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  Now on my third huge glass of wine, I was letting loose. The amount of alcohol that went in my mouth equaled the rage that seeped out of my pores. Underneath my cool exterior I was angry at everything. Tonight I picked on doctors. Doctors were assholes. I shouted into the room, “Assholes.” Lucky lifted her head up from her paws and looked at me, her head sideways. Admonished by the dog, my diatribe lost steam.

  Nothing like the present to end my nightly slurp. All the things that had made me stressed enough to drink heavily were over. The kids were grown and newly responsible, and the husband was dead. And here I was: an old, fat, alcoholic failure. And why couldn’t I remember more than four of the things I was at any one time? I sighed, and listened to the sound of the ticking clock echoing in the empty room: stu-pid stu-pid stu-pid. The house was so quiet. Oh right. The fifth thing. All alone. I was an old, fat, alcoholic, all alone, fail-ure. I knocked back the glass.

  And then my anger kicked up again. Some nights were like that, a roller coaster of emotions that usually ended with me passing out. “Not anymore,” I yelled as I thwacked what was now my fourth huge glass of wine down beside me on the telephone table. Changes were in order. The drinking simply had to go. I was not going to be a seventy-year-old grandmother completely fit because I had to carry a heavy case of wine from the liquor store to my car every week. No, I would be a fit grandmother because I did yoga and rode a bike.

  I roared right out loud at the mental picture of me in leotards. Would my cellulite show through the thin material, puckering the stretched polyester? What would Trevor say about that? The same Trevor who thought women shouldn’t even wear jeans to the supermarket. Who’d he think I was? June fucking Cleaver? Nonetheless, I had my pride and there would be no downward dog for me! And speaking of dog, the sound of Lucky scratching again at the back door drew me back into the reality of my kitchen, away from hearing Trevor’s relentless voice telling me to change my clothes, we were going out to a nice place, didn’t I know? And, I looked a right sight wearing that unflattering white blouse, or those cheap ugly earrings, or those old lady shoes. I exhaled as I got up and let Lucky out, leaving the door ajar in case he was in one of his in-and-out moods.

  I strode as well as four enormous glasses of wine allowed me to stride into the living room and turned on my computer. Would there be any responses to my newly posted profile? The weekend had been a dead loss, but maybe now that it was Monday, my luck had changed. I signed in and waited for the screen of the MeetYourMatch.com dating site to open. YES! Look at that, three, count ’em, three replies in my inbox! My heart leapt as I stared at the messages in blue type.

  The hope that I would not be all alone forever surged through my soul like a runaway train. Maybe I wouldn’t be lonely for much longer! Maybe I would be kissing some adorable guy, or maybe doing even more than that. My heart somersaulted. No, I wouldn’t think about that, not yet. Maybe he would think I was … I was … what? I thought for a minute. The cat’s meow! That’s what. I giggled. Maybe I would be going out for dinner, or lunch, or at least coffee, and then? I boggled at the thought of going to bed with someone other than Trevor. Someone who thought I was the cat’s meow.

  I clicked on the first message and looked at the photo, head angled on one side and mouth pursed. “Handsome Starfish” turned out to be not so handsome, with his far too black, obviously dyed, greasy hair slicked back off his high forehead, exposing a somewhat rat-like face with a pointed snout and disappearing chin. Not to be daunted by looks alone, I read on. Oh, for heaven’s sake. He knew how to give me what I wanted? He was romantic and liked riding on his motorcycle after a day at work? He drank? He smoked, but only lightly? He loved listening to jazz full volume on his Bose speakers?

  Wait! No, no, no. I stopped reading. NO Jazz. I couldn’t do jazz. I hated jazz with a passion. To me the sound of a jazz ensemble was right up there with fingernails on a blackboard. I pushed my thumb towards the screen and made a buzzing sound. “Handsome Starfish” was eliminated from the running.

  I opened the number two message in my inbox. The next fella, “Dancing on the Beach,” looked okay, I thought. But where do they get these names? I glanced at his picture and thought with his wavy hair and strong chin, maybe he’d be a nice guy. I scanned his profile. Non-religious. Okay. University degree. Good. Divorced three years ago. Okay. Liked water sports. Good. Played board games. Good. Hmm, he seemed all right. He didn’t smoke. Very good. Social drinker. Well, I could live with that. No major health issues. I gazed at his pictures with renewed interest.

  “Dancing on the Beach” was a fairly good looking guy with all the right qualities, at least on paper. I studied his smiling face. Nice smile, too. As I stared at it I saw there was something not quite right. Oh my God, his teeth! Yellow, crooked, chipped. I could never kiss that. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Never in a million years. Up went my thumb. Off went my buzzer mouth. “Dancing on the Beach” was history.

  It would seem that, to me, Robin MacFarland, jazz and bad teeth were deal breakers. I nodded to myself. You learn something every day.

  So that left one last option. I clicked on the final message to open it and was surprised to see no picture. What? Did “Mr. Sail Away” have something to hide? I read his profile anyway. He was almost perfect! Tallish at six two, which would be a bit tall for my height of five two, and athletic, which would match what I was going to be, after I lost fifty or so pounds from running. He was spiritual but had no religious affiliation, which was fitting with my somewhat spotty attendance as a Unitarian, and my Buddhist practice of chanting most days. He was an engineer with a graduate degree and he was in the business world. I wasn’t too sure about that, thinking he might be an arrogant fat cat. But cats hated water and he’d called himself “Mr. Sail Away.” So maybe he was a different sort of business person. And maybe I was the cat’s meow. Nothing wrong with my logic, I giggled, sipping my wine.

  I read on. Hmm, he worked with sustainable energy. There, see? My instincts were right. A business person with a conscience. A rare bird. A non-drinker! That was great. No temptation for me. Under “Health” he had put that he was allergic to wasp stings. I considered how this would impact my life and decided that it wouldn’t. Besides, my profile said I was allergic to almonds. Everybody these days seemed to have an allergy. No biggie. In the personality section he ticked off the box for slow and steady. I liked slow and steady. Especially when doing you know what.

  Why not, I thought, why the hell not? He’d read my profile and seemed interested in me, interested enough to send me a sweet icon, a tiny vase of flowers, so why not answer him back? I noticed that he was online right that second. Sweat prickled between my shoulder blades. Go for it, Robin. You don’t want to be all alone for the rest of your life, do you?

  I threw back the last of my fourth huge glass of wine and picked out a funny smiley face to attach to my return email. Should I write something? Or should I let him make the first move at actual communication. With a drunken laugh I said “Who gives a shit” into the air and typed, Thanks for the connection. Let’s get together on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. at the Starbucks at Avenue and Bloor. I pressed send with fanfare.

  “Mr. Sail Away” answered me back in seconds. He must have been hovering over his computer, fingers poised. Love to meet you. Starbucks at Avenue and Bloor, Thursday at 8:30 pm it is!

  So, I had a date! That was fast. Holy crap. But what did he look like? I had better check out his teeth. I felt a bit like a vet, wanting to examine a horse’s mouth for signs of decay, but clearly it was important to me. So, I wrote back: What do you look like? I pressed send.

  A picture flew back into my inbox immediately. A handsome face with a square chin came into focus. I looked closer and gasped. I knew this guy. Oh my God, no. It was Todd Radcliffe! The ceremony guy! That fantastically handsome man. The same fella I had just finished decimating today in the article I wrote on Everwave, the one that would go on the front page because
Cindy had agreed to help me by putting her name on it, too. The guy who might have recognized me from my photo as the journalist who had asked questions at the conference.

  I was so addled by this information overload that I went into a sort of drunken auto-pilot mode. My mind was whirring and I seemed to lose the ability to focus my eyes. Conflicting emotions churned in my breast and all reasoning flew out the window. It was as if I had taken leave of my senses. But one thing I knew; I couldn’t get out of it now. It would be too embarrassing. And then my fingers, almost as if they didn’t belong to me, typed Great and then pressed send.

  I stared at the blank screen as the reality of what had happened sank in. Clearly I would have to stop drinking.

  Clearly I would have to get my name off that article before it came out. I’d text Cindy first thing in the morning.

  The smell of burnt food drifted into the living room where I was seated at my computer. Well, I didn’t want dinner now anyway. I was already stuffed with grapes.

  6.

  THE TRAFFIC TUESDAY MORNING WAS TERRIBLE with smelly garbage trucks making my usually zippy trip down to the waterfront from my house in Cabbagetown a stop-and-go trial. And I was in a rush. Shirley had left a grim message on my phone while I was in the shower: See me as soon as you get in. I’m here until ten. When the traffic was at a standstill I looked around for cops, and seeing none, dialed Cindy. Boy, did I have to talk to her! My name had to come off that article, and how. When she picked up I switched to speaker-phone just as I was passing the cop shop on Church. No hand-held device ticket for me! I could hear honks and the sound of traffic through the speakers. She was on her way to work.

  She didn’t even say hello and launched immediately into one of her tirades. “Your chain-smoking, hard-drinking, newspaper editor of the Home and Garden section, has left a message on my cell phone. Don’t you think it’s odd that your editor is calling me?”

  Odd, maybe it was odd, but why would that piss Cindy off so much? Sometimes she overreacted.

  “Yeah, a bit, but she called me, too.” What was going on?

  “Listen to this.”

  Shirley’s thrumming diesel engine voice filled my car. I could hear that Cindy, for the first time in her life, was being summoned to Shirley’s legendary smoky office. Her disembodied gravelly voice commanded, “Come in and see me as soon as you get in. Right away.”

  I had received almost the exact same message.

  “Me too,” I said. “The same message. I wonder what’s up.”

  “I’ve never been to her office. Is it as bad as they say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The smoking.”

  Oh, that’s what had bugged her. “Take your oxygen mask,”

  Even though there had been a workplace smoking ban for over a decade, Shirley persisted in dragging on butt after butt, imagining she was fooling everyone by blowing her smoke up into the air vent and periodically spraying her office with a deodorizer. Air fresheners were plugged in to every available socket, vying for space with the tangled cords of computers and landlines. Her office smelled like a second-hand clothing store.

  Shirley Payne, my editor, was having an affair with Douglas Ascot, Cindy’s editor. So why did my boss want to see us both? There must be some connection.

  I played the message for a third time as I wheeled into a parking spot in the underground lot below the Daily Express. Yes, I was to come immediately, as soon as I got in, Shirley had ruled. She would be in the office until late tonight.

  Given it was not quite nine in the morning, that was a fairly large window of opportunity. No excuses. I sat in my car for a minute and sent a text to Cindy, telling her I had to have my name off the Everwave article. I quickly pressed send, took a deep breath, and braved the underground lot.

  As I shut my car door I saw Cindy clattering on four-inch heels up the ramp from the next floor down. She was at least six feet tall in bare feet and now she looked like an enormous strawberry lollipop with her bright red hair on top of skinny legs. “Hi,” she shouted breathlessly. “Wait up!”

  When she got closer to me she said, “Did you catch that story about the mayor? Holy shit. Is that going to be big or what?”

  “You going to be covering it?” I couldn’t bring myself to mention the text. It was all too awful.

  “Just the intro until the senior political people can clear their desks. What’s this sudden attention from Shirl-Pearl, the Pain? I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong. Maybe Doug whined to Shirley about something or another during pillow talk and she’s going to tell me what it was, sort of behind the scenes, so that I can correct the situation and save her bacon.”

  But if that were the case, then why were we both being summoned? I doubted it had anything to do with pillow talk.

  Cindy had doubts too, but for different reasons. She snorted, “That will never happen. Because then I will owe Shirley big time and of course, Shirley, in due course, will ask for a favour of some kind in return. I will have to hop to it and not tell her to fuck off, like I would anyone else. No, my hands will be tied and I won’t be able to speak my mind, because of Doug being my boss.”

  “You’re really running with this, aren’t you? It’s probably nothing,” I lied. I knew it was something.

  Cindy laughed, “Not really. I’m worried because we both have to go see her. Maybe I’ve committed a political sin by having your byline on the article about Everwave. Surely you are allowed to foray out of your regular section, if only briefly. I mean, are you forever doomed to Home and Garden?”

  We had reached the elevator and she was still jabbering away. Once again Cindy was churned up. “Look, I will do anything to help you get beyond your belief that you are a failure. If Shirley blocks your attempt to feel good about yourself, after all you’ve been through, I will fight it. You’ve been a good friend through my divorce and dammit, your name is going to stay on that article.”

  “Thanks for the support, Cindy. I do appreciate it.” Geezus. What was I going to do?

  “You deserve it, after all; the main ideas are yours. Plus you researched and wrote it, for heaven’s sake. They will have to kill the article before I’ll agree to taking your name off it.”

  I groaned inwardly. This was such a mess. When Cindy was in this hard-ass mood, I always backed down. I hated confrontation.

  As we got closer to Shirley’s office, I watched Cindy clench her teeth and throw her purse in front of her body. She was girding her loins for a battle. I was grateful my friend was so protective of me, but something inside me was a little irritated. I could fight my own battles, couldn’t I? Yes, I was the new me.

  By the time we had reached Shirley’s office, Cindy was ferocious and rapped on the door with harsh little taps. I could already smell the cigarette smoke and knew that would make Cindy even more livid. It was an abuse of power, and my political friend didn’t tolerate that. Deep from behind the steel and glass door came Shirley’s characteristic low throaty rumble, “Come in.”

  I opened the door to a plume of smoke and Cindy made quite a dramatic show of coughing. She then waved the door back and forth several times, in a mocking effort to air the room out. Shirley fake-laughed ha, ha, ha and aimed the air deodorizer right in Cindy’s direction and sprayed, implying she was the source of the pollution. As if a squirt of freshener could possibly dispel Cindy’s fury, not to mention having absolutely no effect on the cloud of smoke that hung over Shirley’s files, her phone, her desk, her coat rack.

  I was now seeing Shirley’s office through fresh eyes, as if for the first time. I saw the cluttered desk, burdened with tilting piles of files and scattered with empty packets of chewing gum, an effort of Shirley’s to control her habit. I noticed that the family photo was lying face down today, its gilt frame peeking out from under a buff-coloured file folder. This did not bode well for us. Everyone knew that if
Shirl-Pearl had had a tussle with any member of her family, especially one of her teenage sons, down the photograph would be slammed, her mood crashing with it.

  Cynthia placed her body directly in front of Shirley’s desk, arms rigidly crossed and head held in what I’m sure she’d hoped was a jaunty, confident angle. Her foot gave a few tentative taps, but I saw second thoughts ripple over her face and watched her decide that toe tapping was over the top. Too cartoonesque. She wanted to convey a “don’t fuck with this chick” stance. Toe tapping was out.

  Me? I tried to shrink into the background. This was not going to be pretty. What was about to go down was one of the main reasons why I had stuck with flowers all my working life. They were conflict free.

  Shirley briefly looked up from what she was writing by hand at her desk and, after slowly running her eyes first over me drooped in the corner against a wall, and then over Cindy’s stiff body, said, “At ease, Corpulant.” She then continued writing as if we weren’t there.

  Cynthia caught my eye and sniffed.

  I supposed it was funny. I supposed it could have been more degrading; Shirley could have called her “Corpuscle.” Maybe this attempt at humour meant we weren’t in that much trouble at all, maybe it was something else entirely, like wanting us to organize the office party, or bringing in a platter of my famous carrot muffins. Or, maybe Shirley needed to know where Cindy got her fabulous hair done. Without a doubt Shirley needed this information what with that bale of hay perched on top of her head, straw poking out everywhere.

  We waited while Shirley kept her head down, focusing on her page. I hated it when people did that. Come in, sure, but don’t expect me to acknowledge your existence, not until I’m done. It was so controlling. As if in response to these thoughts, Shirley held her hand up with her thumb tucked in and her fingers spread, four more minutes was the message. She loved this game. I could see that Cindy was seething. Another abuse of power and frankly, downright rude.