middle of a date. “That would have been rude! I was giving Cari my attention. But it continued until I assumed something very serious was going on, and I excused myself and went to the bathroom.” Dave called Liz and asked her what she wanted.
“I left some things at your apartment that I need to get.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“I really need to get my things now.”
The situation was exasperating. Liz was suddenly worried about a couple of T-shirts, a toothbrush, and some pans, items she had left at his place weeks ago and had gotten along fine without until now. “She wanted me to immediately drop what I was doing and go get her stuff. I told her I was on a date and to leave me alone. I went back to my date. We got done eating, hung out for a little longer talking, and then I invited her over to my place to play cards, watch TV, or whatever.
“We met at my place, we went inside, and we didn’t even get to sit down before my phone was blowing up again, and the security doorbell was ringing. That was Liz trying to get my attention.” Dave could ignore his phone but not the obnoxious buzzer on the security door. It was loud and grating, and there was no way he and Cari could have a conversation with all that noise. His intercom was broken, so he had to go to the building’s vestibule, where Liz stood on the other side of the locked glass door. “I need my stuff!” she insisted. “I want it right now!”
“You don’t need to come in right now!” Dave said. “I have a date in here.”
Red faced, with tears drifting down her cheeks, she stood her ground. “I need my stuff right now! I’m coming in!”
“I’ll bring it to you later.”
“I want it now!”
Defeated, Dave went back inside. “I’ve got a situation here,” he told Cari, explaining that a woman he’d been dating was nearly hysterical, refusing to leave. Later, he would remember what a good sport Cari had been about the whole thing. “She laughed it off. She said something like, ‘Okay! We’ve all been there! Call me when you get it straightened out!’ It didn’t bother her one bit.”
He walked Cari to the security door where a pouting Liz waited. He didn’t bother to introduce the women, and they didn’t acknowledge each other as he played gatekeeper. He let Cari out, and Liz rushed in. “Liz comes into the apartment and gathers up her stuff, and we have kind of a heated conversation. She’s upset, and when she finally gets her stuff, she doesn’t want to leave anymore. She wants to talk about it, argue, cry. She wasn’t happy with me at the moment. I asked her to leave. I wasn’t up to dealing with her. I was very irritated. Here my first date with Cari is ruined, and now I got Liz upset! At that point I just wanted to shut my door and call it a night! Not long after that, maybe ten minutes or so, I called Cari. She was on her way to her house, and she invited me out to her place.”
It was barely 9 P.M., and he did not hesitate to take her up on her invitation. He made the forty-minute drive to Macedonia and found her in her charming little house, smiling her beautiful smile at him as she brewed coffee. The two-bedroom house, built in 1870, had belonged to Cari’s grandparents, and they had sold it to her at a fraction of its value to keep it in the family. It was warm and welcoming, and Cari had decorated it in an eclectic style of antiques mixed with newer furniture. They had the place to themselves. Cari’s son, fourteen-year-old Maxwell, was staying the night with his grandparents in their nearby home.
Cari was perfect! Easygoing, beautiful, funny, and brainy! “She was exceptionally smart,” he emphasizes, confessing that he thought she was far more intelligent than he was, and he found that to be very attractive. “She had her shit together. That was at least as attractive as her being a very pretty woman.”
Cari handed Dave a steaming mug of coffee, and they sat down on the couch. This was the first time they had been alone together. The two minutes they had spent at his apartment didn’t count, because Liz had burst in on them almost immediately. There was no denying the powerful attraction between