turn the water off at the street and a plumber drain the system.
It took a few weeks after that, but one morning The Awful Craig was gone. His lawyer, who’d dragged his heels for months, suddenly agreed to everything. Craig was marrying again.
That had been a year ago. So when Phyllis announced she wanted to date, the rest of the bridge group had their reservations.
“Why are you staring at me?” Phyllis asked. “I won’t make the same mistake twice. I was crazy with grief last time. Besides,” she added triumphantly, “Jane is going to make sure I don’t. She’s going to meet all my dates before I go out with them.” Phyllis looked at Jane. “I will date only the ones she preapproves.”
Phyllis’s announcement that Jane would be screening her dates was met with a fair number of objections, most of them Jane’s.
“How do you know there will even be dates to approve?” Jane asked.
“Because I signed up for an Internet dating service, and I don’t mind telling you, there’s been a lot of interest.”
“And what makes you think these men will agree to talk with me before they even meet you?” Jane pressed.
“Because I posted a profile for you on the service, too. They’ll agree to date you, and after you sort through them, you’ll introduce me to the winner.” Phyllis sat back, triumphant, while the other three stared with their mouths open.
“Phyllis, I cannot believe you signed me up for an online dating service without so much as asking.” Really, this was too much.
“It was easy. I had plenty of photos of you. I know your likes and dislikes, though I did mix in some of my own to make sure we could attract the same men.”
“And what made you think I’d agree to this?” Jane’s tone was sharper than she meant it to be. Phyllis had been through hell.
“You helped Helen. You tried to help Minnie. Why wouldn’t you help me? We’re friends.”
Good grief. How could Jane even argue? No wonder Phyllis was such a good attorney.
* * *
Back at home, Jane sat at the breakfast bar in her kitchen and powered up her laptop. Her photo beamed out from the top of the Getadate.com profile Phyllis had created. Jane had to admit, she’d picked a good one. It had been taken at her retirement party, hair done (then and now again, expensively, honey-blond), makeup on, the pacific blue of a beautiful silk jacket bringing out the blue of her eyes.
In combination, she had to admit she and Phyllis were quite the catch. She’d listed their interests: gardening and travel (Jane’s), along with gourmet cooking and golf (Phyllis’s) and, of course, bridge (both). She’d left off a few hobbies, such as watching trashy daytime television (Phyllis’s) and butting into other people’s lives (now apparently Jane’s).
There had been, as Phyllis said, plenty of interest. Jane scanned the profiles of Phyllis’s potential dates, who were, as her (and Jane’s) preference requested, all men between the ages of 60 and 75. True to their mutual zip code, the men were professors, consultants, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. Most were divorced, a few widowed. Many said they were retired, though others said they were “still working, though it’s not the center of my world,” perhaps unwittingly explaining the reason their earlier marriages had failed.
Their listed interests were pack-like: current events, sports, hiking, music. So many of them claimed a love of art it seemed that Internet dating should be unnecessary. If what they wrote were true, every gallery and museum in the Boston area would be packed with eligible men 24-7.
A surprising number had indicated their grown children lived with them. Given the men’s ages, these children were most likely in their thirties. Jane wondered if this was some sort of trend—men who didn’t live with their children when they were young now housing them long past their sell-by dates. Or perhaps these men were living in their children’s homes. Either way, Phyllis had wisely ruled these candidates out.
Phyllis had been busy indeed. Jane had four coffee dates lined up at forty-five-minute intervals on Monday afternoon at Peet’s Coffee in Harvard Square. There had never really been a question of whether Jane would help Phyllis. Of course she would. The bridge players were her oldest and dearest friends. She would do anything for them. Almost.
Jane printed the profiles and made notes on them much as she would have annotated a résumé before an interview with a job candidate. If Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple understood the whole of human behavior from observing the citizens of the village of St. Mary Mead, Jane had gained her skills toiling in the bowels of corporate America. Offices were like villages in so many ways, and the art of managing people was, in the end, the art of understanding what motivated them.
Prepared for the dates, Jane checked out Walden Spring. The photos on its website showed groups of smiling seniors, the very definition of “active adults 55+.” People with white hair but improbably perfect skin swung golf clubs, swam in an indoor pool, laughed over a card game, and tucked into gorgeous plates of food in a dining room that looked like it belonged in an expensive country club. Another page of the website showed the floor plans of the various units. Jane didn’t spend much time on them. There was no real information about the cost, just a discrete request to call or e-mail for more information. But it couldn’t be cheap. Not in that location, and not with all those services.
Jane glanced at the console phone on her desk, still hooked up the landline. She owed Paul Peavey an answer.
It had been thirteen months since Jane had “taken the package” (an expression that always made her think of a spy swallowing cyanide) and retired as a senior vice president at one of the mutant children of the company that was known, when she joined it, as Ma Bell. Retirement had come earlier than expected, but she’d heeded the advice of her long-dead great-aunt, who said, “Always take cookies when cookies are passing.” The subsequent rounds of layoffs and the diminishing amounts of the inducements confirmed this bit of wisdom.
In the months since Jane had retired, she’d cleaned out her closets, the basement, and the attic. She’d organized her photographs chronologically, her spices categorically, and her books alphabetically, by author. She’d traveled to Florence, Siena, and the Amalfi Coast. She’d planted a hosta garden on the shady side of the house, along the path Paul Peavey had trod to her office door that morning.
She exalted in her new freedoms. She didn’t set her alarm clock. She gave her corporate clothes to charity. In other words, she had done the things she’d dreamed of doing during all those years at work.
She’d stopped herself when she began sticking acid-free labels on the bottoms of her most precious possessions, explaining what they were; where they had come from; and why Jonathan, her only son and heir, should keep them. Trying to control him even from the grave, he would bitterly complain when the time came. Enough, she told herself. You’re not dead yet. If actuarial tables were any guide, she had twenty more years, a quarter of a lifetime.
The “favors” she had done for friends and neighbors, the little problems she had solved, had filled in her time. She had received flowers, pies, and breads, and even the occasional bottle of bubbly, but no one had thought to pay her.
Jane’s retirement was a comfortable one. With stubbornness and luck she’d recovered from the financial disaster that had come decades ago with the end of her marriage. A lot of her wealth was in her house; her neighborhood had gone from solid to insanely expensive
