Somehow he had moved around the table and was holding out my chair, and I couldn’t even remember letting go of his hand. I sat down, in a daze. “You okay?” he said, smiling.
“Yeah, I just…. I guess I’m a little nervous.”
“Oh sure, blind dates are tough,” he said.
“Do you go on a lot of them?” I asked, wondering how it was that he didn’t know me.
“I don’t know about a lot. It feels like a lot. Maybe once a month, is that a lot?”
I laughed. “It’s about twelve more a year than I go on.” I was having this conversation with about a tenth of my brain, while the rest of me was silently freaking right out.
He laughed too, and then he looked me over for a long minute, and I was sure he recognized me. But no, because he said, “How do you know Jim and Shannon?”
“Well, Shannon has been my friend since high school. I grew up here.” I figured now he’d say, Oh yeah, you’re my stepsister Kathy. But still no.
“Really? I didn’t see you at their wedding,” he said.
“No, I had to miss it. I was still in Ethiopia.”
“Oh yeah, the Peace Corps. That must have been a trip, huh? What were you doing over there?”
The maitre d’ came back with a bottle of wine. He showed it to Mick, who nodded, and then the maitre d’ opened the bottle and poured a little bit into two glasses. He gave one to each of us, and I half expected Mick to say, No, she’s underage. Mick tasted the wine, swirled it all around in his mouth like they do in movies and nodded to the waiter again. They both looked at me, so I tasted it, swished it like mouthwash and nodded too, feeling like an actress in a play. The maitre d’ poured us each a full glass and left.
I half-whispered, “I don’t know a thing about wine. So this could be really good Kool-Ade for all I know.”
He laughed hard at that and said, “Believe me, Casey, it’s very good Kool-Ade.” He chuckled some more and then said, “Why don’t we order, and then you can tell me all about the Peace Corps.”
I picked up the menu that had been lying there. My heart sank when I saw the prices. I was pretty sure he was going to pay, so it wasn’t that, but the idea of spending that much money on one meal—I couldn’t do it. To my extreme embarrassment, I started to shake a little.
“I’m not very hungry, I don’t think,” I managed to say. “Maybe I’ll just get an appetizer.” Even the appetizers were in the twenty- or thirty-dollar range though.
He looked up at me sharply. “Don’t tell me you’re dieting,” he said. “If I date one more girl who can’t eat because she imagines she’s too fat….” Mick gazed into my face for a minute, and then in a voice like a caress, a voice I still heard in my dreams, he said, “What’s wrong, Casey?”
“It’s just—this is going to sound crazy—the prices on this menu! If we order wine and apps and entrees…the total…. It could probably buy enough food to feed my whole village in Ethiopia for a week, maybe longer.” I could hear that my voice was wavering. I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t start crying in the middle of a fancy restaurant.
I couldn’t quite figure out the look on his face. Finally he said, “That doesn’t sound crazy. It kind of makes you sound like…a decent human being.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make a big deal about it. I just got back two weeks ago, and…I just don’t think I can do this.”
Mick looked at me steadily all this time, and then tapped his chiseled upper lip with his forefinger. “I’ll tell you what. I want you to have a really good time tonight, without worrying about this. What if—however much we spend on dinner tonight, I’ll donate the same amount to the Peace Corps or whatever your favorite charity is. We’ll even send it right to that village if you want to.”
I blinked a few times. “Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll even write the check right here at the table and we can drop it in the mail on our way home, if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh, no, I believe you! I just…. I’m surprised.”
“Of course you know what that means, don’t you?” he teased.
“Um. What?”
“That if you really want the donation to mean something, you have to order the most luxurious, most obscenely expensive things on the menu. You can’t skip dessert. You have to really commit to being lavish and extravagant.”
I felt a smile start small and grow bigger and bigger until I was grinning across the table at Mick. He was doing the same thing right back at me. The longer we sat there, the bigger we smiled until the whole thing started to seem funny. Soon we were chuckling and truly laughing as we looked into one another’s eyes. He groped for my hands across the table and I joined my hands with his until our laughter went back to smiles again, and then nothing was funny any more. We were just two happy people holding hands. I was feeling pretty wonderful until I remembered with a jolt that this was Mick and he didn’t know who I was at all. I gently let go of his hands and the moment passed.
Soon we were discussing menu items, and how to plan our orders for maximum extravagance. I talked him into adding the amount of the tip to the donation check as well, knowing that he was just pretending to resist the idea. It was easy to talk about myself then—or about the last few years and my job. I didn’t touch on my family at all, of course. He told me about being an environmental lawyer.
“With our state lawmakers being in the pockets of the big oil companies,” he said at one point, “fracking doesn’t have a lot of checks on it. It’s so destructive, though. Suing the oil and gas companies is about the only protection the little guy has when a big corporation wants to frack his farm. That’s where I come in.” He smiled modestly, and I felt so proud of him. Not only had he managed to make something of himself in his chosen profession, he was doing important work for the greater good of everyone on the planet.
I must say, there were several points in the evening when I almost told him who I was. But I knew that as soon as I did, everything would change. He would stop looking at me with those admiring glances, stop flirting and laughing with me. He might even be angry that I had waited so long and wasted his time, not to mention his money. So I decided to keep it to myself for just a little while. To enjoy this one night when I could pretend that Mick and I could have had a life together. It wouldn’t really hurt anything. In a day or two, I decided, I’d text him, or email, and call a halt to this game. Or maybe I’d get lucky and he wouldn’t call me for a second date and the problem would solve itself.