I started this story Saturday evening, about a day before writing "Her Darkly-Shining Soul", but wasn't quite sure where to go with it. Looking at it late this evening something clicked, and this is the result.


Modern Love

If only their eyes had met across a crowded coffeshop, or they’d stopped at the same street corner and fallen in love while waiting for the light to change. That’s the beginning of a story you bore your children and grandchildren with at your 50th wedding anniversary. Appropriate ‘aww’ing would follow, as each of them imagined meeting the love of their life the same way.

Cheryl met Craig at the Laundromat. A shared love of Lawrence Block mysteries had broken the ice (just as the March issue of GQ had suggested it would, in an article entitled ‘Love In The Laundromat: Seven Sure-fire Icebreakers’. Block’s All The Flowers Are Dying was #4. Cheryl had read exactly one novel by Block, and she had done so in the week after reading the GQ article. Craig had done the same thing, giving them one more thing in common than either of them believed they had. Other than just going to the Laundromat to fall in love, that is. Of course, on such foundations great romances are not built, and this was no exception. Still, a $6.95 novel, $2.00 worth of laundry, and a quick bite to eat at the pizzeria next door resulted in six months of relative bliss, and only a month and a half of mind-numbing boredom before the relationship ended.

John was next, and quite a catch, he was. A bartender eleven years her senior who still shared his college apartment with three roommates while trying to make it as a painter. Even when he’d said it aloud, in not so many words, while pouring her the drink that would give Cheryl closure on Craig, it hadn’t sounded so bad. It was nearly Romantic, in a Bohemian sort of way. It was under the head-pounding light of morning that she discovered his aspiration was more in the Dutch Boy vein, than Rembrandt or Van Gogh. This would be Cheryl’s first and last one night stand.

Cheryl fell hard for the contractor who installed the new roof on her parents Lake Erie cottage the next spring. He was tall and tan and rugged and handsome and quite literally could guarantee a good roof over your head. It was his sense of humor she truly found engaging, though not as engaging as her mother always made a sense of humor in a man out to be. Still, there were moments when she’d wistfully compose the story of their courtship in a far off place (or near enough) to hypothetically tell her hypothetical grandchildren someday.

In the end, she got Jason. They met when Cheryl took a temp job at an insurance company downtown. His desk was directly across from hers, and he asked her to lunch her second day. He was nice-looking and good-tempered and generally pleasant to be around, and at the end of the day seemed to be someone she could contentedly spend the next half a century with (and his feelings were not unlike hers). So, no great romance, no “cute meet” as she’d heard it described in a film class she’d taken long ago.

Speaking of that film class, that was where she’d met Stefan…

Nice work. I liked it, Matt.