2
SADIE
“There you are!”I exclaimed when I saw my pink, plastic cupcake keychain sitting atop the frozen peas.
After a ten-minute search, I’d found my keys in, drumroll, the freezer. You know...where keys go. I’d opened it to grab an ice pack for the key-search-injury I’d sustained—which was a fairly significant lump on my shin after I’d lost my balance trying to look on the other side of the coffee table and hit it on the corner—and voilà there they were. The last place I’d ever look.
I heard my dad’s voice saying, “There’s a reason you always find things in the last place you look, why would you keep searching if you’ve already found them?”
He had a point, but this truly was the last place I’d ever look. I must’ve dropped them there when I grabbed my mint chocolate chip ice cream last night after Eeyore’s walk.
I’d love to say that this was an isolated incident, but the truth was this was the third time in the past week that I’d lost my keys.
My bestie Charli had gifted me an alarm system to locate them.
She’d handed me the device and said, “If—no make that when—you lose your keys all you have to do is press a button on the FOB and it sends out a signal causing your keys to beep making it easy to find them.”
Simple, right? In theory, it was great. In practice, not so much. I’d lost the FOB within forty-eight hours of receiving it.
But I had them now.
I clutched the frozen keys in my hand and a quick glance at the digital clock on the microwave told me that there was no time to ice my swollen shin. It read 4:05. I was already five minutes late. Story of my life.
As I rushed to the bedroom to put on my shoes, I quickly discovered they were not where I’d thought I’d left them. I glanced under my bed, in the tiny bathroom that was no bigger than a closet, and back in the front room. My apartment was less than five hundred square feet. There were only so many places they could be.
As I continued my shoe search, I wondered how many hours I had wasted in my life trying to locate things I’d lost? Hundreds? Thousands?
It had to be in the thousands.
My first-grade teacher used to say that I’d lose my head if it wasn’t attached to my body.
If Mrs. Winslow knew that I’d grown up to run a successful, by modest standards, business, I was sure she’d be shocked. To be fair, it had taken me until I was in my mid-thirties to make it happen. And it surprised me, on a daily basis, that I’d been able to pull it off.
So far… that is.
Sweet Temptations had only been open for six months. But, knock on wood, business had been going so well that soon I’d be able to bring on a second employee. Part time, but still. My inaugural employee, Yana, had been with me since the inception of Sweet Temptations two years ago when I was operating out of my tiny studio apartment in the Castro District.
I’d met her the day I’d moved into the building after a fairly brutal breakup. I’d never forget that day. It was overcast and gloomy, which matched my mood to a T. While I was waiting for my new landlord to show up with my keys, I sat on the stoop and cried. She came shuffling down the street, her head wrapped in a scarf that was tied beneath her chin. I scooted to the side to make sure that she had enough room to go up the steps. She only stepped up two before she stopped. Her wrinkled hand tilted my chin up and she stared into my eyes and asked me what was wrong. I sniffed and told her that I’d just broken up with my boyfriend.
She tsked at me as she shook her head. “Lapushka, any man who makes you cry, doesn’t deserve your tears.”
I’d wanted to explain that it wasn’t Sam that I was crying over, it was the idea of Sam. I’d built him, and my relationship with him, into something it wasn’t. Just like I had with Chris. Julian. Frankie. Leo. Craig. Harry. Pete. Roman. Marc. James. And Aaron. All of whom I collectively referred to as the Dirty Dozen.
The twelve men that I’d given my heart, my soul, my everything to. I was a serial monogamist who always ended up with at the very least a broken heart, at worst, an emptied-out bank account and/or apartment.
It had taken me three and a half decades to realize my six-part pattern:
Meet a man.
Fall madly in love.
Create an image of who he is.
Romanticize about our future.
Find out he’s actually a fill-in-the-horrible-adjective-blank.
Get heartbroken when my romantic fantasies turn out to be just that, fantasies.
