got to.”
“You’ve always been good with children,” her mother had told her over the phone. “You were the favorite baby-sitter of all the kids in the neighborhood when you were in high school.”
“That’s because I was their only baby-sitter, Mom, since I never had any dates.”
“That is not true, Linda. What about Andy Hecker?”
“Yeah,” Linda had replied, laughing. “What about him?”
Andy Hecker wasn’t exactly boyfriend material. He was a gangly, pimply kid who preferred building monster models to practically anything else. Geek with a capital G. And all the rest of the letters in caps, too.
Still, her mother had a point. The kids in the neighborhood had liked her. She did fun things with them when she baby-sat. They played Twister. They made pizza from scratch, putting everything from peanuts to marshmallows on top. They stayed up late watching slasher videos.
“The boy will come to love you,” Mom said, “once he realizes his mother isn’t coming home.”
“I hope so.”
“I know so. If his father loves you as much as you say he does, the boy will come around.”
Linda heard the rooster crow on her parents’ farm and felt a little homesick. “If he gives me a ring as I think he will, you will come out here to Massachusetts for the wedding, won’t you? You and Daddy both?”
“Of course we will, Linda, honey. Would we miss our baby girl’s trip down the aisle? And to a man as successful as Geoff?”
They thought I’d never get married, Linda thought. They thought I’d be their old maid daughter. Hadn’t I always been the plain one, “little Linda”? Oh, won’t Mom and Dad be impressed with Geoff’s house, his car, his four published books?
Geoff was even more successful than Dennis Gunderson, the man Linda’s sister Karen had married. Dennis owned the largest chicken-feed supply business in their home state, and Karen had thought she’d made quite the catch when she snared him. Karen hadn’t gone on to college like Linda had; she’d never even left the state for so much as a day trip. But she was the beauty in the family, dark and sultry, busty and hippy. Everyone predicted she’d do better than Linda, and until Geoff had come along, Linda had believed them.
Linda remembered that day at the lake when she and Karen had been teenagers, both in high school. She would never forget it.
How could she? It was burned onto her brain.
Karen was one of the popular girls, with her dark hair and small features and delicate hands. “Cute as a button,” everyone called her. Linda was just small and blunt. Nobody called her anything.
“Oh, come now, Linda, don’t be a spoilsport,” Karen insisted.
But Linda didn’t want to go out with Karen and her friends to the lake. She knew what it would be like—Karen and the girls giggling over boys, Linda lagging behind, no one paying her even the slightest notice.
“Mary Ann and Jessica asked for you especially,” Karen pleaded.
“Right,” Linda said. “So I could lug the cooler.”
“They enjoy your company,” Karen said.
Her mother piped in, scolding Linda for being a “stick in the mud.” So Linda relented, heading upstairs to change into her bathing suit.
“You’re not wearing that, are you?” Karen asked.
Linda had slipped into a striped red-and-blue one-piece. “Why not?”
“Never wear horizontal stripes,” her sister told her. “Especially not across your butt. They make you look fat.”
Linda crossed her arms across her chest. “I am not changing.”
“Have it your way.”
Of course, at the lake, she did feel like a fat troll. She sat with her towel wrapped around her waist, a big floppy hat on her head, her eyes hidden behind large sunglasses. Karen and the girls laughed and chatted, practically ignoring her. When Jake Gandolfini—the hottest boy in the senior class, dark hair and cleft chin and muscles—stopped by their blanket, he kept his back to Linda the whole time, flirting with Karen and her friends.
“I don’t want you girls to burn out here in the hot sun,” he teased.
Silly little Mary Ann dissolved into giggles. Behind her sunglasses, Linda rolled her eyes.
Jake was grinning now with a devilish idea. “Maybe I ought to put some more lotion on all of you,” he said.
The girls squealed. Linda knew “all of you” didn’t include her. To Jake, she was just some maiden aunt. Worse: she didn’t even exist.
So, one by one, the three of them—Mary Ann, Jessica, and finally Karen—peeled down their shoulder straps so that Jake could slather their backs and shoulders and arms with Number 15 sunblock. Just before it was her turn, Karen looked over at Linda and seethed, “Not a word of this to Mom.”
Linda watched from behind her dark glasses, and the image has never left her. It summed up, perfectly symbolized, completely illustrated her life before meeting Geoff: the one outside, watching as the pretty girls exposed their skin, lined up for the handsome jock to touch them, each worthy in a way Linda would never be.
Until now.
“Congratulations, Linda,” Lucy Oleson tells her, clasping her hand in greeting.
“Thank you so much.”
“I thought ol’ Geoff here would never again take that matrimonial plunge, but you must have worked your charm,” Jim says, laughing.
Geoff kisses her warmly. How good it feels to be in his arms. He smells great, as usual: that heady scent of aftershave and man sweat.
“Hello, darling,” he says to her.
“Sorry I’m late. Traffic—”
“No problem,” he says, holding out her chair for her as she sits down. “We were just talking a little shop.”
“I just don’t see Ronnie Simms getting the position,” Lucy says, continuing whatever conversation they had been having before Linda’s arrival. “Not with his views of historical revisionism.”
“Well, he doesn’t view the construct in that way, Lucy,” her husband tells her. “He’s a revisionist with a proclivity for obduracy. Really, I would think that…”
Linda feels Geoff reach under the table and take her hand. They exchange small smiles. Is it any wonder she fell in love with him?
They met cute, as they say in the movies. She was getting into a taxi from one side, he was getting in from the other.
“Uh, I was here first,” she insisted.
“I flagged him down,”
