A Girl Like You by vinnie Kinsella (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📕

rock climbing in summer, hiking in fall, and snow-shoeing in winter, all in a setting I didn’t recognize. Adirondacks, maybe?

If I could walk on an incline on a treadmill, I could snow-shoe, I told myself proudly, even though his pics showed him traversing rather big hills. The shoes looked large and extremely stable, so the possibility of tipping over and face-planting in a snowbank seemed low.

Nature aside, Wood—real name Macon—and I had a few things in common. We both had two grown kids, liked Mexican food, and liked to travel. As the icing on the cake, he lived right outside Meredia and was my true age.

“Have you met nice men?” Macon messaged.

“Not exactly,” I typed in, then deleted it. Try to sound upbeat, I told myself. “I just got on the site, so I haven’t had a lot of experience.”

Great. Now I sounded like a clueless newbie.

“There are crazy women out there. One woman I didn’t know from her pictures.”

Ahhh. So, catfishing happened at every age. Scary.

“Do you want to meet for a drink this weekend?” Macon messaged.

Did I? You bet I did. I liked that he was direct; it seemed confident.

We agreed to meet the next night, picking a pub about five minutes from my house and an equal distance from his.

This time I refused to get all worked up. I’d survived Michael. What could possibly be worse than being dumped by an angry pothead?

The pub was dim, but Macon was sitting at the bar close to the door and thankfully looked like his photos. He waved me over to him. I held out my hand to shake his, but when he didn’t return the gesture, I had to turn it into a half-assed wave back to him.

“Hello!” I said, already sounding too giddy.

“Hi, Jessica. I’s good to meet you.”

Hold on. Had he said “I’s?” And why was it so hard to hear him? The bar was mostly empty.

“You as well.”

“Vould you like drink?” Macon asked.

I realized it wasn’t that he was speaking quietly. It was his accent, so thick that he was almost impossible to understand.

“Where are you from?”

“Croatia.”

“How long have you been in this country?” I asked, signaling the bartender wildly, because a glass of Pinot couldn’t arrive soon enough.

“Tree months.”

“Well.” I began. “What do you do?”

“Fix medical equipment.”

“That sounds interesting,” I lied.

For the next forty minutes, Macon told me in excruciatingly precise detail how to repair ultrasound machines, including how to troubleshoot problems, what tools to use, and how badly his lower back hurt afterwards.

Between the language barrier and his techie talk, I understood almost none of what he was saying.

“How old are your sons?” I asked, trying to steer things back to common ground.

“They twenty-four and twenty-five. Not used to being around people. Don’t like go out. Stay inside.”

“All day?”

“Ya, day and night.”

“That’s kind of sad. If they got out, they would get used to life here.”

“Not veally,” Macon said. “They don’t go out muchly.”

Macon pulled his buzzing cell phone out of his pocket.

Without a single word to excuse himself, he carried on a loud conversation in Croatian, at times gesturing to me as if describing what I looked like. Twice, I heard him say my name.

A full five minutes later, Macon finished his phone call. I polished off my wine and stood up, bumping our knees together in the process. Macon put out a hand to steady me and I tried not to recoil from his touch, managing to turn it into sort of a side step away from the barstool.

As luck would have it, Macon’s car was right near mine. The short walk across the parking lot was agonizing.

When we got to my car, Macon pointed at my zombie leggings.

“I don’t understand the pants,” he said.

“No, I don’t suppose you would.”

“We do again?” Macon said, smiling.

“We won’t do again,” I said. “But good luck. Enjoy America!”

I’d tried to leave it on a high note but ended up sounding like Betsy Ross.

“No matter,” Macon said, turning his back and walking away.

My jaw fell open. No matter? I had just nothing to say to that. No response. Nada.

But I gave myself credit for weeding out one more frog, and after all, it was a great story to share with Eddie and the kids.

44

“So, I was invited to have a viral drink last night,” I told Ian while peeling potatoes in an attempt to make Cathy Kitchen’s frittata for dinner.

“What’s that?” Ian was at the kitchen table, slumped over his homework.

“You don’t know? I thought it was a thing. It’s when you sit at your house and drink, and they sit at their house drinking, and you go on WhatsApp.”

“What the hell? That’s completely stupid!”

“So it’s not a thing?”

“No, it’s not. And I’m not willing to sit and use an app while drinking beer in my living room, and if that means I’ll be alone the rest of my life, that’s fine,” Ian said.

“Geez, and here I thought I was missing out on a trend.”

“Don’t waste your time with that one, Mom.”

“Good to know,” I said. “In other news, I’m thinking of trying speed dating.”

“OK, this sounds interesting,” Ian said, pushing aside his books.

“As you know, the last guys I went out with turned out to be something completely different than what I expected.”

That was an understatement.

“I’ve lost track of your dates, to be honest.”

“There was Harold, the sad guy with no money who lost his hair during chemo, and then Macon, that jerk who talked about me on the phone right in front of me then said it didn’t matter that I didn’t want another date….”

“Oh yeah, right! The one with the accent? You couldn’t even understand him?”

“Exactly.”

I’d given it some thought and realized if I’d met either of them in person, we would both have known we weren’t a good match.

“The best way to meet a guy, I think, is to do it in person—you know, let it happen organically.”

Ian was unsuccessfully trying to hide his laughter.

“Yeah, Mom, speed dating seems pretty grass