Bang! Bang! Bang!
The nice thing about waking up early, aside from having more time in the day and being able to work before the flood of emails rolled in starting at nine, was that my family didn’t bother me.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Mark!” Carter hollered. His raggedy little dog yipped under the crack of the door.
I was doing T’ai chi in my living room.
“I am going to ignore him,” I told myself. “He does not exist. I am a block of ice, a piece of wood carved in the desert sand.”
“Let me in. I need to use the bathroom!”
“What the—” I wrenched open the door. “You have a whole apartment to yourself. Why are you even down here?”
“We came to see you!” Grant was behind Carter, flipping through his phone. His half brother Wes was beside him. He gave me a weak smile. I didn’t return it.
“I tried to tell them to leave you alone,” Wes told me.
“Clearly not hard enough,” I grumbled.
Wes followed Grant and my brother inside. Carter immediately went to my fridge.
“Do you have any food from the Gray Dove Bakery?”
“No.”
“But it’s in your office building.”
“Do you have some reason for being here?” I asked. “I have to finish my workout then go to the office.”
“This,” Carter announced, “is an intervention.”
“No.”
“We just feel like,” Wes said gamely, “that, well, all of us have a girlfriend.”
“Dana is single,” I interjected. “Why don’t you go harass her?”
Grant shuddered. “She’ll do something mean like put whipped cream in your shoe.”
“Besides, you are the one with the tragic backstory,” Carter added, peeling one of the hardboiled eggs in my fridge.
“I booked you a slot in a speed-dating event,” Wes said, handing me a flyer. “You might be able to meet someone. Even if you don’t find the love of your life, maybe you can at least make friends.”
“You work too much,” Grant told me as Carter dropped little pieces of eggshell on my floor.
“I don’t need friends, and I certainly don’t need a girlfriend.”
“Why don’t you just try,” Wes said, tone cautious.
“We aren’t leaving until you say yes,” Carter told me, slicing off a piece of cheese and shoving it into his mouth.
“Okay,” I lied. “I’ll go.”
Grant narrowed his eyes at me. “That seemed a little too easy.”
“I’ll be there,” I told them.More lying.Then I herded them to the door.
