Alistair was sexy or if she had a single investment to track, but she didn’t and he wasn’t.

She had her wonderful house, which she owned outright, which still seemed like a miracle, an ’89 white Beretta with red upholstery, and a paycheck that almost covered her monthly expenses, as long as she didn’t buy lingerie. And her divorce settlement was perfectly safe stashed in the bank in a savings account, collecting minute interest. Despite Alistair’s advice, she wasn’t about to risk it on stocks. By her own standards, she was well off.

Grandma Blin always said that money was only worth the enjoyment a person got out of it, and by that criterion, Alistair Farnsworth was a pauper.

It was a desert out there. Where had all the heroes gone?

“Aren’t you concerned about your retirement, Tessa?”

No. Her ovaries, yes. Retirement, no.

“I’m sorry, Alistair, but I’m busy tomorrow evening.” She was busy. She had to cut her toenails and clear away rampant bits of hair that insisted on growing in visible places. Did she want to see him ever again in this lifetime? The simple answer to that was an unqualified no. It was time to cut him loose. She sighed, and wondered how to tell him. They got so upset when you dumped them, begging and promising.

“You know, Tessa,” he was droning in her ear, “you’re a wonderful woman and some man is going to be very fortunate to spend his life with you, but the chemistry just doesn’t seem right between us.”

Tessa almost dropped the phone. He was using one of Clara’s best lines on her, before she’d had a chance to remember it herself. The little weasel, how dare he dump her before she had a chance to dump him! And he didn’t even have the decency to wait five minutes and pretend to be heartbroken before whining, “Do you think you could arrange a date with someone else for me for the weekend? After all, I’m a member of Synchronicity. The understanding was that you people would find me a suitable companion.”

Tessa crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out at the telephone receiver, giving him the finger with her left hand as she exerted superhuman effort and kept her voice perfectly polite.

“Absolutely, Alistair, I’ll make certain we locate someone compatible right away. I’ll get back to you.” She waited until Alistair hung up to smash the telephone down.
The miserable creep
. He could at least have been gentlemanly enough to let her let him go. She snatched up the files, determined to find a perfectly despicable unattractive gold digger who’d take Mr. Dot-Com dipstick on the ride he deserved. It shouldn’t be hard, there were a surprising number of members who fitted that profile exactly.

But there were also messages to return, prospective clients to charm, and this nagging need to find someone for Eric. And today was the tenth business day Clara had been absent. It seemed strange that Clara didn’t care anymore if her clients dated or not. Each time Tessa phoned her, she seemed to be lying down with a cold cloth on her head. Why didn’t she just cut up all Boorish Bernard’s best suits, toss him and the scraps out on the driveway, and get on with her life?

She flipped through the female possibilities and paused at Margaret Westwall, a perfectly despicable, unattractive gold digger.
Yes, Alistair
.

Margaret was a widow, and going by the snapshot on the file, she was okay if you liked the bulldog look, square jaw, lots of mouth, big teeth, droopy eyes. She didn’t seem to drool, which was definitely a plus. Clara’s notes indicated that Margaret was interested in wealthy men who knew about the stock market. Probably didn’t want them to lose money before she had a chance to get her paws on it, Tessa concluded. Margaret wanted to travel, and she considered herself a good conversationalist. The good conversation bit was iffy with Alistair, but the stock market thing was positive.

Tessa called the number on her file. The female voice on the answering machine was starchy and abrupt. Well, maybe the market wasn’t doing too well the day she recorded it, Tessa reasoned. Margaret would be a perfect match for Alistair. Although she didn’t have firsthand knowledge, she just knew that his penis reacted in direct relation to the Dow.

With hardly a twinge of guilt, Tessa left a glowing and flattering description of him on Margaret’s machine, a lot of which centered around his bank account, adding, “If you think this fascinating gentleman would interest you, Margaret, please call Synchronicity and leave a message, and we’ll give him your number.”

There. She blew out a breath and fished in her purse for a cigarette before she remembered she’d flushed them all down the toilet this morning. It was the third pack she’d wasted that way. Alistair would have pointed out that she could have used the money to invest in a cigarette company.

Now she had to find some unsuspecting fellow female to offer as a tidbit to Eric, the catch and release king. Out of the mouths of innocent children came truths she might otherwise never have known. He was good at deception. She’d even been starting to trust him before Simon summed up his track record. Hell, she was even liking him a lot.

Poring over the files, she finally located a photo of Sylvia Delecroix.

Lithe blonde, good teeth and hair, smart business suit. Banking specialist, whatever that was. Clara had noted with her usual optimism that Sylvia was intelligent, attractive and sophisticated.

Tessa dialed the number on Sylvia’s file, and in a sugary voice that almost gave her diabetes, she extolled Eric’s virtues. To her eternal shame, she made him sound like a cross between George Clooney and Superman. She didn’t add that he thought women were disposable—what was wrong with her head, what else would a garbage man think? —Or that he wasn’t about to use his precious sperm to produce progeny. Sylvia wouldn’t care about that anyway, she didn’t sound the motherly type. She might have something to say about Eric’s ugly old van, though. They’d deal with that when the time came.

When Tessa hung up, she symbolically washed her hands with scented soap in the bathroom and then sucked hard on a toothpick, squinting her eyes at the imaginary smoke she blew out in invisible puffs.

All she had to do now was wait for a call from poor Sylvia, and with the bio she’d created for Eric, that call was inevitable. Then Tessa would call Eric with the good news. She made a bet with herself that she’d hear from Sylvia before noon, God help the sad woman. This must be what it felt like to slaughter lambs, and what was lung cancer in the face of that? She was just about to lock the office and race out for a new pack of cigarettes when the door opened and Clara walked in.

Tessa immediately gave Clara a guilty hug and sent up a prayer of thanks for delaying the cigarette run. “Clara, honey, how are you?”

She looked like hell. The short white hair, usually softly waved and puffy, hadn’t been washed or set. Her eyeliner was on crooked, her mascara smudged. She gave Tessa a wan smile.

“Not my best, dollink.”

No kidding. And if Clara were anyone else, Tessa would have found her boring, because every sentence in the next half hour began or ended with Bernard. Bernard this, Bernard that, Bernard the next thing until Tessa wanted to gag.

“Bernard’s moving out of the house,” Clara confided while Tessa was trying to give her a rundown on which clients were seeing which. “He’s starting divorce proceedings, he’s asking for a ridiculous amount of money from me.”

“That’s bullsh—” Tessa caught herself. “That’s a load of crap. What does your lawyer say?” Tessa had relied totally on her lawyer, Sheldon Winesapp, during her own divorce.

“What men think they can get and what they do get are two very different things, Clara,” she quoted. “The law does protect women more now than it did years ago.”