“Looking for royal heritage, honey! But with a name like Lisa Anne Smith, fuck it. And Dave wonders why I resort to the phone book.” To demonstrate this, she flipped one of the tissue-thin pages with such fury that she tore it clean in half. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time, because she produced a roll of Scotch tape from her sweatshirt and went to work repairing it immediately.
But before I could ask her what I wanted to ask, which was, of course, Hang on one sec, did you just say “royal heritage”? Dave came around the corner, and I watched his gaze bounce from me to Grandma and back again. He put two fingers against his temple and shook his head at the floor. “Lisa, meet Grandma.”
“We’ve met!” Grandma bellowed. “Girl’s got a name like a placeholder ID in a half-priced TJ Maxx wallet.” With that, Dave moved both hands to his head, like he was in an ad for Excedrin, as Grandma went on, “Lisa Anne Smith! Christ!”
Dave looked up at the ceiling and shook his head and then refocused on me. We had a sort of tender, quiet moment, in which his eyes said, So sorry about my insane relative. I waved it off and took a sip of my coffee. I shook my head and mouthed, It’s fine! He guided me over to the far end of the kitchen, which was absolutely enormous. I hadn’t really realized it last night, not in the half-light and focused as I’d been on making hot toddies. But now I noticed, and I saw that on one counter there was a special marble top for rolling out dough. Be still my beating heart.
Turning on the stove with one hand, he expertly cracked the eggs into a bowl with the other. “Sorry about that. There’s coffee in the pot, if you’d like some more.”
From the other end of the room, Grandma leered at me. My initial thought about her talon-hands wasn’t totally off the mark. Only, less like an eagle and more like…a molting falcon. I whispered to Dave, “Did she say royal heritage?”
“I mean, it’s not…” Dave glanced at me and then set to scrambling the eggs with a fork.
“Wait…” I stared at him. “Are you famous?”
“No, no,” he gasped. “Exiled, like five generations ago. The opposite of famous. It’s so totally mundane. Not worth mentioning, really.” He sprinkled some salt into the eggs and then cracked some pepper from an antique silver grinder, which had something that looked a lot like a family crest carved into the front.
What was happening to me? Was this a dream? Was I actually still unconscious in my Jeep on the side of the road, clutching my frog charger and waiting for the National Guard? “Are you a prince or something?”
He stopped scrambling the eggs and stared at me. “I sell mattresses. That’s pretty much the most interesting thing about me.”
I glanced around the kitchen, at the rows of heavy-bottomed copper saucepans hanging neatly from the rack above. At the matching set of chef’s-quality chopping knives in a block. At the walk-in pantry and the enormous Sub-Zero refrigerator. “I had no idea mattress sales paid this well.”
“I don’t sell them, really. I own a company. I’m in mattresses.” Dave opened a nearby cabinet and handed me a mug. A swirly, fancy logo wrapped around the ceramic front.
ROYAL MATTRESS
Sleep like a queen.
You deserve it.
“Oh my God,” I said, giving him a shove on his rock-solid upper arm. “You’re the Royal Mattress guy! You were in People magazine!”
Dave waved it off. “That was totally a PR thing. I had no idea I was going to be on that list.”
“Pfffft!” I shoved him again, and he mock-stumbled, as if I were way above his weight class. He glanced at me for one second and then looked away again. But now I really was a bloodhound on the trail, and it had nothing to do with bacon. “Most eligible bachelors, yada yada yada? And no wonder the bed was so comfy!”
But then I noticed he was actually blushing. A rosy glow was reddening his rugged cheeks, and he couldn’t even face me. He really was just so stinking adorable. And handsome. And wearing an apron and scrambling me eggs while a dozen pieces of bacon cooked in the oven. “Seriously, though, are you royalty? Are you…a prince?”
He gave me a stare to say stop it. “I’m about as much a prince as you are a princess.”
I noticed his eyes on the logo on my hoodie. A cupcake with a frosting tiara. Feeling a bit embarrassed—it seemed somehow ridiculous, given that I was talking to an actual prince—I clapped my hand to it. I was suddenly very self-conscious about my little bakery, named after every girl’s fantasy. But in truth, I was just barely scraping by. As if there was any doubt, I knew it then for sure—I was way, way out of my league. My efforts to hide my logo had made it so I’d inadvertently perked up my girls from below, giving him an accentuated view of my cleavage, and I clapped my free hand over that. I was clutching my chest like I was having a heart attack, and I might as well have been. “I’m no princess.”
He gave me the up-and-down again, and not just zeroing in on my cleavage either, but lingering on my lips and my throat. He glanced over at his grandma and snuck a little grab of my ass when she was looking away. And Dave said into my ear, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” as he sprinkled some cheese into the eggs.
*
Just as Dave was turning off the burner, the lights flickered. For one startling second, everything went silent—all the appliances going dead at once sounded like a sound effect from a cartoon—but as quickly as everything had gone quiet, it whirred back to life again. “Goddamn it,” Dave growled, carefully arranging my omelet on my plate and adding a few strips of bacon to the side, along with a sliced orange. Goodness. He popped a slice of bacon into his mouth and wiped his hands off on a dish towel. “You stay here. I’ll go make sure the generator is ready to go.” As he moved away, he left me with a perfect view of You-Know-Who, spraying some whipped cream directly into her mouth.
“I’m a good shoveler!” I added, not at all halfheartedly as Grandma shook the container, making the pellet inside sound a lot like a ricocheting BB.
“No way am I letting you go out there,” Dave said, and off he went toward some far corner of the house, where surely there were shiny cars in a row in an immaculate garage.
Which, of course, left me alone with Grandma. I wasn’t sure what to compare it to, really—maybe being left unexpectedly with a surprisingly dangerous animal at the zoo. And so, as if I were in a cage at the zoo, I moved slowly. Very slowly. Do not disturb the ostrich. At first, I thought she didn’t realize we were alone, but when the triple beep of the security system announced Dave had opened the door, she sprang to life mid-thought like someone had just plugged her back into the wall. “To hell with Baltimore! I’m talking old country! I want percentages! Irish? Scottish? Austro-Hungarian?”