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  I tried to make sense of what had just happened as we stood before the RV on the other side of the parking lot with two taciturn Mexican women inside awaiting our orders. Julien puffed on his bummed cigarette and pointed out his favorite items on the menu painted on the side of the truck. With my blessing, he ordered for both of us and paid in cash before leading me to a bench on the sidewalk where we ate our tacos while looking out at the ocean. The food was almost too spicy, but I relished it. Again, the Julien effect. I felt like I belonged here, sitting on a bench with a true mentor, someone open and honest and as smart as I could ever hope to be, who would steer me toward a better future.

  “Thanks for listening in there,” he said after a bout of silence.

  I nodded once, my eyes on the ocean. “Thanks for trusting me,” I said.

  Sitting up straight, his energy shifted back to intense enthusiasm for the day as he clapped his hands together, crumpling his empty taco wrappers and rolling them into a ball. “So! We need to stop by my office for a couple of minutes at least. That way, we have an alibi.” Julien stood up from the bench and I saluted him, prompting him to laugh heartily, as if it were an inside joke we’d already established: Julien as drill sergeant, me as devoted recruit. He either thought I was very funny or the tequila shots were still working their magic.

  As we headed back across the parking lot, he reached out and patted my shoulder, a chaste, fatherly gesture that somehow turned my thoughts to Liam, who had touched my shoulders the night before in quite the opposite way—lustfully, proprietarily.

  At the spa where I had worked up until the fall of last year, my jet-setter boss Sasha Myers was always repeating clichés about men. “Creatures of conquest,” she would call them. “Once you’ve kissed, barring any major mishaps, they will not stop until they’ve sealed the deal. A man once tracked me down from Alaska because our one-night stand had been interrupted. Five thousand miles he flew! I’m telling you… they will find you and they will finish you off,” she would tell single customers, throwing an extra sample of eye cream into their bag with a wink and a thumbs-up. She liked to repeat this story in particular; over time, I had realized that it was really just a pep talk for herself, a twice-divorced woman still chasing the thrill of romance. However, thinking about Liam, I wanted to believe that Sasha had been right. Deep down, I wanted him to find me and, whatever the emotional fallout might be, finish me off.

  Chapter Five

  The rest of the week flew past in a haze. Every morning I awoke, joined Cecile and Julien for breakfast, then biked with him to the office, where we spent seven or eight hours working diligently, Julien typing away at his computer while I filed, sorted, collated, stapled—monotonous tasks that were oddly soothing. Every night before going to sleep I noticed whether or not his light was still on, as his bedroom window was visible from mine. If it was on, I imagined he was still working, keeping his mind off the empty half of his bed. I tried to take a page from his playbook and work hard enough every day so that I was too exhausted to lie awake and think about Liam at night, but I failed. A community of butterflies had taken up a permanent residence in my stomach, and any downtime that I had was devoted to rehashing that night at the restaurant, wondering what would happen if I ever saw him again.

  I came to see Julien’s office as a protective bubble, the only place where thoughts of Liam couldn’t penetrate my mind. We mostly sat in silence—him hovering over his laptop and me alternating between the uncomfortable wooden chair across from his desk and a patch of floor, reorganizing and flagging piles of research. Sometimes I found myself staring at one of his packed bookshelves and dreaming of what it would be like to be a respected professor like him but finding it impossible to envision myself that way. The more I witnessed Julien’s quiet, brilliant, sequestered life, the more the idea of working in the rarefied world of academia became. The best I could hope for from this experience would be to come out of it a little more culturally astute, if just by osmosis.

  Our bike rides to and from work were also quiet, as were shared mealtimes at the house, when Cecile did most of the talking. The lack of conversation was refreshing to me, because whenever I did speak, I caught myself trying a little too hard to please, sometimes bordering on pretention with my attempts to sound perceptive and well read. However I was coming across seemed to be working, though. At the end of my first week, Julien granted me the privilege of reading the first chapter of his book and I did so under his watchful eye, my red pen hovering over the printed pages but finding no errors to mark. When I was done, I only offered one criticism—to strike the last line of an annotation—and he thanked me so profusely, you would think I had carefully edited the whole thing.

  “I wish I were you,” said Gracie when I called her that Friday after work. “You should see the middle-aged bums in my office. Julien Maxwell puts them all to shame.”

  “I see what you’re saying, objectively. But you know me—I’m working on making him the father I never had. I’m even warming to the idea of having a bratty little sister. Did I tell you she makes me coffee in the morning?”

  “Yes, it’s a real blended family scene you’ve got going over there.”

  “Maybe I’m just trying to fill the Gracie-sized hole in my heart since you left. So how’s D.C.?”

  “So far so good. I mean, aside from the irony that I’m working for an organic foods lobby and microwaving half my meals. But it’s good to be in a city. You should come visit!”

  “You know me, Oceanside’s got all the excitement I can handle. Plus, I’m broke.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, do me a favor. Give Julien a big fat sloppy father-daughter kiss for me?”

  “Ew, ew, ew.”

  “Or find somebody to crush over. I need to live vicariously. I got nothing doing here.”

  “’Kay, I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “Love you, gotta crash.”

  “Love you too.” I heard Gracie sigh on the other end as we hung up. She still had no idea about Liam, and at this point, I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t fessed up. Perhaps because I knew she would only fuel the fire, when I really should be forgetting all about him. Of course, as someone great once said, Best laid plans and all that…

  * * *

  “You need to eat,” I instructed Isabella as she rocked on her wicker patio chair, puffing the new e-cigarette she had spent the last ten minutes extolling. The first time I had met her had been on this very same porch, when as a freshman I had come to her retirement community with one of my Nutrition professors who was running a gardening program there. I had helped Isabella start a thriving tomato garden on her porch, which she had proceeded to neglect that summer when I had gone home to Iowa. When I got back, it had made me secretly happy to know how much I was needed. Ever since, I’ve made weekly visits in which I cook her a week’s worth of meals.

  “These are the best crab cakes I have ever made.” I propped up my empty plate as evidence, trying to coax her to put down the nicotine. “They have capers! You love capers!”

  “Just let me have this first. You know I’m very excited to try your food, always,” she said in her heavy Austrian accent.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say you haven’t been eating enough.”

  “Not true! You saw—everything you made me last week is gone. Fertig.”

  “How do I know you didn’t just throw it in the trash?”

  “Because I can describe to you in detail just how succulent and perfectly seasoned the roast beef was and tell you all the ways in which I ate it—in sandwiches, heated up with the savory mashed cauliflower, in a box, with a fox.”

  “I’m just saying, you seem like you’ve lost weight.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “Isabella, I worry about you,” I said. And I did. Just as I had a penchant for gaining five or ten pounds every once in a while, she tended to lose that much, and whenever she did, she got a little wild-eyed and defensive. I had to think there was a history of disord
ered eating behind all of her jokes about having a “discerning palate” and needing to get ready for bikini season.

  “Tell me more about this nymphomaniac,” she said, eyeing me mischievously.

  Even though I hadn’t planned it, I had broken down and told her about Liam the minute I had walked in. “Well, he’s bad news, obviously,” I said.

  “You don’t sound so convinced. There’s something about Australian men, the good-looking ones anyway. I knew an Australian years ago. Race car driver. Formula One. Biggest schwanz I ever saw.”

  I rolled my eyes and noticed Isabella’s next-door neighbor, Melvin, waving from his own screened-in porch. I waved back and nudged her to do the same but she ignored me. “Why aren’t you nicer to Melvin? I think he likes you.”

  Isabella closed her eyes and shook her head. “No way.”

  “Why? Is it because he’s Jewish?” I said.

  “Ha!” Isabella took a long drag from her e-cigarette and blew out a cool wisp of steam.

  “That’s what it is. You’re somehow devoutly Catholic and I never knew it. Can’t date a man outside the church?” I was mostly teasing, but after four years of knowing her, I had learned that Isabella was a walking paradox, a sort of deranged mash-up of Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, and Miss Havisham; the likelihood of her being a Freedom Rider or part of the Hitler Youth were about the same.

  “Darling, I’ve sampled the rainbow—race, religion, creed, whatever that means. Don’t be a twit. What’s the Australian’s name again?”

  “Liam.”

  “Oh yes, Liam. He’s got the restaurant I like”—not surprisingly, Isabella was a big fan of Trio, just like my old boss—“and your little rendezvous was interrupted by the waitress?”

  “Well, sort of.” I had lied to Isabella about running out of the restaurant. It had been hard enough for me to talk about in the first place, and certainly the truth—that I had aborted the mission the minute we kissed—was not going to impress her. So I fudged the story a little, saying that a waitress, there to pick up her paycheck, had interrupted our tryst.

  “Then I think you have to see him again, no? He sounds like a good time. And very good-looking.”

  “He is good-looking. He’s about eighty thousand miles out of my league good-looking.”

  “Pfft.” She shook her head. “You kissed, it was good, who cares?”

  “I just don’t think getting involved with a sex addict is a good idea. I’d feel like a drug dealer giving heroin to a junkie… low-grade heroin. And then one day he would wake up and realize how much better he could do when the supermodel down the street offered him way better stuff, and then I’d be screwed. He would change dealers, break my heart, end of story.”

  “Nonsense! You just graduated college. Live a little. Here, have a puff.” She held out her little white tube as if it promised emotional maturity in addition to smoke-free nicotine.

  I took the e-cig to oblige her. Isabella was obviously proud of herself for adopting this cutting-edge vice, and who was I to shatter her illusion of coolness? Nicotine had never really done it for me; when I had dabbled with smoking as a teenager, I had found it supremely less interesting than eating lots of food and determined my money would never have to be wasted on such an expensive trifle.

  After a quick drag, I handed it back. “I don’t know.”

  “Does he make you feel comfortable? When you’re with him?”

  “Strangely enough, yes. I mean other than the butterflies.”

  To this, Isabella pretended to face-plant on the patio table, hovering her nose inches from its dusty surface. “Young lady, have I taught you nothing?”

  “What?”

  Isabella groaned as she straightened back up. “This is not an opportunity you pass up, my dear.”

  “But I’m not like you.” I smiled, hoping I didn’t sound too judgmental. “I don’t just jump at opportunities. I’m too afraid of the consequences.”

  Isabella responded with a bitter laugh. “You’ll learn.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She shrugged and turned her head, eyeing one of her female neighbors as she passed on a golf cart. “Ugh, tell me I don’t look that old.”

  * * *

  That night, I tossed and turned, unable to sleep with Isabella’s words still ringing through my head. What did she mean, “You’ll learn”? How was she so convinced that I was letting something important pass me by? Usually I took her life advice with a grain of salt. She came from such a different world than me that most of her axioms (“Never wear red lipstick before five o’clock,” or “Flatware sets should be six pieces, not five”) did not apply. But her attitude about Liam had been markedly assured. Despite eighty-five years of life experience, she wasn’t warning me to steer clear of him, even though I had painted him as a potential train wreck. I had even told her the part about the Craigslist prostitute, to which she didn’t bat an eye. Not that I had always considered her a mentor per se, but I listened to her input at least as much as I listened to my own mother’s, who represented the exact opposite of the spectrum, always encouraging me to protect my heart above all else. Between the two of them, I had probably developed quite the Madonna/whore complex without even knowing it. The problem this time was that I had only confided in Isabella, so she was the only voice in my head—or devil on my shoulder, depending on how I looked at it…

  * * *

  Friday, second week after graduation: Ocean View Baptist Church Overeaters Anonymous Meeting

  Topic of discussion: “Lost Causes”

  Calories imbibed: approximately 1 billion

  My second week at Julien’s had been more of the same—bouts of intense work and distraction followed by persistent daydreams of Liam. Actually, for the better part of the week, I had been working by myself in the library, making copious amounts of photocopies at a finicky Xerox machine and tempering the boredom with even more copious amounts of vending machine snacks. By Friday, I was feeling pretty isolated, not to mention bloated, and decided I needed to have at least the illusion of a social life. So after work, I wiped the Snickers smudges from the corner of my mouth and changed my clothes, determined to find the OA meeting I’d been looking for the night I had crashed the sex addicts’ group at Ocean View Baptist. This time, I will get my details right, I promised myself on the way there. The last thing I needed was another dose of sex addict confessionals, not to mention the sight of Liam’s golden boy face mocking me for denying his sexual prowess.

  Once I got there—to Chapel B, not A—the meeting itself went by slowly, and I felt myself itching to leave several times. My secret binging had been almost nonstop for the past week, while most of the people in the room were reporting great success with sticking to their meal plans and avoiding trigger foods, accepting a higher power, and taking it one day at a time. I could usually find inspiration in these intrepid twelve-steppers, but not tonight. Moving into Julien’s was supposed to mark a new start for me, health-wise, yet I had bungled it in a matter of days.

  This particular group, I discovered, liked to end their proceedings with a “gratitude share,” in which everyone in the room names something for which they are thankful. My opposition to public speaking—especially on bad days—was such that even this made me anxious, and by the time it was my turn, a couple of tears had already welled up in the corners of my eyes. What is wrong with me? I thought, glancing around nervously and kicking the pew in front of me as, one by one, the women seated in my row named the reasons they were grateful that day (things like “serenity,” “a week without chocolate,” or my personal favorite, the ever-cliché “my cat”). My eyes searched for the moderator and I raised my hand halfway, wanting to opt out of the gratitude share the way I had opted out of high school gym with a doctor’s note so I wouldn’t have to change in the girls’ locker room. But when it came time for me to speak, the moderator hadn’t seen my hand, and I was too cowardly to dissent.

  “Hi, my name is Mischa,”
I said in a shaky voice.

  “Hi, Mischa,” the sympathetic crowd responded.

  “I guess… today… I’m thankful for…” I glanced around at the waiting faces, annoyed with myself for not preparing an answer. Do not say pizza. Or ice cream. Especially not ice cream. Each second that passed made me feel like more and more of an ingrate. Which is perhaps why I answered the way I did. “My father,” I said.

  Wait, wha…? I almost shook my head in time with the words as they came out of my mouth, having no idea what I thought I was talking about. When asked to name one thing I was thankful for, I came up with the derelict parent who had opted out of my life fourteen years ago, the one my mother and I now laughingly referred to as “the charismatic cult leader.” Was this opposite day? Why couldn’t I have thanked my mother, who had toiled and sacrificed and been there for me through thick and thin? For some reason, she was not who my subconscious came up with in the heat of the moment. Instead, I named my father, who had ghosted on me when I was eight years old. Okeydokey, Mischa. I guess you’ve finally lost it.

  Regardless of my answer being haphazard and basically wrong, I was met with smiles of encouragement during the gratitude share. A big-haired, blue-eyed woman named Dawn, who smelled heavily of rose perfume, came up to me after the meeting to thank me for mentioning my dad and lament how much fathers tended to get a bad rap in these meetings. Of course I had no words to respond. I couldn’t explain why I’d said it or burst her bubble with the truth that my father was a deadbeat just like everyone else’s here. As Dawn started talking about her third step and how much difficulty she was having turning her life over to God, the room started to close in on me a little bit. I knew nothing about the Twelve Steps, beyond having them memorized. I had never worked them—had never even considered it, really.