Chapter 1

Virginia decided to offer on the house as soon as she saw the back yard. It was fully fenced, so she could just let Anax out in the morning to do her thing. It had a few rosebushes, a raised vegetable bed and a cute shed shaped like a barn, with a plaster pig standing guard instead of a scarecrow. The house was almost too big for one person and one dog, although it did have stairs, which might one day become a problem, but at least for now she could deal with it. And it had a south-facing garage, which she knew would be a major plus when winter came to Colorado.

She called Amanda to tell her she had found a house. Naturally Amanda didn’t pick up, so she left a message. Then she drove back to Amanda’s house, timing it carefully. Fourteen minutes. Far enough to feel independent, close enough to still be available for baby-sitting or picking up a stranded grandchild at an athletic event.

Instead of parking in front of the house, Virginia drove on to the nearby mall, where there was a Great Clips that accepted walk-ins. She was meeting a guy for coffee that afternoon, and it wouldn’t hurt to get a trim first. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to get the color touched up, but there wasn’t time for that. She didn’t have high hopes for this first date. On the phone he sounded like kind of a dork. But she applied herself to meeting guys, dorks and all, assuming it was not that different from a job search (apart from the fact that you couldn’t believe a thing they said about themselves), where numbers count. You have to kiss a lot of frogs. This one, another Dave, had said in his profile that he lived in Denver and had a high school education. After they had talked a few times, he admitted that he lived in Wyoming and was an engineer. She could understand why he wouldn’t advertise the fact that he lived in the middle of nowhere. Nobody would look twice at his profile. But why hide the fact that he was educated and skilled? He said he “didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention.” Presumably he meant women looking for a rich husband. Evidently the dating site experience was very different for guys from what it was for her—her idea of the wrong kind of attention was when they wanted to skip a few steps in the get acquainted ritual and go straight to the pay-off.

As soon as her hair was trimmed, she would work on dressing for afternoon coffee with an engineer from Wyoming. Something bright, becoming, and most important, clean. She thought wistfully of the boxes to come, now that she had an address to deliver them to. There was hardly anything she hadn’t worn yet in the suitcase she had put in the car two weeks ago in Minneapolis to drive herself and Anax to Colorado.

As she pulled into the parking lot of the hair salon shopping center, her left eye began flashing the way it did sometimes. She had looked it up under symptoms on the internet, and as far as she could tell, it was a migraine aura. Essentially she saw a circle of white exes that started small and grew larger in the space of a few minutes until it got bigger around than her eye was and disappeared. There wasn’t any pain, either during or after, so she parked the car in front of the hair salon and waited until she could see more or less clearly.

Based on past experience, the exes would be out of her eye in less than ten minutes. That didn’t mean her vision returned to normal though. She would continue to see flashes in and around just about everything in sight for the next three to five hours. Oh shit, she thought. It would have been nice to be able to meet the current dork under relatively normal conditions. She made herself a mental note not to finish his sentences for him. It was an unfortunate side effect of her visual disturbance—an irritating tendency, almost a compulsion, to see where the speaker was going and to show it to him, in case he didn’t realize it himself.

When she felt her eye clear, she picked up her bag by its denim shoulder strap, walked into the salon, gave them her name, and sat down to wait for one of the stylists to be free. Her phone dinged, and she glanced at the text from Amanda: Awesome! with one of those exploding emoji’s of congratulations. She was just about to acknowledge it when the phone dinged again, another text from Amanda: Can you pick up some Chinese for supper?

She sent a thumbs up, and immediately the phone dinged again. That will be Dave, she thought, letting me know he’s running late. Sure enough, it said, Horrendous traffic. At standstill on I25. She sent him a thumbs up too. Nice of him to let me know, she thought as she put the phone on airplane mode, figuring she had bothered everybody around her enough with all the dinging. It would, in fact, not give her much time before she had to pick up dinner for Amanda and the kids. She might want to invite Dave to come along. If all went well.

One of the stylists swept the hair up from around her chair, looked at the check-in list and called, “Virginia?”

Somehow Virginia knew that this person had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and was going to be hard to deal with. So she kept quiet and shook her head when Sherry looked around and caught her eye. She wasn’t sure how she knew the stylist’s name was Sherry; she must have heard one of the others talking to her.

Sherry impatiently moved on to the next person on the list and ushered her back. The client was super chatty, not pausing long enough to notice that Sherry was out of sorts, and Virginia could tell she wouldn’t even notice when Sherry was finished and the two sides of her hair didn’t match. Virginia breathed a sigh of relief.

A second stylist, this one named Hannah, came forward to check the list, and Virginia moved up to intercept her. “Hi, I’m Virginia,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

Virginia had never actually seen Hannah before, but something about her looked right. Again, she wasn’t sure how she knew her name, but it wasn’t worth worrying about. She settled back in the stylist’s chair, made a polite remark or two, then allowed her hair to assume the shape she was hoping for and thought again about what to wear.

What if this Dave didn’t turn out to be such a dork after all? The last time she had a coffee date with a guy, he backed out at the last minute, presumably because she had said, “let’s wait and see” when he suggested they go straight from the coffeehouse to the bedroom (before they had even met!)

There was a time when she jumped into bed with guys on the first date. Everybody did; it was called the seventies. It wasn’t a time she particularly wanted to revisit. Maybe she was a slow learner, but things just seemed to go better when you followed a few rules. So she decided, in advance, not to invite Dave home to meet her family tonight. Very few of her first dates led to second ones. Let time do its thing.

Speaking of time, she had a little extra, since Hannah had done a terrific job in, what? ten minutes? She gave her a big tip and made her way out the door, then stood in the bright sun shielding her eyes from the flashes glancing off the surface of her car. “Don’t. Get. In,” the car seemed to be saying.