“Quit tormenting me,” Melanie says to Teddy with temper. She gets up, runs to the bathroom, and slams the door behind her. The juice has cleansed her at least four times since 9:00 A.M.
He blinks at me like his feelings are hurt. “What’d I do?”
“You’ve been making her feel like her hair is inferior. She wears her ponytail extension every day now. It’s hard on the scalp.” I’m unsettled as I go over his comment. “Alpaca ranch, huh? Have you heard something?”
Teddy continues sorting through his hair with his head tipped back. Up to the ceiling, he replies, “No, but even if I did, I couldn’t tell you. Board members and shares and whatever. Don’t wanna get sued by my own dad, that’d be awkward.” He yawns. There’s those back molars I’ve been missing. “Rose would be first up in the witness box.”
“A surveyor was here.”
He winces. “That’s never a good sign. Stop looking at me with those huge brown eyes. I know what you want from me, and I can’t do it.”
Melanie comes out with her ponytail redone. “Teddy, what conditioner do you use?”
“I rinse it in rainwater with a capful of vodka.”
“Really,” Mel marvels, leaning on her desk with eyes like cartoon spirals. “Does it have to be cold water?”
“Very cold. Like ice.” He drops his hands out of his hair. “You got a Tangle Teezer in your bag, Mel? ’Course you do, you’re a girl. Come brush me.”
“Can I practice a basket braid on you?” (He nods.) She approaches him unsteadily and puts both her hands into his hair, making his eyes droop into slits. My eyes probably are, too. She’s up to her wrists in that gleaming black stuff. I love her, but I want to scream at her.
And he’s watching for my reaction and I’ve got to hold it together.
“It’s got to be a wig. It’s too perfect.” Melanie tugs around on his hairline until he whimpers. “Okay, that does it. Ruthie’s bones told me that it’s going to rain. I’m going to put a bucket under the garage’s downpipe.”
I save her some effort. “He’s kidding about that. Please eat this before you faint.” I pass her a banana. It makes her relinquish his hair and I hiss out the suffocating green steam building in my lungs. His nostrils flare and I swear he scents it. His mouth quirks. I want to stick his head in a bucket of dirty mop water.
“My cleanse,” Melanie says, a lamb bleat. “My toxins.” We watch her violently skin the fruit and chomp it in half. Through her disgusting mouthful, she says something to him like, “Before you ask, no, I won’t tell you what Ruthie’s dating profile will say.”
“I’ll swipe through all the girls in the world until I find her.”
“You would,” she says darkly after a hard swallow.
“Sounds like he already has.” Wow, I really said that. I turn back to my computer and open an email from the maintenance contractor while Teddy just stares at me. “So it looks like they’re sending an electrician next Thursday.” I reply to the email, diarize it, all under his bright-hot hazel eyes.
Mel contributes the following insight: “Banana good.”
“Why are you on the juice?” Teddy asks her.
“I met a guy for a date down at the Thunderdome. He said I was bigger than he expected.” This isn’t what she told me about the juice cleanse. But it’s okay. Teddy has a way about him that draws the truth out.
I’m instantly angry. “Excuse me, he said what?”
“My profile says I’m half Japanese, and he made an assumption.” She smooths her hands down her front. “I should be smaller.”
Teddy’s equally affronted. “You’re planning on changing yourself based on some dude’s imagination? You’re smarter than that, Mel.”
“I just haven’t been having much luck lately,” she says defensively. “I’m sorry, Ruthie, but it’s a jungle out there.”
“He saved you a lot of time, revealing himself as a jerk up front. Don’t change anything about yourself. You can have my yogurt.” The spoon I hold out is snatched by a desperate hand.
Melanie throws the banana skin at the bin and it sticks to the wall above. “Thanks, Mom and Dad, you’re the best.” She goes to the fridge. Silence fills the office, apart from rhythmic scraping, swallowing sounds, and mmm. When she’s back at her desk, she makes a decision. “I’ll read out Ruthie’s profile, but only because I want a decent guy’s perspective.”
That’s troubling for him. “Find someone else then.”
“Twenty-five-year-old cute-as-a-button brunette— ”
I hold up my hand. “Objection.”
“Overruled,” Presiding Judge Theodore Prescott says. “So far very accurate.”
Bananas mixed with yogurt are a hell of a drug. Melanie is getting some color back in her cheeks. “Just let me say the whole thing. No interrupting. Twenty-five-year-old cute-as-a-button brunette seeks old-fashioned soul mate to set her world on fire. No casual hookups, weirdos, little dicks, broke dudes, or fugs.”
I am aghast. “Melanie. Take that last bit off.”
“I loaned her some of my dating profile,” she says to Teddy with a grin. “It’s too good.”
“Well, it rules me out.” He hauls himself to his feet when he hears a scooter. “I’m sure you’ll debate that in my absence.”
“Broke dude,” we both say in unison to his departing back. “He’s also a weirdo,” Melanie adds. I cut her off with a head-shake before she can ponder the rest.
“I am feeling so much better, but I need some air,” Melanie says when Teddy walks in holding the delivered takeout. “Why don’t I walk these up to the girls. I want to talk to Aggie about careers. Did you know she was a fancy lawyer?” She detangles the bags out of his hand and walks off up the hill.
The light leaves the room. This is traditionally the time that makes me feel like life is over, but it’s just beginning, because he is here. The zesty lemon flecks in his eyes are the only bright things.
This is it. Another moment I’ll look back on one day with either a headshake or a mental high five. I had a gorgeous, single next-door neighbor, a risky one for sure, but I am a champion at guarding my feelings. I have been training for this big, tattooed mistake all my life. If I ask him to just give me the last few weeks he has left, what would he say?
Before I can take this chance, he lifts his phone and says, “Here, I’ll take your dating profile photo. Oh, man,” he says in despair to the screen.
“Show me.”
He holds the screen up. For a dating profile photo, it’s not the best. I’m at a desk with glasses around my neck and yes, brown and cream is not my best palette, but I look like someone who has integrity, clear skin with a flush, a light in her eyes, and a fond softness to her mouth.
“I look like a pretty little dweeb. At least it’s truthful advertising.” My joke doesn’t make him smile. He sinks down lower, staring at the screen, polishing a smudge off the glass with his thumb. His chest rises and falls on a deep breath.
I’m going to take a page out of his book. If I say it light and joking, he won’t know that it’s serious. “I’m worried I won’t remember how to kiss. I haven’t kissed anyone since Adam. My prom night feels like a long time ago now.”