With a Little Luck: A Novel (19 page)

I notice Nat shifting from foot to foot as I get off topic. “Sorry,” I say. “Go on.”

Nat takes a deep breath. “Last night I was over there because his
email had supposedly ‘disappeared.’ How he manages to find new and inventive things to screw up on his computer is beyond me.”

“It’s kind of an art.”

“Yeah.” She rolls her eyes. “Art.”

“Maybe he just wants to see you,” I suggest. “Did you ever think it’s just an excuse to get you to come over?”

“No. Because I see my parents plenty. Can I finish?”

“Finish …”

“So last night I go over there to help him find his email, which as you can imagine wasn’t ‘lost,’ but he’d done some cockamamy thing that made it appear that way. So I restore his settings and then decide to check match.com to see if there’s anyone interesting who hasn’t already been on the site for the past seven years, and when I go to type the URL into his drop-down menu bar, a bunch of his ‘recently visited sites’ expose themselves.”

“Uh-oh …” I say.

“And I do mean expose.”

“Double uh-oh …” I say.

“Beyond double uh-oh.”

“How bad?”

“Not just regular porn. Asian girl porn. Asian teen-girl porn.”

I twist my face while trying to think of something I can say either to defend how this porn could have accidentally found its way to his computer (“I thought your dad couldn’t find a website on purpose if his life depended on it!”) or to perhaps initiate a fast subject change, like, “Look! George Clooney just walked by! With his arm around Matthew McConaughey!”

She goes on. “I mean … not just one site … dozens.”

So much for my brilliant defense. Your Honor, we’d like to discuss a plea.

“That’s … awful.”

“No shit!” she says. “Do I tell my mom? Do I bring it up to my dad?”

“Never talk to a man about his porn habits,” I say. “That’s a sure way to get rid of him.”

“It’s my dad,” she reminds me. “Much as I may like to right now, I can’t ‘get rid of him.’ ”

“Still applies,” I say. “I just don’t think you wanna go there.”

“Asian cheerleaders,” she says, with a look on her face like she just realized the milk she guzzled was sour. “Pom-poms and innocence lost.”

“What can come of it?” I ask, immediately regretting my choice of words, so I keep going. “You bring it up to him and he’s embarrassed and you’re condemning and God forbid you tell your mom and she hates him for the rest of their marriage—”

“Oh, she’s hated him since 1985.”

“Still. It’s a different kind of hate.”

“I’m horrified,” she says. “I can’t even look at him.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That is profoundly awkward. I feel for you.”

“It’s revolting.”

“Dads are handfuls,” I say.

“Yours gambles and thinks the sun rises and sets around you. Mine is a pedophile! Slight difference. I can’t even say ‘handful’ and ‘dad’ in the same sentence anymore without conjuring up mental images that will drive me right into therapy.”

“You already see a therapist twice a week.”

“And now I need a third day. This is not just horrifying. It’s expensive.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to find a bright side. “But he’s not acting on it, right? He’s just … looking …?”

“Why are you defending him?”

“I’m not. I just … He’s still gonna be your dad, so I’m trying to
soften the blow.” Why does every turn of phrase I utter somehow sound perverted in this context?

Nat sinks her head into her hands. “Can we talk about you again?”

“Yes,” I say as my cellphone rings and I look at the caller ID but don’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“So I was serious about wanting to go on a date,” he says. It’s Ryan.

I nudge Natalie and point to the phone, mouthing “Ryan” as I practically bounce out of my skin.

“Well …” I say. “You know where to find me.”
What does that even mean? Why did I say that? He just found me. Idiot
.

“Well … that’s what I’m doing now,” he says. “I’m finding you.”

“Okay, then,” I say. “Hello.”

“Hi,” he says. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” I repeat back, looking to Nat for help with my answer. She nods. “I’m, well … I’m on the radio from seven to midnight.”

“And I’m on the radio from four to seven,” he says. “So what about lunch?”

“I eat lunch.”

“As do I. Would you like to do that together?”

“Sure,” I say. “That sounds … fun.”

“I promise we’ll stay on the ground.”

“Otherwise you’ll be six feet under it,” I reply warmly.

Ryan tells me to “wear something nice” and says he’ll pick me up at twelve-thirty.

“You soooooo like him,” Natalie says the second I hang up. “I
could see it in your face. And your voice changed into your ‘I like you’ voice.”

“I don’t have an ‘I like you’ voice.”

“Oh, you totally have an ‘I like you’ voice.”

We stand in silence for a minute before I can no longer take it and am sure that I will explode from excitement.

“I have a date tomorrow,” I say. “A real one.”

Ryan arrives at twelve-twenty-nine, wearing a great-looking suit. He’s so handsome that he almost looks like he belongs on a red carpet somewhere. He hands me three lilac orchids wrapped in plastic as soon as I open the door. Three. A perfectly odd number.

“For the lady,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say, blushing. “Come in while I put these in something.”

Ryan follows me inside my apartment and takes a cursory glance around. I get self-conscious immediately, wondering what he’s looking at, what he’s thinking, why I still have that stupid bright green stuffed frog I won at the arcade two summers ago—what am I, fourteen years old? But my memory quickly relives the sequence of that night: I’d won the balloon-water-gun game, besting a thirteen-year-old—who no doubt spent about fifteen hours a day parked in front of a PlayStation—after eating not one, not two, but three cones of cotton candy (the third hadn’t gone down nearly as easily as the first and second, but two was an even-numbered no-go, and one wasn’t cutting it); after riding the Witch’s Wheel not once (or twice, which would have been unthinkable) but three times; after wasting three nickels on the wishing well (low percentage, admittedly); after watching the odometer roll through a triple
seven; after brushing my hair for three minutes with my lucky Vidal Sassoon brush. That little hopper was luckier than a squirrel in a nuthouse, as my dad says. It was my reward for doing everything right that day and a reminder to be vigilant about superstitions. So it wasn’t going anywhere.

“That’s a pretty dress,” he says, taking in the seventh outfit I tried on—a slightly nicer-than-average sundress with medium-heeled ankle boots. Moose loves the boots, perhaps a touch too much, which is why they reside on the top shelf of my closet.

“Thank you,” I say. “You look pretty sharp as well. Am I dressed okay for our destination?”

“You’re perfect,” he says, and I find myself wishing he was talking about me and not just my outfit.

I notice him looking over my shoulder at the horseshoe on my wall.

“It’s a horseshoe,” I say, and then wonder why I said it. Duh. He can clearly see it’s a horseshoe.

“Is there a story behind it?” he asks. “Do you ride horses?”

“I have ridden horses,” I say. “But not since … I don’t even know when. That’s not why I have the horseshoe. I mean … horses are great and all, but that’s not … I’m not a horse aficionado or anything.”
Can someone stop my mouth from moving? Jesus!

“Okay,” he says, with an easy smile. “I’m officially clear on what it doesn’t represent, then.”

“It’s important that the … you know, the curvy part, that the shoe be mounted upright, you see? Like so.”

And I trace the shape in the air, illustrating. “It’s to ward off bad luck,” I blurt.

“I see. And how’s that working out for you?”

Fine, until I stopped being able to form an intelligent sentence
. “It’s
working out very well,” I say, and then once I’ve placed the orchids in a shallow jade vase, I walk back toward the door. “Shall we?”

Ryan opens the car door for me and then walks around to let himself in. I wonder whether he’ll have a radio station on or a CD that will provide a glimpse into his inner soul, but when he starts the car … nothing.

“So where are we going?” I ask.

“It’s a surprise,” he says, and then quickly changes the subject. “Did you know that Big Brad Stevens does traffic on KRST in a fake voice under a pseudonym?”

Brad Stevens is our sports guy. He’s the most mild-mannered psychopath you’ll ever meet. I always exchange pleasantries with him in the hall when I pass him because I want to remain on his good side, and he has always been entirely pleasant, but I’ve heard stories about him flipping out, making interns cry. And there’s a rumor that he once got into a fight with Bill and tried to choke him. Which would explain a lot, including the giant dent next to Bill’s Adam’s apple.

“No way,” I say. “How can he get away with it?”

“He just does. A lot of people do it. He has a mortgage to pay and, well … KKCR—”

I interrupt him at that point. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me how pathetic the pay is at KKCR.”

“I mean … don’t blow his cover.”

“Are you kidding? You think I want to be on that guy’s bad side? He’s like Jekyll and Hyde, and with plenty to Hyde. And apparently he’s two different radio hosts as well. Fitting.”

“Now if he ever gets on your bad side, you’ll have something to
hold against him,” he says with a wink. I have visions of my blackmail note in uneven newsprint cut and pasted together in different fonts:

After about a twenty-minute drive—everywhere in L.A. pretty much takes twenty minutes to get to—we turn onto La Tijera and I start getting nervous. This is the way to the airport. If he thinks I’m getting on any type of aircraft with him, ever again, he’s nuts. I keep my mouth shut, though, and after a few short blocks we pull into a driveway, and wouldn’t you know it … Ryan has managed to outdo himself.

And by “outdo himself” I mean make a quasi-mockery of our date while further convincing me that he and I just might see the world through the same bizarre, twisted tinted lenses. Hilarious.