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Rebecca, unseen, somewhere in the fantasy section, cackled.
“You’re done, no more advice from you.”
Ariana rolled her eyes and walked away.
Rebecca had a different tactic. “I did most of my dating before cell phones,” she remarked fondly, leaning against the counter next to Gertrude’s register. “But we did use a lot of notes. I would send a hand-written note that smells of your perfume back with one of his little deliveries.”
“Okay,” Gertrude said. She liked it better than Ariana’s idea, anyway. “What should the note say?”
“Something filthy, of course.”
“Wha-?”
“'Stop sending gifts and finish in my mouth already,'" Rebecca said thoughtfully. "Say that. It should work on him."
“Rebecca!”
“It worked on my second husband.”
“Stop it! No more!”
Olivia was somehow worse. “You. Me. Dinner. Tonight. Pick me up at 8.” She thought for a second. “Add a heart emoji. So he knows it's flirty.”
"You text like a divorced dad, Olivia."
"Thanks, I learned from Rebecca's husbands."
Rebecca, somewhere in the dark romance section, yelled: "Hey! The first one was a writer! He was alright!"
The only one of them who wasn't single, divorced or “temporarily between boyfriends” as Ariana put it, was Nora. Her boyfriend Jay arrived early to pick her up, but they hung around together fretting over Gertrude’s dilemma.
“Well, what works on guys?” Nora asked him.
“If they don’t get attention from women, pretty much everything,” he said. He was a stringy, nerdy man who had square framed glasses that he constantly pushed back up his nose. Together, with Nora's round glasses, they looked like an advertisement for LensCrafter. “But if they’re a rich playboy then…” he took the glasses off, cleaned them, and replaced them back on his face. “He might be looking for something different. He’s been sending you stuff?”
“Cakes, flowers, notes,” Gertrude said.
“Oh, so he likes you. Maybe he’s into the whole “You’re not like other girls” thing.”
“I was pretty rude to him.”
“That can be hot. Nora bullied me in middle school. Changed me.”
“I did NOT!" Nora said hotly. "I laughed at your dumb Power Rangers shirt ONCE.”
“See?” Jay said. “Absolute bully. She does not respect the Power Rangers. I’m leaving her.”
Gertrude looked down at her phone. His number had been typed in; the contact saved. $Barret$ was already taking up a large chunk of her life and they’d only exchanged a few words. Would she soon be answering $Barrett$ texts? Building an association with that name in her phone? God, what if she got attached? What if he turned out, somehow, to be decent?
No, do not turn into an “I can fix him” girl.
“So, after all of this, the advice is to just be myself?” Gertrude asked her friends.
“Yeah,” Nora said. “Didn’t you watch Disney channel as a kid? That’s always the lesson.”
“No, I watched House of a Thousand Corpses.”
“Pretty sure that was on Disney channel,” Jay said.
