“I’m offended.”
“Sorry. You’re right. You’re the most evolved man I know. Wanna talk about my menstrual cycle?”
The light mercifully turned green and I simultaneously hit the gas and turned the volume back up.
We pulled into the illustrious cul de sac my father and Lisa had moved into when I’d left for college. Marley was a whirlwind of movement as she grabbed her things and bounded towards the front door, shouting over her shoulder, “Don’t think you’ve knocked me off the scent. Something is up with you and I’m going to find out!”
I groaned and slid from the car, shutting the door and locking it before following along, meeting my dad’s grinning face as he waited for me on the threshold of the house.
“Already got her hooks in you?”
“She’s relentless.”
“She on to something?”
“Is she ever not?”
He laughed and wrapped an arm around my shoulder as we walked to the kitchen together, the smell of something baking filling the air and making my mouth water.
“Marley’s birthday cake,” my dad explained. “As well as two different kinds of cookies.”
“How are you still so fit?” I asked, eyeing my dad’s physique admirably.
“See that pool outside?” my dad asked with a laugh. “And the home gym? And the bikes and kayaks?”
Lisa, a successful attorney-turned-baker, owned a high-end bakery in Boulder. When she wasn’t there, she was often trying out new recipes at home. I’d received overnighted boxes of treats at least twice a month for years, which I’d had to stop when I’d married Nadia because, “I cannot have that homemade, country-bumpkin, sugar-filled junk in my home”.
As soon as she moved out, the boxes had resumed.
Marley’s birthday cakes had never been made by anyone but her mom. Beautiful creations that you almost felt bad about digging into. Until you got a taste of them. And then all the guilt would quietly slip away as you began unabashedly shoving them into your face.
A timer rang out and Lisa appeared, flour in her dark hair, waving a yellow, ladybug-decorated potholder at us, before turning off the timer and opening the oven.
The scent of chocolate wafted over.
“Help yourself,” she said, nodding toward a plate of peanut butter sandwich cookies. “There’s strawberry frosting inside.”
“How have you done all this in the time I was gone?” I asked, snagging a cookie and taking a bite.
I’d only left two hours ago, after flying in this morning and then going to peruse a couple of bookstores before surprising my sister at school. In that time, Lisa had somehow baked two layers of cake, two different kinds of cookies, and there was a bowl of frosting sitting in wait on the end of the counter.
She shrugged, her freckled nose crinkling as she smiled.
It was interesting to me that my father ended up with Lisa after being with my mother, who’d had a similar look, temperament and style, although she couldn’t bake to save her life. Somehow, whenever she’d tried to make cookies, they’d spread so thin we’d always joked she’d made pancakes instead.
Why does one pick someone so similar when it clearly didn’t work out the first time?
Or the second… or the third…?
It was this very thing that scared me about getting into a relationship again. I had chosen, or had been chosen, by women who found me charming and interesting in the beginning, and then tried to change me, got angry when I didn’t adhere to some strange set of rules they thought I should have, and wound up deciding I was actually boring. Which they had no problem telling me. Often quite brutally.
What did that say about me, that I ended up with people like this? And could I break the cycle? How could I know if the next woman I ended up with would be any different?
I didn’t. And that’s why I’d determined I was going to most likely end up alone, writing increasingly depressing stories about humans trying to escape their lives in one way or another.
“So,” my dad said. “I was thinking, since the big party is Saturday, the four of us would go out to dinner tonight to celebrate Marley? Somewhere nicer than the usual burger joint?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
