Page 23 of An Introvert's Guide to Life and Love
He crunches into the peppermint immediately. My mom eats hard candy the same way. It’s hedonistic.
“What I’m trying to say is, don’t you want to make some friends?”
He finishes chomping on the peppermint and then says thoughtfully, “I’ve lived here for over fifteen years. I’m not the new kid in town, Mallory. I have friends. Or Lottie did.”
His last words hang in the air.
“So, do you feel like they were all Lottie’s friends? Is that why you’ve been…” I gesture around his kitchen and living room.
“Compared with her, who would want to see me?” He shrugs and grins, like it’s a throwaway comment.
Lottie did have a habit of stealing the show. She wore bright colors and had a megawatt smile. She also had this way of making each person she talked to feelseen. I always admired that.
“Angela seemed like she wanted to see you.” I raise my eyebrows suggestively. Gramps just looks at me, his face blank. Perhaps it was insensitive of me to suggest a flirtation with another woman mere weeks after the death of his wife of sixty years.
“Sorry,” I add quickly.
He’s quiet for a while, returns to the living room to fetch his empty cocktail glass, and comes back to the kitchen. He opens the fridge and pours some more seltzer into his glass.
“Lottie was a social butterfly. We met at a party—a dance—inColumbus. She was a sophomore coed and I was a graduate student.” He twirls the ice around in his drink. “I noticed her right away. She was wearing a purple dress and matching purple shoes. She had a magnetic energy around her that made everyone in the vicinity drift toward her. Including me. I didn’t usually ask girls to dance. Maybe one at each dance, to get my friends off my back. But Lottie, I had to ask her. And she said—”
“On the condition that we do the mashed potato.” I’ve heard this part of the story a few (hundred) times before.
“I think she thought I wouldn’t know how. Maybe she wanted to get out of dancing with me,” he laughs.
“Not true. She told me that she’d noticed you on the quad and had been stalking you for weeks.”
He seems pleased by this, although he’s heard Lottie’s version plenty of times before. “Yes, she did say that. Maybe it’s true, I don’t know. Personally, I think I won her over with my mashed potato.”
And to my sheer delight, he sets his drink down on the counter and does a slow-motion, old-man version of the dance, shimmying his knees together with his elbows tucked at his sides. I burst into giggles.
“Like this?” I mimic his dance moves.
“Not even close,” he says. “Anyway, it’s better with the song.”
“Okay, wait.” I grab my phone and pull up the song “Mashed Potato Time” by Dee Dee Sharp.
“This is it,” Gramps marvels. “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. The internet did. Okay, now show me.”
He does the moves again, this time picking up the pace until his feet become a blur. I’m stunned. I’ve never seen anybody move their feet so fast.
“Holy… how do you…what?”
He’s beaming, wagging his head to the beat as his limbs do their own thing, like he’s possessed by the spirit of the 1960s.
“I practiced in my room every night after that dance.” He’s out of breath now. “Just in case Lottie ever asked me to do it again. The first time I just copied what she was doing.”
I try to keep up with him but I end up tripping over my feet and crashing into the counter, which makes us both laugh so hard we have to sit down. We migrate to the couch with our seltzer mocktails. Gramps flips through the channels.
“You leave on Tuesday?”
“Yeah. I have a meeting tomorrow morning with the property manager. Need to figure out the next steps with the house. And then—” I pause. “And then, yeah, I fly out on Tuesday.”
Gramps nods, his eyes on the TV.
“The Music Man.Lottie and I saw this on our second date.”
