Page 13 of Meet Cute Reboot
I eye the bed closest to me, settling on an overgrown dandelion plant the size of a dinner plate. A sphere of cottony seeds flutters in the morning breeze. I know about those seeds. One puff and you spread them far and wide, hundreds of potential weeds dancing in the wind waiting to be fertilized. The dandelion might be a handsome flower if it weren’t for its bad habit of procreating beyond any reasonable sense.
“Not in my yard, you don’t,” I say to the dandelion like it can hear me. Verdict is still out on whether plants are intelligent. They can divide and conquer. That’s got to count for something.
I plunge my weeding tool into the dirt next to the plant’s base. The soil is soft, thankfully, allowing me to poke around until I hit resistance. I think it’s the root, so I jab a little further and apply some muscle. With a pop, the root lets loose and the soil around the dandelion mounds. I grab the flowering stem, careful not to disturb the seeds, and expose the root.
Yep. Easy enough.
I hunch over another dandelion and do the same.
The first time I cheated on a girl I was fourteen, a wanderer in the hallways of Hamilton Junior and Senior High. My voice had just dropped, and I had no real sense of myself. For some reason, the girls kept chasing me even though I barely showered.
I agreed to be Darcy Cawthrowe’s boyfriend. One of her cute friends came up to me at lunch and asked me if I would. My friends all had girlfriends, so I assumed it was the thing to do.
Darcy and I danced to every slow song at the Valentine’s dance, but she never talked, and I had no idea what to say. As we were dancing, I noticed Tiana. She noticed me back, and we kept stealing glances over the top of Darcy’s head.
A guy with any sense would have broken up with Darcy before making out with Tiana behind the bleachers, but that wasn’t me. I didn’t have sense. I knew you shouldn’t kiss another girl while you were some other girl’s boyfriend, but it didn’t fully compute until Darcy called me (we’d never talked on the phone before this) and laid into me. It was the most I’d heard her speak.
In high school, I made the same mistake again. Twice. The first time resulted in a slap across my face in the middle of a full cafeteria—henceforth known as the LukeRy melee (a bit of an overstatement if you ask me)—and the second time resulted in my phone hitting pavement before being crushed by a tire. I had a fun time explaining that to my mom.
By then I knew when you cheat on a girl, she gets angry. Really angry.
This was no deterrent. I simply learned to be more discreet. In college, I cheated on two more girls without getting caught. To this day, I don’t think any of them know. I’m not in a twelve-step program, but if I was, I’d owe at least four people an apology. More than that. A lot more.
The garden is in shadow but sweat still drips from my brow. I wipe it with my forearm and then dislodge another dandelion. There’s a pile of them behind me, but I’ve barely made a dent.I’ve focused my effort along the borders. If I want to move further in, I need to remove the sticker bushes first, so I can continue weeding without getting stabbed by thorns.
The first prickly weed lets go with a satisfying snap. Unlike the dandelions, which came up roots and all, this one left much of its carrot-sized root in the ground. I poke at the dirt to reveal more of the root, thinking I can grab it and strongarm it out, but instead I just break off another piece.
This weed isn’t playing games. It has a ginormous tap root or it’s a mere sprout off a large, buried tuber. Either way, fully uprooting it will take more digging than I’m willing to do today. So, I move on to the next spikey abomination and stab at the soil.
After college, I gave up on traditional relationships. I’d hang out with the girl for a month, maybe longer, and then I’d ghost them. Then I met Cassie. She was my waitress at the Mudroom, and I was immediately taken by her cute nose, her grin while she was taking my order, her curly brown hair, flawless skin, and the pink flush in her cheeks.
We went to The Oak Steakhouse on Broad Street for our first date. She ordered the most expensive item on the menu, the crispy fried lobster tail in addition to her cheese plate appetizer. I knew something was up when she ordered an eighteen-dollar drink and didn’t take a single sip. She did go through the San Pellegrino though, three bottles of it. I thought she was gonna start squirting water from her nose and ears.
“You’re messing with me, aren’t you?” I said when she had barely touched her lobster.
“Me? How so?” There was cunningness beneath her innocent expression.
“You keep ordering the most expensive things on the menu.”
She looked at me, her dark eyes penetrating. “I’m just a poor waitress trying to make the most of the moment.”
“You’re still offended by my tip?”
Cassie speared a portion of lobster, twirling her fork before wrapping her lips around it. “If I was offended, would I be sitting here?” she said, after tapping her napkin to her lips.
“To milk me out of fifty more bucks, maybe,” I said with a wink.
From there our conversation returned to my promotions business, specifically the local concert I was working on featuring a host of local artists. She stopped short of saying she would go, but she didn’t say no.
Our conversation was pleasant, a rarity for me on dates. She had a dream, a plan, and a vision to achieve it, and as she conveyed them to me, I held onto her sentences like a fish on the line. I wanted to tap dance under the table.
The way she rested her elbows and played with the cross necklace against her chest captivated me. Was that cross just decoration, or did it mean something to her? It was too soon to ask.
As I was signing the check, Cassie asked me how much I planned to tip.
“Eighteen percent,” I said.
“That’s all? She took our order, refilled our drinks, brought our plates and everything.”