Not because my brother is a jerk, surprisingly, but because I was a bitch, I did not answer.
“He just wasn’t my type,” I said.
To that, she stopped on a scooter squeal and looked up to me.
Gert had curly gray hair, two missing teeth, three sons and a daughter who lived in different states and did their best from far away to take care of their mother, who flatly refused to move closer to her children.
And she fell in love with computers the minute she saw her first one in 1981 (she knew the exact year, and by the by, it was August).
In other words, we were kindred spirits two generations apart.
She budgeted everything from groceries to gas to electricity.
But she paid Charlie for tech support, because now, she lived on her computer with her email friends and her Facebook groups and her online forums, and if her system was down, her entire life was interrupted, and she was even more alone than her normal alone.
This being how we met.
And when I went to fix her computer and saw the state of her, and her house, bimonthly grocery shops and more than occasional trips to the likes of Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden, not to mention, me talking her into letting me clean her pad every once in a while, became part of my schedule.
I also talked her into giving up her yearly support payment to Computer Raiders, which felt disloyal to Charlie, but if something came up, she had my number. I didn’t charge, but that didn’t mean she could afford a trip around the world.
But for Gert and her fixed income, one thing loosening up for her meant a lot.
Another reason for my presence at the grocery store and our eventual trip to some family restaurant chain.
We’d have our usual discussion about it, but I’d be the one paying for both, and Gert would be all about the gratitude in order to hide her relief that she could pay her winter gas bill and maybe afford a haircut.
“That’s it. You’re in the doldrums because he wasn’t your type?” she asked.
“Do you want the marshmallow Milanos?” I asked back to deflect.
“Evan, talk to me.”
I focused on her to see she was very focused on me.
She was also worried.
“He was a great guy,” I said softly. “And I messed it up.”
“How’d a sweet, pretty girl like you mess it up?” she returned softly.
“It’s a long story,” I told her.
“Well, I got all day. But I know you don’t,” she said. “Still, I got all day, every day, and everything else on my body is goin’ south, some of it literally, but my ears work just fine. So, you wanna talk, I’m an old lady, my husband’s dead, but I remember the way it was and that it was hard work, finding a man.”
“I’m actually not in the market for a man, Gert. It was a blind date. I just…liked him.”
She tipped her head to the side. “And you can’t fix what you messed up?”
Mag had exited the premises with a slam of the door.
I doubted it.
But for his sake, I wouldn’t even try.
I shook my head.
Gert motored toward the Milanos, mumbling, “Shame.”
She had that right.
“Think about you,” she said, grabbing a pack of the toasted marshmallow Milanos. “I think about you all the time. Minute I met you, I was surprised you hadn’t gotten yourself claimed. But that happens a lot.”
She kept motoring.
And talking.
But I grabbed another pack of toasted marshmallow Milanos, and a double dark chocolate, both her favorites, because she’d be through the pack she nabbed in a day, but she also wouldn’t take three because she knew I’d eventually be buying them.
I tossed them in the cart, and she talked through it.
“Good ones, they fester, and I know why. And it’s a fool reason, men not wanting a woman who’s got a head on her shoulders and herself sorted. They gotta play the hero. They gotta be the fixer. They can’t be the one with the problems ’cause it’s all a competition for them and they can’t have their woman bestin’ them at somethin’. So the smart ones, the adjusted ones, they go to waste. And the men pick the crackpots, then moan that their woman is a hot mess when they looked right past that one who’d give them harmony.”
This sounded startlingly like my mother and Rob.
She shot me a semi-toothless grin and finished.
“I was a hot mess. My Stan sorted me out. Maybe you need to