Page 4 of Suddenly Dating
What?No! Lola was used to sitting quietly while other people talked, fighting off yawns, wondering about things like whether or not she should take up knitting, or what was up with North Korea, or what the difference was between barley and bulgur as they had both made an appearance in her salads recently. She wasnotused to talking, and was so surprised that it took her a moment to realize everyone was looking at her. She slowly sat up. “Me?”
“Yes, you!” Tamira chirped. “You’re so quiet, Lola. But I assume you’re in this group for the same reason as everyone else.”
“Aah...” Jesus, she hoped she didn’t have to come up with a good reason for being in this group because she didn’t have one.Sara made mesounded a little pathetic, even to her.
“By that, I mean, you’re divorced, right?” Tamira asked, as if Lola might have forgotten why she’d baked that stupid cake last night.
“Yeah... about a year now.”
Tamira nodded, and her head of amazing corkscrew curls bounced. She leaned forward, her arm braced on her thigh, absently clicking the end of her pen. “And?”
“And... it wasn’t very dramatic,” Lola said apologetically. “We just grew apart.” She lifted her shoulders, let them fall.
“That’s what happened to me,” Betty said as she studied her nail. “I realized that somewhere along the way Russell and I had gotten on two different ships and they’d gone in different directions. When did you get on your ship, Lola?”
“I, ah... I don’t know that I got on aship,exactly.” Lola hadn’t had to think about what went wrong between her and Will in a very long time and was suddenly aware how much she didn’t want to think about it now.
“So how did you know you’d grown apart?” Betty asked. “I mean, I had no idea I even felt that way until one morning Russell was eating breakfast.” She suddenly leaned forward and looked around the group. “That man ate the same cereal every morning of his damn life. Frosted Mini-Wheats! Can you imagine, every day for fifty years you eat Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast? Every morning, the same thing,munch munch munch munch slurp.” She shook her head. “I was standing there listening to that and it suddenly dawned on me—he and I weren’t on the same planet anymore.”
Everyone in the circle nodded.
Lola eased back in her metal seat, sure that Betty would take over. But Betty didn’t take over. She looked at Lola and asked curiously, “So how didyouknow, Lola?”
“Well, it had nothing to do with Frosted Mini-Wheats,” she said, and laughed a little. No one else did. It wasn’t anything like that—Will would never go near cereal. He was very careful with his diet. Lola fancied herself an excellent cook, but Will always complained if the meal wasn’t a salad and a piece of fish with some flax seed or some bullshit sprinkled on top. Whatever happened to lasagna? When did it become the bad guy?
“So what did it have to do with?” Betty pressed.
Lola swallowed. “I guess it had to do... with... a text message,” she said uneasily, and suddenly wished it had been cereal. How easy that would be!Will, we’re through because I don’t like your cereal choices.
“A text message? For who?” Tamira asked politely.
Lola crossed her legs. “It was a text message to Will from someone named Danielle.”
Sara suddenly shifted around in her seat, her focus laser sharp on Lola. “Atext? You never told me about a text! You never mentioned anyone named Danielle! What’d it say?”
“I don’t—”
“What’d it say, what’d itsay?” Sara demanded.
“It said...” Lola really didn’t want to repeat it, but she could tell from the way Sara was looming over her like a raptor that she had no choice. “It said,Babe, Ican’t stop thinking about last night.” And boom, just like that, Lola’s stomach dropped down to her toes.
She managed to get her foot crossed behind the opposite ankle.
“Wow,” Sara said, eying her like some sort of alien. “How did I not know this? What’d you do?”
What does anyone do when they see a text like that? She’d lost it. Just thinking about it made Lola’s heart start to pound, and she was suddenly overcome with an overwhelming urge to plant her face in a bucket of ice cream. “I talked to Will about it, of course.”
Three or four days later after she’d stopped sobbing hysterically, which was how long it took her to process it—meaning get up off the bathroom floor—she’d decided to confront him. Sara would have picked up a bazooka and fired away if she’d found that text. But Lola didn’t know how to use a bazooka, so she’d had to approach it a little more sanely than that.
“And?”
“And...” Lola scratched the back of her neck. “Will didn’t deny it.” Actually, he’d kind of shrugged like she’d found some old sweatshirt he thought he’d lost.Oh, that.He’d asked her to sit down like he was the principal and she was the B-average student, and then very calmly told her he thought it was over between them. He’d said he was sick of her family’s constant needs and how she couldn’t say no to them whenhehad Bigger Needs. He said a bunch of other stuff, too, like how Danielle made him feel alive or some shit like that. “I guess he grew a little further apart from me than I did from him.”
“Yathink?”Sara snapped, then threw up her hands and fell against the back of her folding chair. “See what I’m up against?” she said to the rest of the group. “This is how she is.”
“What do you mean, this is how I am?” Lola demanded.
Sara suddenly sat up again, planted her boots firmly on the ground, and leaned forward to Lola. “You’re tooniceor something. I don’t know what it is with you, but you always act like nothing is wrong. Why didn’t you tell me this before? And why are you letting him off the hook?”
