sockets, I decided to stop looking like an asshole and go inside. The solid smell of boiling meat greeted me at the door like a gruff old man. Whuddayawan, I don’t have all fucking day.

“Heeehhh-looowww,” I yodeled, one hand gripping the door-frame.

“Yeahp,” came the answer from the next room.

I approached the main office the way a Discovery Channel intern approaches a den of wild hyenas in the bush—very carefully and with low-pay-grade precautions. Sticking my head into the room before the rest of me followed, I wouldn’t take my notepad out just yet—don’t want to frighten them into a stampede. Them was a seventy-one-year-old black man, J. C. Martin, and the boss of the place, “Dr. Ray” Charles Jones, who, judging from the juice of his Jheri curl, looked to be in his early fifties and definitely not a doctor.

Steak and onions. That, plus motor oil. Perfect. I was interrupting lunch. Everybody knows wild things act more so when they’re hungry. Dr. Ray walked over to a Crock-Pot on a desk littered with garage tools, stirring what was inside before introducing himself and his friend. “He’ll answer all your questions,” he said, nodding to where J.C. was sitting without taking his eyes off what was in the pot. I took out my reporter’s notebook.

“I know more about Jesse Jackson than Obama. He just popped up. I never heard anybody say anything about no Obama,” answered J.C. when I asked him the most profound question I could muster: Did you ever think you’d live to see this day? We went on like that for a while—me asking stupid questions and him trying his best to answer them without making me feel stupid. He sat with his legs so far apart I was in constant uncomfortable eye contact with his old-man junk. I played it off by pretending to be blind. He wouldn’t tell me what J.C. stood for, aside from “the closest you’ll ever get to Jesus Christ.” When it was finally over, he decided to do some interviewing of his own. Probably trying to show off.

J.C. and his wife had been married for fifty years before she died. Dr. Ray, who finally started acknowledging my presence, said he “got started early” and had eleven children before he was middle-aged. I scanned a shelf crowded with frames of cap-and-gowned girls and tuxedoed boys, while Ray checked on his steaks and onions for the third time. He mentioned his wife in the past tense, and I nodded, not sure how we got so off topic. But there does come a point after one has reached the socially preferred age of procreation when talking about one’s reproductive prospects with total strangers is not only common practice, but anticipated.

“Are you married?” asked J.C. as I was furiously scribbling down details. Something like—“Ray Charles Jones, who runs a ground transportation business in Columbia…”

“Ahhhh? No,” I answered hastily, looking up with a cocked eyebrow. I knew this would be coming, but not so soon. My coat was still on.

“But you’re looking for a husband? Right?” This was more of a biblical command than anything else. Make babies, not bachelor’s degrees.

Had I been looking? Had any of us? I wasn’t so sure. At that point, Dex and I were still in the “this could so work” phase. Everything he did was magic—making inedible eggs, writing impossible poetry. Imagining the look he’d give me just as the doors were opening for my big reveal on the day of our wedding was a treasured pastime. As was examining every inch of his Facebook wall. Happy to claim somebody, I was hardly concerned if he was that somebody, and ignored the faraway looks he sometimes got. Besides, a stared-at BlackBerry never vibrates or whatever. If I was out there looking all the damn time, I’d probably never stop long enough to find someone. In my head that sounded all feministy and liberated and logical.

Hiding behind a brief smile, I considered what to say to the little old man sitting in front me with the potbelly and splayed knees. He was waiting patiently for whatever answer I was searching for. How exactly does one look for a husband? Is there an educational game I should’ve gotten for Christmas instead of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Who’s got time to find Machu Picchu when there’s a man on the loose?

If I had screamed, “YES, yes. A thousand times yes!” would I be better for it or worse? Of course I