“Did you at least get a good story out of it?” I asked.
“That bad?” I asked.
I winced. “What else?”
“Next time,” she said, finishing the last of the pistachio, “I’m bringing you. You can make faces at him from across the table.”
My mother doesn’t date often. After the divorce, she said she was “recalibrating,” which is a very mom way of saying she’d rather read a mystery novel in a bathrobe than suffer small talk with a stranger. But her friend Carol insisted. “You’re a catch, Linda. A whole marlin.” mother's bad date
We sat in silence for a moment. The clock ticked.
She sat down at the kitchen table, cradling the ice cream like a newborn. “He spent the first twenty minutes explaining why he doesn’t ‘believe’ in mood lighting. Said it’s deceptive. Like a menu with no prices.” “Did you at least get a good story out of it
“The final straw,” she said, taking a massive bite of ice cream, “was when he told me I’d look younger if I smiled more. And then he corrected my pronunciation of ‘bruschetta.’”