Sometime Soon

six



A smile blooms across my face as I recall the conversation. I’m driving to Waltham to get my check for the car repairs. I explained to Jason that Tiger is a most entertaining kitty. Luckily, he doesn’t seem to have a thing about cats. Cats seem to turn a lot of men off for some reason. Maybe they think cat ownership is evidence of dangerous nesting instincts. That thought rankles me, but I can’t discount the theory.

The Waltham Brew House is a local neighborhood pub with its own glass enclosed brew-house. Scratched wooden booths line a windowed wall that looks out onto the sidewalk. The brewing area, made up of several medium-sized wooden barrels surrounded by snaked silver piping, is near the entrance. The bar sits in the middle of the dining area like an oval-shaped donut. The heat wave broke overnight, and the afternoon is cool and overcast with a low leaden sky that threatens showers.

I have on shorts and sandals today despite the chill. I’ve also thrown on my favorite blue sweater, the one that matches my eyes, and my hair is loose and obedient, so far. I know we’re only meeting so he can hand me a check, but I’m wondering if maybe he has more in mind. Standing in the entrance of the Waltham Brew House, I glance around the sparsely populated place. I’m about five minutes early, and there is no sign of Ryan “the bumper denter” Miller. I’m actually not sure if I would recognize him, having only met him briefly, and under a certain amount of duress.

A young, friendly hostess approaches me, but I tell her that I’m waiting for someone. About fifteen minutes later, as I’m shifting my weight from one foot to the other and glancing at my watch for the third or fourth time, through the pub’s windows I see someone briskly round the corner and head for the entrance. The door opens behind me, and I turn to see a somewhat familiar figure enter. He looks up and I notice a flicker of recognition cross his face when he spots me. I recognize him as well, although he appears quite different. His hair, dark and wavy, is brushed to the side with some locks disobeying and hanging down over his forehead. His golden brown eyes have interesting green tinges, and they are bright and friendly--no longer bloodshot and tired. He appears comfortable and casual in olive colored shorts and a navy T-shirt.

“Andrea?” he asks, stopping in front of me.

I’m struck by how handsome he is, and suddenly I feel uneasy. It’s an unusual response, but history has taught me that guys like him are not usually very nice. They may seem nice at first, but dig a little deeper and they’re generally too self-centered to be likable. “Ryan,” I reply.

He smiles at me. “Sorry, I’m late.”

“No problem.” He is actually just under the gun of okay on the lateness scale. Tardiness is a pet peeve of mine.

“Well,” he says, “I’m relieved to see that you’re not wearing a neck brace or showing any other signs of injury.”

“I’m in perfectly good health.”

“Have you had lunch yet?” he asks.

I’m debating how to answer. If this is a quick check exchange, I can do some grocery shopping and get home to do my usual Sunday afternoon cleaning. But then I hear my sister yelling at me when I tell her that I avoided having lunch with Ryan. “No,” I finally reply, hoping I didn’t hesitate too long.

He sort of squints at me, making me believe there may have been an awkward pause before my response. But he recovers quickly. “Let me buy you lunch then,” he offers.

“Oh no, you don’t have to do that.”

“It’s the least I can do after the inconvenience I’ve caused you. Besides, I was planning on deducting it from the amount I owe you anyway.”

“Oh?” I reply, raising an eyebrow.

He grins at me. His teeth shine brightly against the shadow of a beard that darkens his face. “No, not really.” He glances at the hostess when she approaches again. “Lunch, then?”

I nod and Ryan requests a table for two. We’re led to one of the wooden booths by the window. As Ryan settles in across from me he asks, “Have you been here before?”

I sit down and the wood bench is cool against the summer-bare skin of my legs. “Yes, but it was years ago.”

“Well, if you like beer, I would recommend the Titan Ale.”

“You come here often then?”

He shrugs. “I only live a few blocks away, and the office is just down the street. We walk over here for lunch meetings sometimes.”

“Beer-enhanced lunch meetings?”

He nods.

“Are they very productive?”

“Probably more productive,” he answers, laughing.

“You look much more rested today,” I comment.

“Yeah, you definitely saw me at my worst. I’d been working for seventy-two hours straight trying to solve a problem for a customer. I finally solved it that day I ran into you.” He pauses as he runs a hand across his rough cheek. “And I’m afraid,” he continues, “That I was thinking about my bed and not about my driving, unfortunately for you.”

The waitress approaches then. We order the Titan Ale to start, and Ryan recommends the burgers for lunch. So we order those, too.

“What kind of business do you have?” I ask once the waitress is gone.

Ryan raises an eyebrow. “It’s a startup. We’re kind of in stealth mode.”

“Top secret, huh?”

“Yes and no. Now that we finally have a customer, it’s a little less stealthy.”

“Oh, so you were working on a problem for your only customer.”

He laughs. “Yes, our most important and only customer gets very special treatment.”

“Well, now I’m curious,” I say. “But you don’t have to tell me.”

“It’s actually not all that interesting, but people will want it, we hope. We’ve got something similar to an access control profile that companies can give their users for gaining user permission rights to information. The idea is that the profile combined with a network acceleration tool can help users access what they need more quickly, and not be able to access what they shouldn’t.” He stops talking and looks at me with a slight grin and a shrug. I realize he thinks he’s boring me.

“You’re a software developer?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he shrugs again.

“I work with lots of developers.”

This piques his interest. “Oh, really?”

“I’m in product marketing at BTS Systems.”

“Marketing, huh? A necessary evil,” he says with a challenging twinkle in his eye. This is the typical reaction of developers to marketing departments.

“I’m afraid so.” I laugh.

Our beers arrive then, and Ryan explains that he and a friend left a large local software company about a year ago to develop the prototype for an idea they had. They put up nearly all of their savings, and lived off of lots of macaroni and cheese while they visited venture capital firms seeking funding.

“And we got a small first round of funding a few months ago,” he continues. “Enough to hire a couple more engineers and a skeleton sales team. We’re running lean and mean for now, trying to raise more money.”

“That sounds promising. But it also sounds like a lot of hard work.”

He nods. “True story. We’re hoping this first customer will act as a reference for others, but once this round of money runs out, there may not be more. It’s all very shaky still.”

It’s a story I hear often from others. Every engineer talks about going to a start-up, owning a piece of the action, and making a killing. But for most, it’s just talk. The work it takes to actually make a go of a new company selling a brand new product is generally enough deterrent to prevent most people from actually making the leap.

Once our burgers arrive, I begin to feel guilty about the car repair money and about letting Ryan pay for lunch.

Ryan is right about the burgers. They are great, but a bit too messy I decide, as I demurely wipe dribbling juice from my chin with a paper napkin. Ryan seems not to notice as he asks me more about my job.

As we finish off our lunches, we exchange workplace stories. Most high tech companies have surprisingly similar environments. Then Ryan withdraws his checkbook, and I dig around in my black hole of a purse for the estimate. He eyes me, his lips curving upward, as I finally come up with the pink copy from the garage.

“What do you women keep in those things?” he asks.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Wallet, cell phone, kitchen sink.”

His smile widens, and then he apologizes again as he hands me the check, and I thank him. I also thank him for lunch.

“Andrea,” he says, looking down at the table, fingering a dent in the wood, before raising his eyes to mine. “I don’t know what your situation is, but maybe you’d want to have dinner with me one night.” He watches me and his hand stills.

I blink at him as I realize that he’s wondering if I’m single, and he’s asking me out. I haven’t been on a date in months, and now I have two offers in one week. When it rains, it pours. Of course, it has poured before in my life, and those downfalls came to nothing. I glance at Ryan’s hand resting on the table. His fingers are long and narrow with trim square nails. A bulky silver diving watch filled with dials encircles his wrist. I think my first impression, well second impression actually, when he walked into the restaurant, may have been wrong. I’m not getting ‘self-centered’ from him at all. I’m getting something closer to ‘unsure’ and maybe even ‘nervous’. The typical engineer has a reputation for being socially inept and less than average in the looks department. This, of course, is a stereotype. But like most stereotypes, it does hold true a certain percent of the time. Thankfully, Ryan’s appearance shatters the stereotype to pieces.

“Sure,” I reply.

“Great.” He grins and lets out a breath as though he had been holding it.

I realize that his demeanor gives me pause. His personality doesn’t match his exterior, which is disarming to me, and I’m not sure what to make of him.

“If you want to give me your number, I can give you a call. My schedule is pretty crazy this week, but maybe we could get together over the weekend if you’re free.”

“I’d like that.”

Ryan pays the bill when it arrives. When we get to the door, I realize that it’s raining in earnest. We’d been sitting by a window, but I never noticed what was happening outside. There could have been a hurricane going on, and it likely would not have registered with me during lunch.

“No umbrella?” he asks, looking down at me in the doorway.

I shake my head, noticing that he hasn’t brought one either. “It’s just water. We won’t melt.”

“I’ll be right back.” He turns and goes back inside the main room of the brewery. I see him talk to the bartender. The bartender then exits through a door in the back. He quickly returns and hands something to Ryan who has joined me again in the doorway. He starts to unfold an oversized black garbage bag. “I can hold this over us and run you to your car,” he offers.

I just look up at him as my surprise renders me speechless.

He’s staring down at me expectantly.

“Um, that’s okay,” I hear myself say. I’m too shocked by the gesture to think clearly. I know it’s not really a big deal, but no one I’m not related to has ever offered to do something this nice for me.

Ryan glances out at the rain and eyes me speculatively. “Are you sure?”

I’m getting a second chance to change my answer. “Well, if you don’t mind? I’m just down the block. Where are you?”

He points toward the same parking lot I’m in. “Whenever you’re ready,” he says, raising the bag up over our heads.

“Ready,” I state and I take a breath, preparing to get soaked.

We dash outside, moving together in a slow jog. The rain plays a steady staccato rhythm on the plastic bag as we huddle underneath it. I have to stay close to Ryan in order to remain dry, and the side of my hip is bumping against his leg as we move down the sidewalk. The humid air carries the clean scent of his soap to me.

“Right there.” I direct him, pointing to my silver car by the entrance of the lot.

I have my keys in my hand, and my thumb finds the remote unlock button. “Thanks,” I say a little breathlessly, turning toward him in our rain-free bubble as I grip the door handle. “Still nice and dry,” I announce, although my feet in my sandals are pretty soggy. Then I notice that he’s kept the bag mostly over me. Damp hair hangs down over his ears and onto his wet shoulders.

“You’re soaked,” I accuse, feeling badly.

“I won’t melt.” He gives me a lopsided grin and pulls my door open, motioning for me to get in. “I’ll talk to you soon, Andrea,” he says, before dashing off. Through my rain spattered windshield, I watched him disappear to the other end of the parking lot.



“Maybe that’s how he meets women.”

“You’re saying he hit me on purpose?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Tiger rubs the top of his head against my hand as I refill his dish with food. Tiger is on a diet. He gets two small helpings of his dry food a day, one in the morning and another in the evening. His hunger drives him to rapture each time I withdraw his food from the cabinet. His nature is so gentle that it nearly brings me to tears thinking of him living with an inconsiderate owner. I rescued Tiger from a shelter when he was six weeks old. Since then, we’ve had a few mishaps. Since he is often underfoot, I have inadvertently stepped on his paws every so often. I also hit him on the head once with a closet door because I hadn’t realized he was right beside me when I pulled the door open. But he never holds a grudge. Rather he looks to me for reassurance and comfort, even as I’m the one inflicting his injuries. There is a lesson to be learned from Tiger and his ability to love unconditionally.

“I really don’t think he drove into me on purpose,” I tell Katie, holding the telephone in one hand while trying to close the cat food bag with the other. Tiger is now going to town on his dinner.

“Well, be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I promise I won’t give him my ATM pin number or my Social Security number--no matter how nicely he asks.”

“Aaaandy,” she drones, “you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I know. I need to walk a fine line between seeming friendly and open, while actually being completely paranoid and closed off. Dating is so complicated.”

“Being engaged is pretty complicated, too,” Katie says.

I get the cat food put away and sit down at the kitchen table watching Tiger inhale his dinner. His life is so simple. “Still having trouble deciding on a wedding date?” I ask.

“I’m not sure Mike really wants to get married anymore.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

“When I started looking at dates again, he said that he’s too busy to think about it right now. He’s got some big meeting in Chicago that he needs to plan for. But it’s just another excuse. He always has an excuse.”

“You don’t think they’re legitimate excuses?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they could be, but he doesn’t even seem to mind that we can’t settle on a date.”

The afternoon rain has lasted into the evening. I hear the heavy drops pelting the windows. Despite the fact that Katie is one of my best friends, I’ve only met Mike a handful of times. He is divorced with two children, a boy in middle school and a girl in grade school. Katie has worked hard to win them over, but she wasn’t making much progress until they discovered Katie’s parents have a cottage in New Hampshire near the ski slopes and right on a beach off Lake Winnipesaukee. They all spent July fourth weekend there, and it had gone great.

“Have you asked him if he’s having second thoughts?” I’m not a big fan of Mike’s, but I want to tread carefully. I haven’t revealed my doubts to Katie, but I don’t like the things she’s told me. According to her, Mike has painted his ex-wife as an ogre and himself as the injured party. Apparently, the ex-wife is completely self-centered, has turned all their friends against him, and often threatens to drag him back into court to extort more money from him. I have trouble believing this one-sided account.

“No, I haven’t said anything to him.”

“Do you think you should? Maybe you’re worrying yourself needlessly.”

“I don’t want to seem insecure.”

“But you are--or at least he’s making you feel that way.”

Katie is silent on the other end of the phone.

“What about telling him that he has to pick a date by the end of the month? It can be any date that works best for him. Tell him that you’ll make the time work for you, but you need to make your plans and you need a finalized date. But say it in a nice way, not like an ultimatum.”

“Let him just pick any date?”

“If picking a wedding date is becoming such an issue, then let him choose one and make it work for you. If he really doesn’t want to get married, he won’t give you a date, right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take all your impediments out of his way and see what he does.”

Katie hesitates. “I suppose I could try that. What if he wants to get married in the middle of February?”

“Then you’ll get married in February and be a beautiful winter bride.”

“I guess it’s worth a try,” she agrees sounding a bit less forlorn. “Maybe I’ve just been too picky about the timing.”

“By the way, if you do have your wedding in February, personally, I’d prefer a Caribbean location.”

“Me, too,” she laughs.

I end the conversation feeling proud that I’ve improved Katie’s mood, but hoping I haven’t just doled out some really bad advice. Katie is going to be devastated if Mike has changed his mind. Of course, I’m also thinking that Katie really needs to be more assertive. I wouldn’t stand for Mike’s wishy-washy attitude. But then again, I’ve never really been in love. Who knows what I’d be willing to do for it. I don’t think I’d compromise myself or let insecurity rule me. At least, I hope not.