“That’s the style. A bare midriff is sexy! You can always cover it up with your dupatta.” She draped the long, sheer scarf around me.
I eyed my reflection. “Can we alter it? Lengthen the top a little?”
She assumed I was too modest to show a little skin, but really I just wanted to be able to wear my Spanx underneath. Nothing stops you from going after that third chicken samosa than being trussed up in a sausage-like encasing.
“Can I get you something?” asked one of the waiters coming out of the kitchen.
“Just helping myself to some water.” I smiled as I grabbed a glass and reached for the pitcher.
Okay. Let’s freeze this moment for a second.
This moment right here, where I’m reaching for the pitcher.
Because this is the moment where everything starts unraveling.
Are you ready?
Okay. Unfreeze.
My fingers grasped the pitcher the exact moment someone else went for it. Which happens. Someone always goes for the same doughnut I want at work. No biggie.
Whatwasa biggie—what made my jaw drop and what warranted this freeze-frame, was the weird little nubbin sticking out of this person’s thumb. A dwarf thumb, complete with a miniature nail, like a deviated knob growing off a ginger root.
Polydactyly.
An extra digit in the hand or foot.
More specifically, pre-axial polydactyly.
When that extra digit is a thumb.
Chances of running into a person with this condition: 1 in 1,000. Or was it 1 in 10,000? I should know. I’d googled it enough times, but the only numbers running through my mind at that moment were 1 and 2.
1: Holy
2: Shit
And so I stood there, thumberstruck…er…thunderstruck. It’s not every day you get to see an extra thumb in the wild. Trust me. I’d side-eyed many hands—on the bus, at the grocery store, on park benches and, I’m ashamed to say, in the play area at McDonald’s (that’s mostly dads chasing after their kids, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and who knows—single dad, double thumbs?).
Somewhere between theHolyand theShit, my brain was running a background check.
Male hand: check
Age-appropriate: check
Wedding-ring free: check
DING, DING, DING!
No. Wait. Un-check. Wedding ring would be on the other hand.
Dare I look up? I hadn’t thought about anything beyond this point, but now that my unicorn was here, I wanted him to be attractive too. To hell with not looking a gift horse in the mouth, because if there was the slightest possibility of me kissing that mouth, then I sure as hell wanted to know what it looked like.
I looked up.
My stomach flipped.
Not just a regular flip but one of those Olympic dive sequences: two-and-a-half somersaults followed by two-and-a-half twists in two-and-a-half seconds. Then my stomach disappeared somewhere in the vicinity of my ovaries, which held up scorecards for the miraculous sequence of human DNA before me.
