Including me being convinced that the constant bickering I did with Grandma over the fact that I wanted to attend public school during my senior year may have contributed to her heart attack. Rationally, I knew this wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop me from reliving our fights inside my head as some kind of personal punishment. That was another reason I needed the job at the hotel. Living in a lonely house of grief for the last few months had begun to feel like a prison I’d never escape.
Latitude affects your attitude.
Scrolling on my laptop, I thought about the ad Daniel had mentioned, which he’d thought I’d seen. Was it still up? If so, how could I find it? My curiosity got the better of me, so I began combing through local blogs and news sites. Nothing online inThe Stranger, Seattle’s local alt-weekly city paper, and theSeattle Timesclassifieds was a bust. I spent almost an hour looking, until sleep was trying to pull me under. Stifling a yawn, I was about to give up and close my laptop when I stumbled upon a local forum for Missed Connections.
The forum contained hundreds of listings over the last week—how many people crossed paths in the city? I was dumbfounded. Most of them were strangers, spotted on public transportation. A few were just begging for kinky hookups. One woman fell for some guy she saw through a restaurant window—just the back of his head, but she knew it was true love.
Then I spotted a listing that sent my slumberous pulse racing:
Flower girl in Moonlight Diner.
Tuesday night we talked in a booth by the window. You had killer eyes and were reading a detective novel. I showed you some card tricks. We left together in the rain, but you disappeared. Can we talk? I can’t sleep, thinking about you and wondering what went wrong.
I reread it several times before closing my laptop.
And for the remainder of the morning, I lay awake, staring at the ceiling while my thoughts ran in circles, racing the beats of my rebellious heart.
“Fellas, coincidence and fate figure largely in our lives.”
—Special Agent Dale Cooper,Twin Peaks(1990)
5
Aunt Mona had taken me to Pike Place Market since I was old enough to stroll the tiled waterfront arcade. It was only a few blocks away from the Moonlight Diner, and even now, as we approached the iconic Public Market Center clock in the late afternoon before my third hotel shift, my mind still associated it with pleasure-filled Saturdays: watching fishmongers throw halibut for the delight of tourists; pressing my nose against the window of Beecher’s as cheese was made; rubbing the snout of Rachel, the bronze pig at the market’s entrance, for good luck. The market’s acres of shops spread over multiple floors were a never-ending labyrinth of discoveries waiting to be found.
But this afternoon, I was tagging along while she picked up a check from a stall that sold herPeople of Seattleprints—quirky drawings of quirky residents.
I’d worked another shift at the hotel last night. A Daniel-free shift, as he wasn’t scheduled. To be honest, after reading his Missed Connections ad, I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed that I didn’t have to see him. Or what, if anything, I would say when I eventually did. But I thought about it. A lot.
After I’d woken up today, I called into work to check the schedule and found that a staff meeting was being held at seven thirty p.m. to discuss the ongoing sewage cleanup in the hotel garage, so I decided to take the ferry over a little early with Aunt Mona to waste time and perhaps get some advice.
“Okay, ’kay, ’kay. You’re telling me that the boy who wrote thisunbelievablyromantic Missed Connections ad is your coworker? Rewind what you just told me,” Aunt Mona said, handing me back my phone. Today she was wearing her Oscar Wilde “dandy” outfit: green velvet jacket with tails, tweed waistcoat, oversize neck scarf with twinkling pin, and heeled spats. A tiny top hat was tipped rakishly over one brow, and her wig beneath it might not have been out of place in Victorian England if it weren’t a color that was somewhere between lime and shamrock. As she strolled, she tapped the tip of a sparkly cane on the floor as if she were Willy Wonka touring his own chocolate factory.
“Please don’t make me say it again,” I begged as we passed a movie-worthy gray view of Puget Sound through the dingy restaurant window where Tom Hanks talked to Rob Reiner inSleepless in Seattle.
Aunt Mona blinked eyes trimmed in enormous fake green lashes and dramatic eye shadow. “You’re telling me that this is the guy you did the four-leg frolic with in the back seat of a car—”
“Shh!”
“He works with you at the hotel? Holy smoke, Birdie, that’s...”
“A nightmare?”
“More like destiny,” she said, grinning at me like a deranged psychopath. The green lipstick didn’t help.
“Don’t start with that,” I said, shoving my phone in my purse. “Daniel already said something about fate.”
“Daniel,” she says, shivering dramatically with both shoulders, causing the LED-lit boutonniere pinned to her velvet jacket to blink. “Sounds so sophisticated. I need to see a photo.”
“Keep on needing. I don’t have one.”
“I’m a visual person,mi corazón. I cannot give you my blessing until I see how hot he is.”
“I’m not asking for your blessing. I’m asking what I should do. He wants to talk about what we did.”
“The banging? The horizontal mambo? A little pickle-me, tickle-me?”
“Please stop,” I begged, glancing around to make sure no one heard her.
