Down the Rabbit Hole

“Before you met Jeremy you were using a spreadsheet to keep track of your dates, remember?”

Her face went hot. “There was a reason for that!”

“Of course there was.” Carolyn laughed.

“Look,” she said, leaning forward, “here’s the thing. My life coach had me make a life plan, which was great, because it’s only when you know where you’re going that you can make the right decisions to get you there. But I felt like, until I found the right guy I couldn’t get the rest of my life in order. I know, I know, I don’t need a guy to be whole and all that. And I don’t! But I want a guy, I want the right guy. But until I find him I can’t get the whole rest of the show on the road. Do you know what I mean?”

Carolyn looked at her like she had three heads. “The whole rest of the show?”

“Yeah, you know, making sure I’m in the right job, the one with the best benefits, maternity leave and career track. Planning exactly where I want to be on that track when I decide to have children, so I won’t lose ground. Then I can start looking at neighborhoods, think about buying a house, calculate the down payment needed and the payments we can afford. I can research new cars that would be family friendly and could be paid for by the time we have to start contributing to college savings accounts, figure out how to adjust our retirement savings, stuff like that, you know? Just make sure my priorities reflect my goals, the future I’m going to manifest for myself.”

Carolyn was quiet a long moment, fingering one earring, a grave look on her face. “And you say you broke up with Jeremy? Not the other way around?”

She knew she shouldn’t have confided all that. “What?”

“You just scared the crap out of me, and I’m not even dating you. So, that little speech? Save that for the losers, because it’s the perfect formula to make a guy run screaming.”

“Not the right guy. Not a practical guy.”

“Not a boring guy.”

Macy sat back, conviction warring with confusion. “But that’s who I am, Carolyn. I’m a planner, you know that.”

“Honey,” Carolyn continued, “there’s planning, and there’s crafting a prison sentence. In your plan, the guy doesn’t seem to matter much, beyond setting that whole unbelievably dull-sounding machinery in motion.”

“Of course the guy matters! He’s at the crux of the whole thing!” She bunched her hands together illustratively. Then she looked up. “What do you mean, dull? You’re married, you’ve got kids, you must have thought about all this stuff.”

“Yeah, right.” Carolyn rolled her eyes. “We got together in high school, remember? Back when planning was Hey, who’s getting the keg for this weekend?”

“Huh. You were lucky. You got the whole thing settled early. My trouble is I keep meeting guys who don’t live up to their billing. They seem great on the outside, and they can maintain that facade for a few dates—or, like in Jeremy’s case, a few months—but then, inevitably, the Problem shows up.” She leaned back. “There’s always a Problem. With Jeremy it was the freaking phone. I mean, who wants to look across the table at the top of someone’s head for the rest of their life?”

“If you’re lucky, it’ll have hair on it.”

“Oh, it’ll have hair. I require pictures of parents and grandparents on the second date.”

Carolyn closed her mouth, gathered her napkin and rose from the table.

Macy laughed. “Carolyn, stop! I was kidding!”

“I’ll be right back. I have to think about an adequate response to all that”—she rolled a hand—“stuff.” She walked off.

Chuckling, Macy pulled her phone from her purse, thinking, See? It’s okay when someone leaves the table to check the phone. There is proper cell phone etiquette, and there is cell phone rudeness. A sigh escaped her as she slid her finger across the screen, entered her passcode and saw that nobody had emailed or texted. She’d sort of expected something from Jeremy, a What’s going on? or Can’t we talk about this? But there was nothing. He must have agreed with her decision . . .

She gazed at the familiar checkerboard of apps. Familiar, that was, except for one yellow icon in the lower right corner that seemed to be throbbing.

She looked closer. iLove, it read underneath it. Inside the box was a red heart, surrounded by a bright yellow sun, which was the thing that seemed to be pulsating. She put her finger to the icon and the app burst into a bright full-screen sun, and then up popped what looked like a dating website. Find a Guy, Contact a Guy, See the Guys Looking at You—all with little red heart icons.