Page 8 of The Match

“Then it’ll look like a big round butt,” she says with a satisfied smirk. “And that, darlin’, will make you laugh every single time you look at it.”

I nearly spit my wine back into my cup. Drinks are never safe with Jo around. There’s no telling when she’ll say something that makes you shoot it out your nose.

“Where’s Gary tonight?” I ask later, after she and I have packed up our canvases and moved to the couch. Her painting is a masterpiece of bright, delectable fruit. Mine, a plump booty covered in an orange spray tan. I actually wouldn’t mind having this peach for an ass. “And why doesn’t he ever get dragged along on these hobby adventures?”

Gary is Joanna’s husband, and he is just as likable as she is. He’s a sixty-six-year-old journalist who can work from anywhere and loves his job more today than he did the day he started thirty years ago. Joanna and Gary Halstead are just the sort of people to make my mom and dad turn up their noses. Gracious me, do you mean he had to work for his money?

The Halsteads moved into the Charleston area about five years ago simply because they’d always wanted to live here. That was when Joanna founded Southern Service Paws. These people are as down to earth as the ground itself.

I aspire to have what Jo and Gary have—the kind of love where a man will still walk into a room and pinch my butt after forty years of marriage. And I know this from witnessing it a few too many times for my liking.

A mischievous glint enters Jo’s eyes, and she wags her eyebrows playfully. “Gary’s not invited because I don’t like to mix my hobbies. And he already participates in a very favorite pastime of mine.”

“Ew,” I say, dramatically shoving my face into one of her oversized throw pillows.

Suddenly, I’m thirteen, and she’s my mom telling me about the birds and the bees. Except the irony is that Mom never actually told me about the birds and the bees. She gave me a book and walked away, because Melony Jones doesn’t have personal conversations.

I remove my face from the pillow and toss it at Jo instead. “Gross. I don’t want to know about your nighttime hobbies with Gary!”

She catches the pillow, laughing. I know she takes great amusement in the fact that I turn red easier than if I were on the beach with no sunscreen, because she always, always, always takes her inappropriate jokes a step further.

“I never said they are nighttime hobbies. Honestly, Evie, where’s your creativity? Thinking like that is going to give you the most boring relationship on the planet one day.”

La, la, la, not listening.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good inappropriate joke. But from the first day I met Joanna and Gary, they became the parents I never had—meaning, the parents I wish my current parents were. Because of this, I absolutely do not want to hear about my surrogate parents’ bedroom endeavors.

I curl up in a ball in the corner of Jo’s massive couch and shut my eyes. This day has felt way too long, and now it’s catching up to me. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about the creativity in my relationship, because it’s starting to look like I’m going to die a lonely old maid. Just me and Charlie forever.”

I gaze longingly at Charlie curled up at my feet. There’s so much comfort in seeing him resting. If he is resting peacefully, it means I’m safe too—no danger of a seizure.

“He won’t live as long as you.”

My eyes fly up to Jo, and I take in her smiling face. If I had another pillow, I’d throw it at her.

She laughs. “I’m sorry! I was just trying to lighten your heavy mood.”

“By telling me my dog is going to die?!”

She shrugs. “My humor is dark.”

I shake my head in a mock reprimand and sink back into my corner. I wish my couch were this big and comfy, but that tiny love seat was hard enough to fit in my apartment.

“Joking aside, I have no idea how you’re still single, Evie. You’re gorgeous. Funny. Driven. Leggy.”

Epileptic.

“As it turns out, men don’t really like to approach a woman with a dog wearing a bright-blue vest with a patch sewn on it that says, Hi, I’m single, and occasionally I lose consciousness and convulse on the ground.”

I can see in Jo’s eyes that she wants to make a sarcastic joke about the patch reference, but she refrains and instead says, “I wish there were something I could say to make it better. But I know there isn’t.”

Reason number 12,345 why I love Jo. She’s been listening to people living with disabilities for the past five years of running Southern Service Paws, and she knows that sometimes people just need to talk and be heard—not fixed.

“Can we change the subject?” I ask, feeling a little too spent from this day to go down a deep, heartfelt tunnel.

“Sure.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch to mirror my position. “Tell me how your meeting went today.”

I groan. Maybe I should just go home. Apparently, there is no acceptable topic for me and my “I hate everything” mood tonight. “I wished him good luck trying to walk with his head up his ass.”

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