“Which is why you say you don’t have enough time to date. Because you’ll end up holding some grown man’s hand so he doesn’t get hit by a car while he crosses the street.”

“Bingo again. Ten points.”

“Oy. That’s bleak. You know, it’s kind of funny that this is the first time we’re really talking about dating preferences.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . never mind.”

“No, really, why is it funny?”

“I guess just because we’ve talked about pretty much everything else.”

“Not . . . everything, Eliot.”

“. . . Right. Do you think we’ll get there, JD?”

“I hope so. I really do.”

Chapter Nine

Jessie

I spend the next day catching up on work for Pops. Being at other people’s beck and call is not my idea of a good time, but he passed this job over to me when I moved down here three months ago. We need the money and the apartment comes with the job so when he proposed I suck up my pride and take over for him, I didn’t have a good reason to say no. The fact that he has come to really care for these people unfortunately also really matters to me. Because most of them I’d like to kindly request that they jump up their own asses. But for Pops, I answer their calls and run errands and do menial chores all day everyday. Because that’s what he’d be doing if he was here.

In my old life, Saturdays used to mean something. I was an office manager at an education-based nonprofit in midtown, and I was good at it. To just look at me, you might not be able to immediately picture me in a collared shirt and tailored slacks, but that was me. Buttoned up and ready for work. My coworkers were scared of me just enough to not come to me with trivial problems. But whenever they did need something to be fixed or solved, I attacked the problem ruthlessly. The office was always immaculately organized. Every piece of mail catalogued, every broken-down desktop computer retired and replaced, old food in the fridge, gone without a trace.

And then the weekend would roll around, and it was almost like the office absolutely ceased to exist. I’d cruise around Queens on my bike. Go to concerts, go on dates, go to bars. I’d work out at my old boxing gym and head down to Brooklyn to make dinner for Pops while we watched the Yanks or the Knicks, depending on what season it was. I wouldn’t even glance at the half of my closet that housed my work clothes. Weekends were when my real self emerged from the chrysalis for a glorious forty-eight-hour stretch.