“Did he tell you about him and Rafael, though?”
Mateo was my best friend in middle and high school. We’d grown up together, our families close. Rafael had been his boyfriend since eleventh grade, and the three of us were inseparable those last few years before I left.
“No. What happened?” I said slowly.
Pop’s eyebrows shot up. “They’re engaged, Maxy.”
I shook my head with a grin. “Goddamn. That’s great news. No, he must have… forgotten to call me. You’ve got all the hot gossip now.”
“People tell me things. I don’t know,” he said. His cheeks were red, and he was dodging my eye contact again. “I, uh… wanted to ask you a question since you’re home for a bit. It’s a little personal.”
“Yeah, sure.” I leaned back, draped one arm across the vinyl. He took out the smart phone I’d bought him a few years ago, even though he swore up and down he’d never, ever, ever use it. “Can you help me with something on the internet?”
I took the phone, gave him a questioning look. “That depends. What is it?”
“It’s a dating thing.” His voice was a little shaky. “A thing for dating. Women. Or whoever you want to date. But I’m interested in a woman that I met on there.”
I spun the phone between my fingers and stared at my dad, slack jawed. My parents had gotten a divorce eighteen years ago, and it wasn’t like he was a monk. But his love life was as private as anything else. “You’re kidding me. You met a woman using your fucking phone?”
Pop bit into his pickle and shrugged like I was being dramatic. “How do you meet women?”
“We’re not talking about me here,” I said. It was too late though. Fiona surged back into my thoughts. She was the first woman in recent memory who hadn’t been swayed by my charm. She’d reduced me to a nervous guy with sweaty palms. And what did that even mean?
“What do you need help with exactly?” I asked, snatching a fry from his plate.
He snatched one of my fries—and his phone back. He opened his screen onto a profile. The website was called Over 60 Match. “A buddy at The Red Room told me about it. It’s for older folks only looking for something serious.”
“Ah, Pop,” I said, leaning across the table. “You’re being for real right now.”
“Of course, I am.” He looked embarrassed, but also pissed, and seconds away from reverting back to just grunting at me. I recognized the signs of my dad about to emotionally shut down. So I took the phone and looked at the screen he was trying to show me.
The profile page was clean with bright colors. The profile was for a woman named Angela Robinson who declared herself to be 67, an avid city gardener, obsessed with her grandchildren, and searching for “later-in-life love.”
“Is this the woman that you like?” I asked.
He reached over and tapped the far-right screen to show me her picture. Angela was a Black woman with short silver hair and a friendly smile that had me smiling in response. She wore a yellow jacket and was holding up flowers, and everything about the picture said hope.
I looked up at my surly father who’d probably never held a flower in his goddamn life. “She’s beautiful, Pop.”
“And nice,” he said. “She’s real nice.”
“Are you two talking?”
He shrugged. “Over the website, yeah. Started this week. She reached out to me. But I don’t…” He crunched some ice angrily. “I don’t know what to say to her. How to talk in a way that would make a woman like me. Not like you. You’ve always been popular. Friends, girlfriends, all your teachers used to tell me about it.”
Honey-tongued. That’s what a woman had called me once in my early twenties—and it wasn’t necessarily for my oral sex expertise (although I was well-known for that as well). She said it had more to do with my ability to grin my way out of any difficult situation. I took it as a compliment.
She told me she’d meant it as an insult.
“Where do you think I get this abundance of charm, huh?” I nudged his arm.
But he only growled a little and crunched more ice, refusing to answer. I knew why. Because he and I both knew I’d been lying about which parent it came from.
I directed my attention back to the screen, tapping around until I landed on Pop’s page and profile picture. “Jesus Christ, you look like a serial killer in this.”
“Stop fucking around.”
“I’m not,” I said. I held up the phone and showed him the little picture. It was a close-up of mostly his nose and eyes, and he wasn’t smiling in it. “For the love of god, let me take a picture of you, okay? Then Angela will at least see your actual face.”
Pop went back to grumbling while I scrolled through his profile, which wasn’t half bad. Under the section titled “Loves” he had written, “Music. And my son.”
“You love me and stuff?” I said, going for humor since Pop hated feelings.
“I guess.”
Seven years didn’t seem like a long time to me, but did it seem like a long time to him? Pop and me, we’d been a team. The second I showed him my first motorcycle, he’d clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Now you’ll never come back.”
At the time, I thought he was happy. I’d been obsessed with motorcycles and bike culture for years. Would order magazines and spend hours on websites, dreaming of shops like Rusty’s, deciding I’d become a mechanic. It was obvious, the path I’d choose. Maybe he was accepting the inevitable.
Mom left. I was bound to leave too.
I poked around at the messaging part of the profile. “Do you like talking to Angela using this program?”
“Nah, not really.”
“What if I helped you send Angela emails? That’s a little better than these messages. And if she likes that, you could even meet in person.”
“If she doesn’t delete my emails and change her name,” he said.
“That’s always a risk.” I grinned. “You gotta shoot your shot, old man. It’s the only way.”
He fiddled with his napkin, rolling it into strips, then rolling those strips into balls.
“What is it?” I prodded.
He looked at me with real concern. I was surprised. “I haven’t dated anyone seriously since the divorce. But I don’t want to spend however many years I have left alone. I worry that you’ll be like me sometimes.”
“Like you how?” I asked, startled.
“Alone,” he said.
“Aw, I’m not alone.” I shrugged. “I make friends every town I land in. And it’s never hard for me to pick up women.”
“Yeah, but…” He fiddled some more. “Is that your forever?”
“My what?”
“Your forever. On the road, no family, friends you leave behind. A different woman every night.” He shrugged again.
“You make it sound bleak,” I said, trying to laugh. “It’s fun.”
He held up a finger, and a server brought us the check. He tossed some bills on the table, then rapped his knuckles against the tabletop. “We should go.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay. But you know I’m happy, right?” I touched his arm, stilling his motions.