A Package Deal Page 2

  As if I hadn’t even spoken, Mikey retorted with, “So, back to that fucking goofy-assed grin you’re wearing… wus the deal? You get lucky last night?”

  Why did I take this bullshit from Mikey? And take it, and then take it some more? Maybe it was because of the simple fact that ever since I’d met him, he’d always been one to blabber on and on incessantly—enough for the two of us, in fact, so there were never any of those dreaded awkward silences when we hung out together. Mikey DeSalvo had very simply been easy for me to be friends with; I’d never really had to put myself out there too much to satisfy him.

  He’d won today’s first battle easily and we both knew it. David (aka Davey-boy) DeSalvo would be the electrician whose price we carried. I called to mind my mother’s advice when it came to dealing with Mikey, “Robby, you’ve got to choose your battles with that boy.” Yes, Mom always knew best. Nonetheless, I had to smile. “I got a date with that sweet babe from last night.”

  He tapped his pencil on the blueprints two or three more times, harder than before. “You know, Rob, that love-at-first-sight shit just don’t exist. Like, no way in hell it does. And I’m not just shoveling horseshit, my man; there’s lit’rally tons of evidence on the net to prove it, an’ I done the research. But I’ll tell you what, and you listen good: lust at first sight is something I’ve got plenty of firsthand experience wit’.” Still staring fixedly at the plans, he rubbed his palm forward over his short, wiry black hair and then back again. “And that babe you showed me last night was lust-worthy.”

  “Whether it’s love or lust, well, let’s say I’m not willing to commit myself quite yet.” I ran my hand over my own cropped blondish hair, which featured a slightly longer tuft in the front, an exact replica of Mikey’s.

  “Well, take it from me and stick to the lust, bro. And that girl was a tiny little thing, but there wasn’t no shortage of T or A, which is what counts the most.”

  That wasn’t even close to the way I thought of Savannah, but Mikey expected full concurrence with his jaded opinion, so I nodded… and then I delivered. “And major bonus—she’s a blonde, but not too dumb at all.”

  “Well, that’s a crying shame. In my opinion girls’ tits can’t be too big and their brains can’t be too small, ya get me?”

  My voice grew harsh, even defensive, surprising us both. “Savannah’s beautiful, and I wouldn’t say she’s even slightly dumb.”

  “Sava-a-annah, huh?” Mikey drew out her name with a singsong Southern drawl that sounded quite bizarre when fused with his Boston accent, and then he chuckled. “I think it’s been way too fucking long since you got laid, my man.”

  “Who the hell asked you?” I meant the question exactly as it came out, but I softened its harshness by erupting into a quick bout of laughter. Then I handed Mikey the coffee I’d picked up for him at the convenience store and pulled the top off of my own to let it cool. “Anyways, I talked to her for a while—she’s a good kid. I’m going to take her to dinner tonight.”

  Mikey reluctantly lifted his dark eyes from the drawings. “Jesus, she looked on the young side, but… you gonna be doing a teenager? There’s a term for that. It starts wit’ statutory and ends wit’ rape.”

  “Christ, Mikey!” I nearly choked on my first sip of coffee. “She’s a fucking college student, maybe even a grad student. That’s plenty old enough!”

  “Okay, then. So this bitch is cute—young, blonde, not lacking in the two most important qualities a girl can possess: T & A—she got a twin sister for me? Preferably one who puts out?”

  If I was going to hold back from slugging him, I needed to refocus my mind onto business. “Anyways, you’re going to need to get a price for drywall and flooring.”

  “Sure thing, bro. That won’t be no problem.” Mikey started typing notes into his iPhone. “So, tell me, where you gonna take her?”

  “Um, I’m….”

  He lowered his unibrow and stared me down.

  “We’re meeting at… at a place near the college.” That response was surely not going to even come close to satisfying Mikey. “A diner.” I tried to make those last words sound very small.

  “That lame S-Squared place from last night?” He was predictably appalled.

  “M-maybe.” There was no use asking for his approval. I already knew I was not going to get it.

  “You get what you pay for, buddy. And if all’s you pay for is dinner at a shit-hole diner, don’t expect that bitch to fuck your brains out tonight, and that’s a fact.” Mikey was glaring at me now, shaking his head in unmasked disappointment. “Jesus, Rob… but at least you’re going out wit’ a female. I was beginning to wonder about you, man.” He lifted his wrist and let it fall limply in the universal gesture for an effeminate male.

  “No need to worry about my machismo, man. I’ve been saving it up, that’s all.” Confident that Mikey was going to now want to hear a detailed listing of what items were going to be on tonight’s sexual agenda, I decided to change the subject. I just wasn’t that sleazy and I couldn’t fake it well enough for Mikey to buy it—no sense trying to bullshit a bullshitter. “So talk to me about this little library job, Mr. Numbers. You know, if you land it, I’m going to reward you with a finder’s bonus, since it was your Great Uncle Tony who put it on our radar!”

  Chapter 4

  Robby

  FIDGETING with the popped-up collar of my crisp white polo shirt, I sat alone in a corner booth at the S-Squared Diner, trying to imagine how I could’ve possibly ended up at a less romantic spot for a first date. And I’d arrived here forty-five minutes early, as if there would be a line of hungry diners, all competing for the opportunity to enjoy a gourmet meal in the quaint ambiance of this extremely well lit, if I don’t say so myself, establishment.

  Okay, so maybe I was a smidgeon overeager for my dinner date with Savannah. Not because I hadn’t taken a girl out for at least six months. After all, getting RD Builders off the ground consumed most of my waking hours—I’d simply had no time to wine and dine women. And also not because I actually believed that I’d be, as Mikey would phrase it, “getting some” at the end of the night. I had absolutely no intention of jumping Savannah’s bones after a single dinner date.

  My nerves were acting up because this girl was actually interesting to me; Savannah just didn’t seem as one-dimensional as most girls did. Now I wasn’t going to lie; finding Miss Right had never been an obsession of mine. And that was an understatement. I’d figured this much out by my senior year of high school: the effort of trying to keep at an arm’s length all of the enthusiastic and hopeful future Mrs. Daltons just wasn’t worth the minimal pleasure I got out of a couple of dates and a quick trip to the sack with them. I was labeled as an “obsessed jock” and that was pretty much how the story went.

  More recently, particularly since college, specific titles had been bestowed upon me, including Mr. Frigid, The Ice Man, The Cold-hearted Snake, The Commitment-phobic Builder, R.E.M. (Robby the Emotional Nomad), Popsicle-Boy, The Money Hugger, and my personal favorite, Driven Mr. Dalton. There were several very distinct themes running through all of these lovely pet names. Yes, Robby Dalton was cold and Robby Dalton was ambitious. And I guess that was me.

  Nevertheless, here I was, still in the fucked-up game of love, my ass planted in a shiny pleather booth, the fluorescent lighting enhancing my forehead’s nervous perspiration to a less-than-subtle gleam. I guess being alone all the time sucked more than my urgent need to flee from time-consuming, predictably unsatisfying relationships with women. I shook my head to clear all of those evil nicknames out of my brain. Tonight was going to be different. It was going to be the start of something better. Because yes, I still had hope that the right one would come along.

  And then there she was, that slight feminine form crowned by a heavy mass of blonde ringlets barely held off of her heart-shaped face by a colorfully woven headband. Savannah’s appearance at the diner’s entrance proved more jarring than I had anticipated. I can’t say
my gut exactly clenched with unbridled attraction; it was more that my brain froze in fascination. Something told me there was certainly much more to Savannah Meyers than met the eye.

  Savannah strode evenly to our corner booth, and despite her small stature, long tanned legs emerged from her loose off-white skirt with each step. She was one of those hippie-looking girls, her draping tie-dye blouse gathered low on her hips with a loose chain belt. And although she was dressed like a trendy magazine model, her eyes were what caught my interest. Yes, they were a beautiful aquamarine color, but that wasn’t what fascinated me. Those eyes were light in color while being dark in spirit; maybe it sounded crazy and even fanciful, but that’s how I saw it. And they were shadowed eyes, hiding secrets I already knew I wanted to uncover.

  This evening, my first impression of Savannah, based simply on the expression she wore, was: a complicated woman leading a complicated life. And didn’t people say that first impressions are everlasting?

  Jumping to my feet, I briefly wondered what she thought of me. When she reached the table, Savannah pulled me against her side in a brief hug. The girl smelled good, like some kind of wildflower, or maybe even a whole wildflower garden. She overwhelmed my senses.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all day.” That cagey gaze met mine with a force. I didn’t fight my urge to stare back.

  “Same here.” It was all I could come up with. My cheeks burned.

  “Oh, Robby….” She shook her head, then smiled wide and for the first time I got a good look at the little space that separated her two front teeth. No, nothing about Savannah Meyers was conventional, but all of the details added up to a nontraditional kind of perfection.

  “Hey, Savannah, you look fantastic tonight!” So maybe that was a lame way to start things off, but again, it was all that came to mind.

  She didn’t thank me for the compliment. Instead, Savannah dove right into conversation. “You know, I used to work here when I was an undergrad. See the fry cook behind the breakfast bar? That’s Gus, and check out that waitress over there by the door….”

  After a quick peek at the portly, balding fry cook, I then looked toward the door to take in a matronly middle-aged waitress, who, incidentally, was glaring back at me with very little warmth. The woman smoothed back a few strands of unnaturally colored dark-red hair that had pulled free of a well-sprayed twist, narrowed her eyes at me, and then shifted her glance to Savannah. And as she did so, she burst into a grin of good cheer. “That’s Lil, Gus’s older sister. She’s worked here since he bought the place like twenty-two years ago, or close to it.”

  “I don’t think she likes me much.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. Lil’s not really a people person.”

  “I can’t say I’m feeling too many warm fuzzies coming at me from her direction.” I shuddered. “Don’t you think that maybe she’s in the wrong line of work?”

  What was that sound? Oh, it was delicious, an almost bell-chiming sort of… of laughter. And it was coming from between Savannah’s no-nonsense’s lips. “You’re funny!” she chirped with yet another bright smile. But after that moment of mirth, she quickly settled back down to business. “Gus and Lil are good people; they’re always the first ones to donate to my charity drives. They love kids, like I do.” One more time, Savannah allowed a brief, but fairly sunny, smile. “Oh yeah, and I hope you don’t mind, but I asked my roommate to stop by later to grab a bite to eat with us.”

  I shook my head, no, I didn’t mind at all if her roommate came by. She must really like me a lot if she wanted her roomie to come and check me out, I figured. And I was ready to ask her about how she’d said she loved kids when Savannah gave me an appraising look, as if she was a pitcher and was sizing up me, the batter. “Last night you told me you were a contractor, so tell me, what made you decide to go into that field? And then I want to hear about where you grew up.”

  To say I unloaded the story of my life in vivid detail would be an understatement. Sure, I gave Savannah a somewhat abbreviated version of “Robby Dalton in a Nutshell,” but it was not lacking in the pertinent details. After all, she’d asked, hadn’t she?

  Happy childhood in upper middle-class suburbia, check. Doting parents, married to each other for thirty years, check. Football, basketball, and you guessed it, baseball star, at private Catholic high school, check. Carefree, beer-drinking college career at a Boston technical college, check. Older sister married to perfect man with 1.75 children, check. Smooth transition from college to workplace, check. I guess it must have sounded idyllic, and much of it had been.

  And as I divulged my personal history, Savannah listened, pretty much on the edge of her seat, which just so happened to have been a booth. So enraptured was she by my little tell-all that I would not have been at all surprised if she’d pulled out her iPhone and started taking notes. In many ways our date was unfolding like a job interview; however, she was far more concerned with my upbringing than my work experience.

  But the questions she interjected into my soliloquy were not typical of those of other girls I’d dated, which were always along the lines of “What kind of car do you drive?” or “Do you own a house or just rent an apartment?” No, Savannah’s questions were odd. “Did your family sit down to eat supper together every night when you were growing up?” and “Who taught you to ride a bike?” Whenever I tried to bring the conversation back to the topic of my business plan or sports I’d played, she interrupted with something off-the-wall like “Did your parents get you and your sister a puppy when you were kids?”

  And the next thing I knew, I was blurting out the tragic story of how Waldo, our family’s beloved Golden Retriever, got hit by a car and died when I was in third grade. Those typically all-business eyes of hers actually filled up with tears.

  Enough already, I thought when I’d finished filling her in on the habits of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus in my childhood home. “So, where did you grow up, Savannah?”

  And that was when I met with a tiny, blonde, gap-toothed brick wall. “Oh, I went to school in Somerville, mostly.” Her voice was listless.

  “So you’re from Somerville?”

  “No, not really.” Vacant eyes stared past my head.

  “Oh… well, where’d you grow up then?”

  “Not too far from here.” Silence.

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “None that I know of.” More silence.

  I received similarly concise responses to “Did you play town sports when you were little?”, “Do you keep in touch with your high school friends?” and “Do you see your parents much?” In fact, her responses to those inquiries were precisely “No,” “Not so much,” and “No.” It was like pulling teeth; I simply could not get Savannah to put the “life-story-telling shoe” on the other foot, so to speak. And by now, her pretty ocean eyes had darkened to a point where they were completely unreadable. She seemed to become hard… and cold.

  Miss Frigid, I guess you could say. Takes one to know one.

  Out of sheer desperation, I turned my questions from Savannah’s past to her future. “So what do you see yourself doing in like, say, ten years?”

  At that question, my date lit up like the sky over the Boston Esplanade on July 4th. “Well, I’m getting my master’s degree in School Counseling, with a concentration in Family Therapy. My goal is to work as a guidance counselor in either an urban school or a very rural one….” She hesitated, and added, “I’m not sure exactly where yet.”

  “Wow, that’s cool.” I was king of the lame-ass comments tonight.

  “Yeah, it is cool. I still have about six classes, a practicum, and an internship left to complete, but I’d like to take some time off of school soon to do some service work with teenagers. I’m looking into that right now.”

  “What makes you want to work with kids?” For a minute, I thought I was going to see a return of Miss Frigid because her narrow-eyed gaze shifted up and over my left shoulder rather s
hrewdly, but then she tilted her head as if in deep thought, somberly reconnected her eyes with mine, and answered, “It isn’t easy to be a teenager, Robby. And some kids have it much harder than others. I want to make a difference for those kids.”

  BY THE time we were served our dinners, Savannah knew the concise, yet complete, story of my life, and all I knew about her was that she wanted to be a high school guidance counselor. Well, I guess I’d actually learned a few more pertinent details about her: Savannah was a liberal Democrat, she was more than willing to stand up for causes she believed in, she regularly volunteered as a way to give back to society. And she was passionate about helping disadvantaged kids. But I knew absolutely nothing about her childhood, which made me even more curious. Somehow, though, I knew the topic of her youth was closed, and I respected that. So I didn’t drill her with any more questions—for now, at least.

  Just as we were finishing dinner, I, along with everyone else in the diner with a pulse and functioning eyeballs, couldn’t help but notice an extremely good-looking dark-haired man step rather hesitantly into the diner. He stopped beside the cash register and then scanned the tables and booths urgently, as if he was looking for someone; that was when I caught a glimpse of his eyes.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say that I’d been Tasered. On the back of my neck and right over my scalp, my skin puckered and tingled in an involuntary response. And the air in my lungs got stuck there for a couple of seconds before I was able to somewhat forcibly push it back out. I also experienced another conspicuous, but thankfully only to me, physical response between my legs. It was immediate and gripping, not to mention disturbing. In all truth, I was completely overwhelmed by my own reaction to this… to this man. It was just I’d never seen eyes so intense, so striking. So beautiful, really. And I wanted badly to look away, but it was like I was trapped in those deep brown doe eyes, that were now fixed squarely on me.