“Work is fun for me. I've never been happier than since we opened the center. I don't need other things in my life.” She said it honestly, and he could see she meant it, which worried him a little. Something was wrong with this picture, or at least the one she presented. Other than work, much was missing.
“No men, no babies, no ticking clock telling you to get married? That's unusual at your age.” He knew she was thirty-four, and had gone to Princeton and Columbia, but he knew nothing else about her, even after dinner. All they had talked about was the center and the foundation. His work and hers. Their respective missions.
“Nope. No men. No babies. No biological clock. I threw mine away several years ago. I've been happy ever since.”
“What does that mean?” he pressed her a little, but she didn't seem to mind it. He sensed that whatever she didn't want to answer, she wouldn't.
“The kids at the center are my children.” She seemed comfortable as she said it.
“You say that now, but maybe one day you'll regret it. Women aren't lucky that way. They have decisions to make at a certain age. A man can always make a fool of himself and have a family when he's sixty or seventy or eighty.”
“Maybe I'll adopt when I'm eighty.” She smiled at him, and for the first time he smelled tragedy in there somewhere. He knew women well, and something bad had happened to this one. He didn't know why or how he knew it, but he suddenly sensed it. She was too pat in her answers, too firm in her decisions. No one was that sure of anything in life, unless heartbreak got them there. He had been there himself.
“I don't buy it, Carole,” he said cautiously. He didn't want to scare her, or make her back off completely. “You're a woman who loves children. And there has to be a man in your life somewhere.” After listening to her all evening, she didn't seem gay to him. Nothing she had said to him suggested it, although he could be wrong, he knew, and had been once or twice. But she didn't seem gay to him. Just hidden.
“Nope. No man,” she said simply. “No time. No interest. Been there, done that. There hasn't been anyone in my life in four years.” A year before she'd opened the center, as he figured it. He wondered if some heartbreak in her life had turned her in another direction, to heal her own wounds as well as others'.
“That's a long time at your age,” he said gently, and she smiled at him.
“You keep talking about my age as though I'm twenty. I'm not that young. I'm thirty-four. That seems pretty old to me.”
He laughed at her. “Well, not to me. I'm forty-six.”
“Right.” She turned the tables on him quickly, to get the focus off herself. “And you're not married and have no kids either. So what's the big deal? What about you? Why isn't your clock ticking if you're twelve years older than I am?” Although he didn't look it. Charlie didn't look a day over thirty-six, although he felt it. Lately, he felt every moment of his forty-six years, and then some. But at least he didn't look it. Nor did she. She looked somewhere in her mid-twenties. And they looked handsome together, and were very similar in type, almost like brother and sister, as he himself had noticed when he had first observed that she looked a lot like his sister, Ellen, and his mother.
“My clock is ticking,” he confessed to her. “I just haven't found the right woman yet, but I hope I will one day.”
“That's bullshit,” she said simply, looking him dead in the eye. “Guys who've been single forever always say they haven't met the right woman. You can't tell me that at forty-six, you've never met the right one. There are a lot of them out there, and if you haven't found one, I think you don't want to. Not finding the right woman is really a poor excuse. Find something else,” she said matter-of-factly, and took a sip of her wine as Charlie stared at her. She had cut right to the quick, and worse yet, she was right, and he knew it. So did she. She looked convinced of what she'd said.
“Okay. I concede. A few of them might have been right, if I'd wanted to compromise. I've been looking for perfection.”
“You won't find it. No one's perfect. You know that. So what's the deal?”
“Scared shitless,” he said honestly, for the first time in his life, and nearly fell off his chair when he heard himself say it.
“That's better. Why?” She was good at what she did, although he didn't realize it till later. Getting into peo-ple's hearts and heads was her business, and what she loved doing. But he sensed instinctively that she wasn't going to hurt him. He felt safe with her.
“My parents died when I was sixteen, my sister took care of me, and then she died of a brain tumor when I was twenty-one. That was it. End of family. I guess I've figured all my life that if you love someone they either die, or leave, or disappear, or abandon you. I'd rather be the first one out the door.”
