Sparks the Matchmaker

CHAPTER 21

The next day was just like the previous one, only worse. Ollie showed up ten minutes earlier to Joy’s doorstep this time, but she was already gone. He arrived ten minutes before her work shift was over, but she said, “Sorry, I have something I need to take care of on campus,” and he didn’t try to come along— that would have been weird. Sure seems like she’s trying to drop hints. He sat himself down in the quiet of the library and shoved his nose into a textbook for over three hours, hoping to occupy his mind with a little bit of world history instead of his own history. But he couldn’t help thinking about Anne and how he had failed so miserably. Anne tried to give me hints, too. He ended up spending the whole time ignoring his book, just people-watching over the tops of the pages.

He knew Anne was gone for good. He wondered now if Joy was too.

Ollie felt alone again.

It was easy for him to guess how the next day was going to go. It turned out he was right: Joy wasn’t home in the morning so that he could walk her to class. He didn’t see her at all during the day either, until he popped in at the end of her shift. At her cash register she spoke to him just long enough to feed him another excuse to avoid walking home together.

It was Wednesday, though. There was one thing he looked forward to on Wednesday nights, and that was that he’d be hitting something. He loved swinging a bat. It was the first thing he looked forward to all week that he actually got to do.

While he was warming up playing a little bit of catch with Keith, he was surprised to see Lynn and Marie walking with D and Greg toward the bleachers. “You came to watch me play!” Ollie said.

“Yeah,” Marie said. “Lynn promised me that I could get a hot dog if I came.”

“That would be reason enough for me,” Ollie laughed, watching her amble away toward the bleachers. He tossed the ball back to Keith, reflecting on things. He’d been thinking a lot this week, he realized, thinking about how to force life into the little box he’d been making all these years. So Joy needs a little space. Maybe it’s just that simple: she needs space. And maybe that has nothing to do with me. He realized it was a little easier to let himself get angry at Sparks for refusing to feed him answers than it was to get upset at himself for not having them. He kicked himself, wishing he hadn’t vowed to keep from wearing the Yankees hat this week. He had to admit, he kind of missed Sparks. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

Once the game started, he really missed him, because even though he considered himself somewhat of a cheater when Sparks was around, his trusty green cap wasn’t going to help with much other than the sun— which was going down quickly.

Ollie scanned the bleachers throughout the game. Hoping to see Joy? Maybe. He saw that Greg was sitting on the top row next to a young woman he didn’t recognize. They looked like they were chatting together the whole time. D and Lynn sat in the middle of the small stand of bleachers having what looked like a pleasant conversation. Marie was on the bottom corner of the bleachers— closest to the hot dog stand. Ollie could see her get up about every five minutes, walk halfway toward it, and then turn around to talk to Lynn before returning to her seat. In the fifth inning, Ollie chuckled as Lynn finally relented, got up, and took Marie to get the hot dog she so badly craved.

After the game finished, Ollie made his way toward the bleachers, toward his friends. “You finally got that hot dog,” he said to Marie.

“Yeah,” she said. “Lynn made me wait forever! She said I had to wait or I’d just want to go home right after I ate it.”

“Was it worth it?” Ollie asked her.

“Probably,” Marie said.

“I’m Greg.” Pushing in between them, Greg held out his hand to shake. “We came to watch you play.”

“I know,” Ollie said. “Your staff worker is my roommate. I’ve hung out with you before. Don’t you remember me?”

Greg just looked at him.

“We went to the circus last weekend, Pooky,” Ollie said.

“Oh yeah!” Greg said, his eyes lighting up. “I remember you, Pooky!”

“What are you doing the rest of the night?” Lynn asked. “I expected Joy to be here.”

“Yeah, well, she’s kinda disappeared the last few days,” Ollie said. “She keeps telling me that she has something she needs to take care of on campus.”

“And she won’t tell you what it is?” Lynn asked.

“Nope,” Ollie said, a little surprised at how much he shared with her. Normally, he would have felt like she was invading his privacy with the rapidly intrusive pace of the conversation, but instead he felt like she was more sympathetic than anything else. That was a good thing.

“Why don’t you just come hang out with us, then?” Lynn said. “Marie loves having friends over.”

“Marie wants me to come over, or you want me to come over?” Ollie asked.

“Marie, of course,” Lynn said with a laugh. “If it were up to me, I’d send you home to watch reruns on TV alone tonight.”

“Well for your information, I’d be watching the Yankees play the Red Sox in game two of the playoffs. Not reruns.”

“What a coincidence,” Lynn said. “That’s exactly what Marie was planning on watching.”

“Is that true, Marie?” Ollie asked. “Were you planning on watching the baseball game tonight?”

“Sure,” Marie said. “We’d love to have ya.”

“See?” Lynn said. “She’s been wanting to go home ever since she finished her hot dog, and not because she gets bored every three minutes, but because she wanted to make sure she didn’t miss the first pitch of the playoff game.”

“Okay, you’ve talked me into it, then,” Ollie said, pretending to sound reluctant. “For Marie’s sake.” He could barely contain his excitement; he had to try hard to not let it show.

As he drove away from the field, he thought about Lynn and Marie. He knew Keith had already left for home, that he was expecting to see him walk through the door, that they had planned to watch the ballgame together. But Ollie would much rather watch the game with two girls that knew nothing about the sport. How weird is that? And for a split second, he thought what would Sparks say, but he was in control of himself now.

Besides, this was just a baseball game on TV with a friend; it really meant nothing. Keith would understand tomorrow. Plus Joy and Ollie weren’t even an item yet; it wasn’t like he was cheating on her.

***

Ollie sat at one end of the couch, Lynn at the other, with Marie in between. Every time Marie’s restless mind goaded her into getting up to pace the room, Lynn would move an inch or two closer to Ollie. Inch by inch, Lynn made her way so close to Ollie that their knees were touching as they talked, and Marie had to sit at the opposite end. Lynn eventually made her way so close to Ollie that her elbow bumped into his as the conversation drifted effortlessly in waves from one topic into another.

But then a loud noise came from the direction of Greg’s apartment. They peeked out the window to see Greg slam his front door closed, leaving D outside scratching his head in bewilderment on the front doorstep.

“What happened?” Ollie asked from Marie’s doorway.

“I’m not entirely sure,” D said, coming closer to talk. “I was in his kitchen washing a few of his dishes when I heard him stomping through the apartment. I turned around just in time to see him charging me like I was a matador taunting him with a red cape. I wasn’t even doing anything.”

“Don’t take it personal,” Lynn said. “He’ll sometimes just snap like that for no reason.”

“I know. I’m not taking it personal,” D said. “We were having a pretty good evening before that.”

“Did he say anything?” Ollie asked. He was a lot more worried about the situation than D was, but only because he still had it in the back of his mind that his own time was coming. He hadn’t spoken directly to Sparks in days, but he didn’t forget the warning he’d received about being on the receiving end of Greg’s fist, a prophecy he was still hoping would prove false.

“I hadn’t spoken a word to him for about five minutes before he tried to tackle me in the kitchen,” D said. “I’m thinking it might have had something to do with the girl he was sitting with at the softball game.”

“Oh no,” Lynn said. “Did he call her? I heard them talking and I heard her give him her phone number, but… I assumed she gave him a fake one.”

“It was real, all right,” D said. “He was excited all evening about getting a pretty girl’s phone number. He called her three or four times before she was home to answer. It was the saddest thing to watch his face as they talked. He was doing great up until the point when he asked her out. He was pretty depressed after that.”

“It’s such a sad thing to watch sometimes,” Lynn said. “He wants so desperately to fit in, you know? He wants to do everything everyone else does.”

“I don’t get him,” Ollie said. “Why is it he can’t remember my face for more than five minutes, but he can keep himself fixated on his sad conversation long enough to lose control of himself?”

“Beats me,” D said. “I don’t think I’ll ever really get a good grip on how Greg’s brain works.”

“The sad thing is that the girl from the game was really nice,” Lynn said. “I had fun listening to Greg while he was chatting with her. He loved every second of it. She was just trying to be nice when she gave him her number, but that ended up being the worst part of it.”

“He would have probably been just as upset, or even more, if the phone number was a fake,” D said.

“True,” Lynn said. “No way around it, I guess.”

D acknowledged the truth of her comment, but brushed the situation off. “There wasn’t much time left in my shift anyway. I was just trying to do a few of his dishes before heading home myself. He’s already had his meds and everything. The only thing really left was for me to put him in bed and get him to put his CPAP mask on.”

“That probably doesn’t matter anyway,” Ollie said, looking at Lynn for validation. “It’s only a matter of minutes before he pulls the mask off.”

Lynn nodded.

“That’s what I was thinking,” D said. “I think I’ll wait a few minutes, check up on him, and then head home.”

“We’ll keep an eye on his place after you’re gone,” Lynn said. “But I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

***

D was gone, Greg was fine, and Marie was sound asleep in her room. That left Ollie alone with Lynn. “That didn’t seem too tough,” he said.

“I told you. She’s easy. You just have to get used to how she operates.”

They sat close to each other on the couch, their knees touching and elbows bumping as they talked.

Ollie wasn’t clueless about what was going on. He had definitely noticed every time Lynn scooted an inch or two closer. I’m not doing anything wrong. He’d almost completely run out of friends when he was with Anne by devoting all of his time to her, but she was gone now. He’d crashed immediately into the arms of Joy, but she was leaving him on the sidelines while she sorted herself out. He wasn’t doing anything wrong by spending the evening with Lynn, even if she was rubbing knees and bumping elbows with him.

He was just enjoying his chance to watch a ballgame with a pretty girl. That was all. He could have been home with Keith to watch the game, but he needed to hang out with more friends than just his roommates. Her invitation helped him solve his problem of friendlessness. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, even if she was sitting so closely.

He was glad he came. He enjoyed the game, even though he was strongly rooting against the Yankees; even though they won easily. He was glad about everything else that had happened so far. But when Lynn invited him to spend the evening over at her place the next day, he politely declined. “I think I’d better spend the evening working on some school projects that I need to get done.”

“Oh, you’ve got stuff to do on campus, is that it?” She smiled at him.

“No, no. It’s not that. Honest. I can’t get behind in my studies.”

Lynn’s smile was still there, but Ollie could tell the heat had gone out of it a little. “Okay then,” she said.

He felt like he needed to know more about how things were going to end up with Joy before he went on spending consecutive evenings with a new pretty face. It had been days since he’d last spoken to Sparks, and as annoying as he was, Ollie was confident that he was still keeping tabs on him. He knew he’d eventually get burned if he kept playing with fire, even if he was just lonely for a friend.

Though he had become convinced Joy was spending most of her week with some other guy, he didn’t want her to discover that he was spending time with another girl. That sounds really complicated… But Ollie didn’t know the first thing to do about it.

“Well,” Lynn said, “I’ll have to see you on Friday. You are working Friday with Greg, right?”

“Yeah.” That was an easy invitation to accept. After all, he wasn’t betraying Sparks or Joy if it was his responsibility to be near Lynn.

***

Ollie watched his room glow orange from the space heater, his thoughts waltzing between Joy, Lynn, and memories of Anne. His thoughts of Anne had grown less and less intense as the nights went by lately, but they were stubborn and still crept in. Between himself and the three girls, the love triangle now had four sides. He felt strongly that he needed to do something. He just didn’t know what the something would be. He was certainly still too stubborn and embarrassed to go crawling back to Sparks for help. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful to him, he just wanted to do things his own way.

But he was really very lonely.

He decided after a while that the only thing he could do next was try again with Joy. He’d show up at Joy’s doorstep again in the morning. That was all he could think of. If she wasn’t there, he would stake out her cash register and refuse to go away until he at least had a chance to talk frankly to her for ten minutes. It was time for action.

He knew what he needed to do.

…even though he didn’t really know what he needed to do.