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  You could have heard a pin drop in the studio. No one moved, no one breathed, no one made eye contact. Patrick took the world’s longest inhale, and while I braced for venom or violence, I refused to unlock my gaze from his, standing as tall as I could manage, spine straight, full of piss and vinegar. He threw his arms around me, braying with laughter. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially just the face. Meet the boss.” He backed up, bowed deeply at my feet, and began applauding. Slowly, cautiously, the rest of the crew began applauding too.

  I sighed, and my ass unclenched. “Well, if I’m the boss, can you shift your sassy self into high gear and get this shoot done? It’s my niece’s first birthday, and if you keep fucking around and whining about onions, she’s going to be headed off to college before I get to her party.”

  “You heard the lady. Let’s get this done already so we can go home.” And while it wasn’t the last time I ever caught hell from Patrick, it set the tone for the rest of our relationship.

  I look at the sniffling girl in front of me.

  This is not my first time at this rodeo. If she had been angry at how she had been treated, called him names, told me she hated him for humiliating her and making her feel small, I would have told her to tough it out, get through the whole season and then she’d be able to write her own ticket. It would have shown an instinctive awareness of the insanity we all deal with, and an ability to cope.

  But the ones who dissolve in soggy emotion, they don’t last, and this one had completely gone off the rails into self-loathing-how-could-I-disappoint-one-of-my-idols mode, so I assured her that no one would blame her if she didn’t want to return, and that I would be happy to write her a recommendation for a new job; food television is not for everyone. She drank way too much wine and picked at her salad and by the time we were done I had gently led her to decide for herself that it would be best to tender her notice in the morning.

  By the time I got home, I couldn’t focus on work; I just needed to veg out. I put on one of my Julia Child DVDs for happy background noise, grabbed my laptop for perhaps a little online retail therapy, and let Dumpling plop on the couch beside me.

  I scritch him behind the ears, and he puts his little head on my knee. “You know the difference between batonnet and allumette, don’t you, boy?” He lifts his head, licks my knee once, decisively, as if to say, “Of course I do, silly two-legs,” and then puts his head back down and closes his eyes. When I open the computer, it shows the last page I was looking at.

  EDestiny.

  RJ. Wonder what that stands for? I shouldn’t care, I know. Online dating just doesn’t work for me.

  When EDestiny began doing their freebie events, I would log in, just to amuse myself with all the terrifically perfect guys I was missing out on. They apparently really missed my monthly contribution to their bottom line, and stepped up their game volume-wise, sending me the very young, the very old, and the very scary. The recently released and the practically deceased. The stamp collectors, coin collectors, and, for all I knew, body part collectors. They sent me not only my COUSIN Sam, who we all think is gay anyway, but then one of my sister’s chiropractic partners, who is not only also most likely gay, but so deeply closeted that he is currently married.

  It became a game. The more I didn’t pay them, the more often I was offered free weekends and special deals, and peeks at new matches, not one of whom was remotely someone I would want to meet on the street, let alone become romantically involved with. They sent me four guys with more tattoos than skin, three spectacular mullets, a classic Jheri curl complete with “Thriller”-era pleather jacket, and one guy who called himself Metroman and described himself as a modern-day superhero. I got matched with a guy in medium-security prison, who swore that getting caught embezzling was the best thing for him, since he was able to kick his cocaine habit in prison. A guy who bred chinchillas in his basement. And one of my former professors from Northwestern, who had given me a C, made shitty comments on all my papers, and whose expression behind his bushy Claus-esque beard always looked as if he had recently smelled something unpleasant. Which he probably had, because I would not have been in the least surprised if that face fur contained morsels from a decade’s worth of school cafeteria meals.

  A good 80 percent of my matches lived anywhere from fifty to five hundred miles away. At least 50 percent of them were ten years older or younger than my requested limits. And 100 percent of them were not remotely dateable, at least not by me. I started actively booing at the TV anytime I saw the happy spokescouples on the EDestiny commercials.

  My three best friends from high school, Mina, Emily, and Lacey, had turned our monthly Girls’-Night-In date into Official EDestiny Night. They would come over for snacks and cocktails and we would go through my new profiles for the sheer hilarity of it. Emily is a ghostwriter for a New York Times bestselling chick lit author, and would take the opportunity to make up little impromptu stories about each guy and what our life together would be like. Some of which were so hilarious that you can now see them played out rather painfully by the likes of Katherine Heigl in the big-screen adaptations of the novels she writes. Somewhere in the middle of each get-together she sneaks away to call her husband, John, to tell him how much she loves him and how lucky she is to have him, since she is reminded of what else is out there.

  Lacey, the VP of marketing for a local chocolate manufacturer, and herself an experienced online-dater, would just hand over another peanut-butter-bacon bonbon and shake her head. Lacey is a serial monogamist, who dates an endless series of men in uniform—firemen, policemen, servicemen—each for about six to nine months before taking a few months off to be alone with her dog, Jaxie, and then start all over again. And Mina, head recruiter for a Chicago-based executive consulting firm, would try once again to convince me to let her recruit a boyfriend for me. After all, the boyfriend she recruited for herself was pretty fantastic, why wouldn’t she have equal success on my behalf? But I had learned long ago that you actually probably don’t want to know what kind of guy your besties think you ought to be with. It always says as much about what they think of you as what they think of him, and I find a certain comfort in being ignorant of what my pals might envision for me.

  My favorite EDestiny offering was the guy we call “Tiny Furniture Man,” whose profile picture showed him oddly posed, leaning on a dresser from behind. At least, we assumed a dresser until Emily pointed out that since EDestiny loved to send me the little ones, it might in fact be a nightstand.

  “Look at me! I am this much taller than this piece of furniture!” Emily said, wiping tears from her bronzed cheeks. Emily is an unapologetic tanorexic with thick, wavy blond hair that is always perfectly coiffed.

  “I’m totally bigger than this nightstand,” Lacey piped up, folding her long legs underneath her, and tossing treats to Jaxie and Dumpling, who had collapsed in a pile of panting fur at her feet after an hour of playing.

  “The fact that I am leaning on it from behind to hide an enormous goiter should not deter you in the least,” Mina chimed in.

  No one at Whitney Young High School would have thought we’d end up friends. I matriculated as an unapologetic band geek, playing an adequate if uninspired second-chair flute, dating other band geeks for the convenience of it. I was short and overweight, with frizzy curly hair that was waiting impatiently for the invention of mousse, which was still a year away. Mina was a gorgeous almond-eyed African American girl with killer cheekbones, who simply decided she was in charge, got elected president of the freshman class (and subsequently sophomore, junior, and senior, the only student in school history to serve for four years), and eventually led the debate team to three consecutive city championships and two state titles, while handily maintaining a solid A average and one besotted boyfriend per annum. Emily was a cheerleader of the whip-smart and snarky (but not mean girl) variety. She was also head of the Young Republicans (a shockingly big club during the Reagan era), always perfectly put together, and dated th
e quarterback of the football team, whomever that happened to be at the moment. Lacey was an athlete, five eleven, strong as anything, played varsity softball and basketball, ran track, and tended to always be dating friends of her older brother, who was in college ROTC.

  But there we were, freshman year, sitting in first-period biology, hating life and crushing on Adam Ant, having snagged the four chairs in the back of the room. And when the super-popular blond bombshell in the front row misread “organism” as “orgasm,” the four of us made eye contact, and before the end of the period, little folded notes were flying back and forth along that row like we had invented the method. By October we were completely inseparable—thank god everyone had two-way calling for group discussions, and for Lacey’s parents being so generous about allowing sleepovers. Despite losing one another for a bit during college and immediately following during the era before e-mail and cell phones, we reconnected at our five-year reunion and discovered that we liked the women we had become just as much as we loved the memories of the girls we had been. So we agreed to make a once-a-month date so that we didn’t lose each other again. And for the past fourteen years, we have kept that date pretty sacred. We don’t talk on the phone or get together much beyond that one night a month, except for big parties and the occasional birthday and random girls’ weekends. But we are the kind of friends that don’t need to spend all our time together, as long as we keep the connection alive.

  “Okay, seriously, where the fuck do they find these guys?” Lacey asked, incredulous.

  “Um, are you really one to talk?” Mina raised one perfectly threaded eyebrow. “Didn’t your last date from Match take you to Hooters?”

  “He did, but just for the wings,” Lacey said, smirking.

  “Yeah, and he subscribes to Playboy for the articles.” Emily snorts.

  We all convulsed in laughter, poured another round of gimlets, and I got up to answer the door. That was the night Patrick showed up unexpectedly in the middle of our entertainment. And I’d been drinking just enough to let him in, and let him participate.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, swigging a gimlet and finishing the last piece of beet bruschetta and pointing at me. “Has she ever once met any of these guys?”

  “Hell, no,” Emily said. “None of these guys are even worth the free drinks.”

  “She might be missing out on her soul mate.” Patrick dipped his finger in the hummus and let Dumpling lick it off.

  “Nah, I’m reasonably sure her soul mate isn’t a card-carrying member of the Tea Party!” Mina said.

  “Or related to her by blood,” Lacey offered

  “Or a little person,” Emily added.

  “Or older than her dad,” Mina says.

  “Or living in the Upper Peninsula,” Lacey pipes up.

  “Besides, she is not going to settle, ever again,” Emily assures the room.

  “Yeah, she is not going to just date someone to date someone. It is going to have to be the right someone,” Mina declares.

  “She’s waiting for The One. As well she should,” Lacey says.

  “But she better not be too picky, or she will be alone forever,” Patrick says.

  Oy. “She is right here, and she would prefer you not talk about her as if she were not present.” It was more than a little irking to watch Patrick win over my girlfriends. I knew that after he left I would be attacked for saying snippy things about him and be told that, generally, I was too hard on him. Patrick had an amazing ability to seduce everyone in my life, so unless I was going to make all of my friends and family members come hang out with me at work to witness the consistent insanity and occasional cruelty that he possessed, I was destined to have everyone in my private life love him.

  Ever since that night, he has looked forward to the EDestiny freebie events and checking out my possible future lovers with a vengeance. The girls and I got bored with the game nearly a year ago, shifting our monthly evenings to focus almost exclusively on catching up with the antics of whatever current batch of Unreal Housewives are facing divorce, bankruptcy, wardrobe malfunction, or the release of an auto-tuned dance single. But every two or three months, Patrick will remind me that “the game is afoot!” and I have to suffer his opinions of the profiles the Destinometer sends my way.

  But last night, this profile, this RJ … something just struck me about it.

  Forty-nine. So, age-appropriate. Lives in Chicago, geographically desirable. Six feet tall, so I presume, you know, legs. Not that one should have to ask net or gross with such things, but history makes us wise. Likes all the things I like. No picture, so probably a troll. Minimal info, so perhaps not so good with words, could be looking for a green-card marriage. Then again, could already be married. Probably ultra-conservative Tea Party Republican. Or just a liar, plenty of those out there in cyberspace. Most definitely not my soul mate.

  But despite the litany in my head, and the instinct to just log out and go to bed, I do something I have not done on this site, not ever.

  I click the “Invite Destiny” button, which sends this mysterious RJ a preset list of three questions that I picked so long ago I don’t even remember what they are.

  From the other room I hear Dumpling flop off his perch on the couch and come clicking purposefully down the hall to find me. He licks my ankle and then sneezes three times in quick succession, which is his sign that he needs to go out. I look at the screen.

  “Congratulations! You have initiated contact with RJ from Chicago! Good luck, and remember, your Destiny is right here!”

  My stomach turns over, and I close the computer quickly.

  “C’mon, Mister Man, you know you are my real soul mate. Let’s go out.”

  As much as I love Dumpling, I always do remember Maria’s sage, if scatological advice. “The man in your life, ’e should not require you pick up ’is poop, hmm? A dog, that is a good frrrriend, a companero. But not a man. You get a rrrrreal man, and then ’e picks up the poop.”

  I clip on Dumpling’s leash, and grab a blue bag and some treats from the bowl by the door. And before I get completely out the door, a brief thought flits through my brain.

  I wonder if RJ likes dogs?

  3

  That’s a wrap, people. Thank you all. We’ll do it again next week.” Bob, director extraordinaire of both Feast and Academy finally gets the ending he wants for the “Win Over Your In-Laws” brunch episode of Feast, the third show we’ve shot today. We do anywhere from three to five half-hour shows on a shooting day, three days a week, shooting the entire seasons of both shows for the following year in a whirlwind five months at a frenetic pace and with minimal sleep. The shows are not scripted, but rather lightly outlined. Patrick is a natural, so as long as he knows his talking points, he can work off the cuff. We generally tend to do four recipes per episode, two three-minute, one six-minute, and one eight-minute, which leaves room for an anecdote or two. Nearly clockwork. Crazy to some, but it frees Patrick up to run the restaurants and do personal appearances and work on the books and show planning six months a year, and for us both to have the full month of August off to recharge our batteries. No one can work effectively in Chicago’s August heat and humidity anyway; it makes us all mush-brained.

  It became clear early on in our working relationship that the usual vacation schedule does not apply to Patrick’s personal team, and while other employees can grab a week here or there for trips with family, or plan ahead for getaways with friends or lovers, I am only on vacation when Patrick is on vacation. Sometimes I get lucky and he gets a bee in his bonnet about a mini trip, and makes the time for himself (or the Legs of the moment) and I get a spontaneous bit of freedom. I have become adept at snagging last-minute deals for spa getaways with Bennie, cheapo airfare for long weekends in wine country or Montreal with the girls or Barry, or quick zips into New York to see friends and play with Bruce and eat expansively. But usually it is just a day or two of freedom, which I will spend holed up in the little cabin I bought a couple of
years ago just over the border in Wisconsin. Just a ninety-minute drive, so close enough to get home quickly if there is a Patrick-related emergency, but far enough away to relax and breathe fresh air. It is Dumpling’s favorite place on the planet, where he can run around in the woods, chase chipmunks and rabbits that he never catches, and laze around being a warm puppy in the sun while I swing in a hammock or float in the Lilliputian pool, an in-ground so small that no more than four people can float in it at any one time. Emily, who often borrows the cabin to write the last few chapters of her books, calls it the Puddle.

  August is when I can really decompress. Whole weeks at the cabin, where I can host barbecues with friends, spend quality time with the family, catch a Cubs game, sleep in, and take luxurious afternoon naps. Go to the farmer’s markets and get excited about canning, pickling, and making jam. Unfortunately, as today is the eleventh of October, I have 312 days to slog through before my next long break.

  I meet Patrick in his dressing room-slash-office as I always do after taping.

  “That was okay, right?” he asks, while taking off his makeup with cold cream and a hand towel like some 1930s film diva. I tried to turn him on to the new makeup remover wipes, but he insists they goop him up so much for the camera that if he doesn’t really “deep down clean up” he gets foundation all over his eight-hundred-thread-count Italian linen pillowcases. Poor baby. So hard to be him. But even someone as pretty as Patrick can’t get away without makeup these days; HD is a bitch. Look at poor Bill Maher. I know he’s smart and funny, but when I watch his show all I can think is that the man needs spackle. In regular definition? Not a bad-looking guy. In high-def? He looks like his face caught fire and someone tried to put it out with a golf shoe. I’m not saying, I’m just saying. Lucky for Patrick, his skin is smooth enough, and he usually just needs to hide the dark circles under his eyes or the occasional blemish.