Chapter 8

Tommy’s turn:

A text from Mimi. I honestly was surprised. Last night ended in tears. I tried to tell her that I wanted us to be more than friends to each other, she broke down into tears, sobbed about she wasn’t the person I deserve and me being the astute employer of effective conversation, I couldn’t come up with a counter. We barely hugged when I dropped her off.

I didn’t sleep most of the night. I am affected by this girl. I cannot quantify the reasons. I can’t plot the feelings on a graph nor can I do much for an enumerated list past ‘cute, smart, funny’. I work around a lot of ‘cute, smart, funny’ girls. Every one of them is married. I want my own.

Mimi telling me I was wrong in assuming that she was going to be that girl tore me up. If this is how it feels to be in love, I can vouch for it sucking.

Now I get a text that says ‘we need to talk’. I’ve had the ‘we need to talk’ moment before with a girl I really wanted to be with. What she wanted to talk about was that ‘you’re a good friend but... ‘

However, Mimi preceded her statement with ‘baby’ and suffixed it with a smiley face and a heart. I could possibly read a better range of outcomes from that bit of communication.

I want to be happy with her but I also want her to be happy with me. I think I’ve seen that already. There’s a tough part, though. She has to be happy with her.

I see the problem. Mimi’s too darned smart for her own good. Her life had some bad twists and she reacted to them in survival mode and made some choices that she deeply regrets.

I know her story, told to me in snippets starting on the day we first met. It isn’t a happy story, but I didn’t just dump her at a shelter. From talking while we drove from Florida back to Auburn, I sensed that she was a pretty interesting person and over the period of a few weeks I introduced her to the community.

Now she’s settling in, LOVES her job as super-nanny, the little ones love her, and the rest of us think she’s something good.

Ol’ big, dumb Tommy thinks she’s more than ‘friend’ material. Wanted to tell her that Saturday night. And it crashed.

So now I’ve got a little tempest in my head.

When I got finished for the day, I guess I was apprehensive. No, it’s not because I haven’t dealt with emotional and flighty women before. That’s the most prevalent kind, and I have socialized with a few. It’s just that I didn’t get that vibe from Mimi, so when it surfaced, it surprised me. It also surprised me that I found myself caring about it instead of just shrugging my shoulders and moving on. That part is cause for some internal inventory-taking. I haven’t been really active in the realm of dating, at least for a while. I find my work to be stimulating, the people I see five days a week are interesting, as is my work. There’s plenty of mental stimulation, very little drama.

Five days a week? Half the weekends I end up wandering into the community’s pavilion to soak up what happens there. The last few weeks, though, I didn’t wander in alone. There was Mimi. Mimi, to the point of ‘Are you ‘n’ Mimi a thing?’

I found myself wanting to answer ‘yes’, for certain values of ‘a thing’.

We’re not a ‘nine to five’ job at 3Sigma Robotics. Yes, we all drift in before eight-thirty. That part’s pretty standard. Quitting time, though ... A lot of us don’t know when to quit.

Today I know when to quit. I know that by four-thirty, the mommies from over at the engineering office will have put their computers to sleep and headed to retrieve babies, and babies having been retrieved, Miss Mimi would be done for the day and with Miss Mimi freed up, I could give her a ride to her apartment and take her to dinner.

And find out if I was to be that ‘he’s a good friend, that’s all’ while she decided to go looking up losers in tight jeans with room-temperature IQs. Mental inventory, Tom. Is that REALLY the person you’ve been hanging out with, these past few weeks?

Answer: No, I don’t think so. But let’s be serious. She DID slide pretty far off the tracks at one point in her life.

I was ready for anything. At least that’s what I told myself. The other night when she melted down, I think I melted down further. I’m supposed to be the quintessential young white American male, all about testosterone and shit, and that’s not supposed to happen.

Except when it does. I found myself back in my high school English class, studying poetry, and I found myself morphing from Robert W. Service to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a most disturbing thought. Also disturbing was the fact that the whole idea of thinking about poets was from conversation at work. Seems the Munchkins are prodded along by their English teacher, Mizz Lee, into broadening their literary horizons and Jerry’s and my and Terri’s and Vicki’s and Rachel’s meeting about articulated limbs degenerated into a poetry discussion because somebody, in Terri’s words, ‘had Kipled at work and we have to be VERY wary of Kipling at the jobsite’.

I pulled into Alan and Tina’s drive, expecting to go knock on the door to retrieve Mimi. I didn’t get a chance to get the door opened before Mimi came BOUNCING out, her ‘crash bag’ over one shoulder. Big smile on her face.

She popped the door open, launched herself though the car, planted a kiss on me.

“Who ARE you, and what did you do with the Mimi I left Saturday night?”

“THAT Mimi had some sense talked into her,” she said, tossing her crash bag into the back seat, then buckling herself in.

“Just like that?”

“Mizz Donna – surrogate mom,” she said.

“Oh.” I paused. “So do you need to go back to your apartment and change clothes?”

“Nah,” she said. “They didn’t befoul me today.”

“Good day, then?”

“Yeah. Those kids astound me, though...”

“What’d they do today? Differential calculus?”

“You’re going to have to SHOW me differential calculus one of these days, bud,” she laughed. “Or quit using the term to impress the ignorant.”

“So where are we going?”

“I feel the need to celebrate,” she said. “Perhaps a commemorative tattoo.”

She KNOWS how I feel about tattoos, so when my eyes snap right to look at her, she’s got that epic smirk that I’ve seen before.

“Gotcha!” she laughed. “Tommy don’t cotton to no tattoos,” she continued, broadening the accent for effect.

“You ARE in a good mood.”

“Yes. Mizz Donna explained the facts about timelines and life and stuff.”

“Mizz Donna,” I repeated.

“Yes, Cindy’s mom. Mister Bill’s wife. Mother to Elise and carrying Bill Junior. Who did a bunch of stupid shit before she leveled out.”

“I heard that she was a redemption story. Never pushed for details.”

“You never pushed me for details either, Tommy, but I’ve kept nothing from you; not when we first met, not since then. You know what I was. And you keep hanging round. You know. You. Keep. Hanging. Around. Obviously you didn’t do it ‘because she’s a whore and I can score some easy pussy.’ So the other possibility is that you like the other parts of me.”

“I have tried to demonstrate that, Mimi. Words are fine, but living it is better, I think.”

“Didn’t matter, Tommy. I was scared. I hate what I was. I thought you’d hate it, too.”

“I do,” I said. Another glance sideways, catching horror spreading. “But you’re NOT that. If you were, I would’ve never come back to haul you off the second or third time. But you are NOT that. You’re something very attractive to me in too many ways.”

“You always acted like that with me, Tommy. It’s just that underneath that, we both know what I was and I got scared that one day we’d be deeper into this than we are now and you’d roll over and think ‘What am I doin’ in bed with this whore?’ And you’d be gone and you’d be yanking my heart out when you did it.”

“I worry that you’ll look at me and think I’m not very exciting...” I said.

She snickered. “I’ve watched you play rugby. You’re not just exciting, you’re completely nuts. And Tommy?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re smart. Not just smart-mouthed. Really intelligent. I listen to you talk every day. I know that you don’t just bop your way through life and not notice and consider and think about things. You talk to me about them. I’d rather that than ‘Duuude! New Batman!’ any day of the week. You’re not the only one who found somebody attractive.”

“Then why? The other night?”

“You didn’t need a whore. You needed...”

“I’ll tell you what I need, Mimi,” I blurted bravely. “I need the Mimi who’s working on her education because she WANTS to. I need the Mimi who shows up in front of a bunch of very smart people and THEY see what I see in her. I need the Mimi that walks into a crowd and makes herself part of it in her own way. I need that Mimi that knows how to properly snuggle her way through a chick flick. That’s the Mimi I’ve been hanging out with ever since the days when you were staying at the shelter and we were going out to dinner together, and I really like THAT Mimi.”

“What about the old Mimi?”

“She’s gone. I don’t think the new Mimi liked her very much.”

“Hated her.”

“Then let ‘er go. You be the new Mimi and let’s get on with life.”

“That’s what Mizz Donna said. Said Mister Bill knows...”

“I’ve seen Mister Bill. Doesn’t look like somebody who’s easily fooled.”

“Are you easily fooled, Mister Dalton?”

“I can be led down the primrose path by cute brunettes with big brown eyes,” I said. “Call it a weakness.”

“Then you need to be darned careful that you don’t get led astray.”

“I try to avoid the conniving bitches who might do that,” I said. “I’ve run into a couple, you know.”

I had. Bring a girl to my apartment, let her look around while I attend to a bodily function or change clothes or whatever, then pay attention to what she notices and her observations thereof. Adverse comments on the number or variety of my library, books and music and movies, are duly noted and may have an effect on future interaction. Like making Tommy just pull off the playing field entirely until one horribly rainy day on the Florida interstate system.