“So are you,”he replied.
She pushed the reply arrow but didn’t start writing a message. A new email from Cary arrived before she could:
“You should date, Shiloh. You should at least think about dating as something beyond a theoretical possibility.”
“My mom dated. It sucked.”
“You’re not your mom,”Cary replied. “Or mine. Weren’t you just telling me that Junie will have to adapt?”
“I feel like you’ve switched sides, Cary.”
“I just don’t like thinking of you alone. You deserve more.”
Forty-Nine
“So he thinks you should traumatize your daughter with a stepfather... He just doesn’t want tobethat guy.”
Tom and Shiloh were eating hors d’oeuvres left over from a fundraiser held in the theater the night before.
“I don’t know what he wants.” Shiloh shoved a stuffed mushroom in her mouth. “But ‘you should date’is very clearly not ‘we should date.’”
“It is not,” Tom agreed. He was eating a cucumber sandwich. The bread looked soggy. “I had a stepdad. He was fine. He paid for my braces.”
“I’myearsaway from a stepdad scenario,” Shiloh said. “I don’t even have any leads.”
Tom glanced over to where Kate from the costume shop was getting a plate of cheese and crackers. “That’s not exactly true.”
Shiloh went to Shakespeare on the Green with Kate. It was fine. It wasMacbeth. They both knew some of the actors. They collaborated on a picnic dinner.
Kate was short, with short blond hair and an elfin face. She was very cute, and she made a lot of her own clothes. She offered to tailor Shiloh’s jacket so the shoulders would fit better.
She kissed Shiloh sometime during the fourth act, while Macbeth was visiting the witches and the air was thick with artificial fog. Shiloh managed to be still. Kate laid a small, rough hand on her cheek...
Shiloh liked it. She liked it a lot. The kiss confirmed a few things she had long suspected about herself. And she could imagine doing it again—she could imagine doing more.
But as much as she liked it... Shiloh didn’t think that she likedKate.Not enough, anyway. She liked kissing Kate more than she liked sitting next to her. Shiloh gently declined another date.
Tom still declared the night a success.
“This is good,” he said the next day, while he and Shiloh were clearing chairs out of a classroom. “This is great, actually. You just doubled the size of your dating pool.”
“Yeah, but I’m not interested inanyone,” she said. “So that’s like two times zero.”
Tom thought everyone would be better off in a relationship. He was sickeningly in love with Daniel (understandable) and a firm believer in monogamy and sharing mortgages—especially for straight people who could reap the full tax benefit.
When Shiloh had pointed out that she already shared a mortgage, with her mother, Tom said that wasn’t a sustainable financial strategy. (It was very easy to talk about financial strategy when your partner made furniture-superstore money and managed your IRA.)
“I’m telling you,” Tom said now, “this is a positive development—there are more datable women in the world than datable men.”
“Says the guy who’s never dated any.”
Tom made a face. “I datedtonsof girls in high school.”
Fifty
Shiloh, thank you for the fudge. It’s delicious. I’m not going to share it with anyone.
And thank you for the photo—that duck costume is genius.
