A choice.Mychoice. I smile at that, suddenly emotional.
“That means a lot to me, Min. Thank you.” I blink to keep thetears from falling. “And you know that me being here and starting over or whatever—it’s not because I regret anything. I don’t regret having you or raising you or choosing motherhood over any career I thought I’d have.” A career that never felt like the right fit anyway... Advertising may have been the plan, but it was clear that was John’s world, not mine.
“Duh. Because I’m awesome.”
I smile. “Yeah, you really are.”
She leans in toward the camera, her face filling my screen. “But, Mom, you launched me. Your job here is done. When I get back, we can go shopping and hang out like friends... but for now, you can be a little selfish, you know? You’ve never done a selfish thing in your whole life. You’ve earned the right.”
“So basically you’re telling me to get a life?”
She makes a show of snapping her jaw shut and looking back and forth, as if to say,I’m not saying a word, even though she’s said plenty.
“Okay, I have to go get ready,” she says.
“Wait,” I say, doing a quick calculation. If it’s a little after 5:00 p.m. here, then... “Isn’t it after eleven there?”
“Yes, Granny, but this is when things are happening.”
I grimace, suddenly uncomfortable knowing that my daughter is going to be out late in a foreign country with people I don’t know. It’s so much easier to launch a child when you’re still a little in the dark.
“Before you go—what I was going to say before, about dating—”
“I thought we’d moved off that subject,” I say,wishingwe could move off that subject.
“I just thought you should know that”—she inhales a deep breath—“I created a dating profile for you. I’ll send you all the details so you can log in! Love you, bye!”
“Amelia Joy!”
The power of the middle name has no effect. She’s hung up.
Seconds later, a link to an app, along with login details, shows up in my text messages.
A dating app? Really?
I stare at Minnie’s text and scrunch my lips together. Why am I moderately curious about this? Is it because I’ve never even opened a dating app? Because this is how so many people meet their partners these days? Or because deep down, there’s a part of me that wonders if maybe one day I might actually fall in love again?
My finger hovers over the link, like I’m about to pull the trigger on something that can’t be undone.
And before I can talk myself out of it, I tap it.
A website pops up, prompting me to download the app: Matched.
And that’s when my sense of adventure turns cold. I’ll have to add this to my list later—but right now? It feels a little too scary.
I click my phone off and tuck it into my bag, then look up at the neighborhood in front of me. It rained recently and is unseasonably warm. The kind of weather that makes sun-starved Midwesterners rush to be outdoors, probably in shorts, saying things like, “Yeah, the rain’s a lot, but boy, the grass sure needed it. Ope, lemme scoot right past ya.”
I turn the corner and find myself walking straight toward a group of young women, probably in their late twenties. There are four of them, dressed like they just got off work, and my knee-jerk assumption is that they have everything all figured out.
They’re a visual representation ofconfidence, and for some reason, mine shrinks at the sight of them.
They’re young. They’ve got years stretching out in front of them, and they can doanythingwith those years.
I’ll never be able to go back to the days when the world seemed to be mine for the taking. The years I spent in college, mapping out my life plan, and the years of watching every aspect of that plan break off in a detour are still too fresh for me to ignore.
But more than that—these women have no idea yet how cruel life can be.
And I don’t have that luxury. The luxury ofnot knowing.
