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“How are things going down at the shop?” I worried about my aunt running the family business, Moore Farms Moonshine, all alone.
For generations, my family made moonshine. A few of those generations did it illegally, but these days it was all above board. My grandparents had opened up a little stand by the pier. All my life, everyone, including myself, had assumed that my father would take things over when Grammy Moore passed. But that hadn’t happened. He’d decided to retire to Greece with his newest wife five years ago and hadn't been stateside since. I assumed that fact had something to do with his shady business practices, but I didn’t have any proof of that. He hadn’t even attended his mom’s funeral, which I had to miss. I was covering the Cannes Film Festival, and my boss Alexandra made it clear if I left, I didn’t need to bother coming to work on Monday. Or any day after that.
I still felt guilty for choosing my job over the memorial, which was a big part of the reason I’d forced myself to get on the plane last night so I would be here for the award Grammy Moore was being presented.
“Things are busier than ever! We just added a CBD sweet tea.”
The “sweet tea” she was referring to was actually moonshine. For the past thirty years it has been Moore Farms Moonshine’s best-seller. People traveled from all over to drink it.
“I’m thinking about putting pumpkin spice latte on the menu, too. I’m experimenting with recipes. Have you finished yours?” Aunt Rhonda glanced around the table.
Shit.I’d left it in the barn. If I admitted that, she’d just run and get it.
“Have you given any thought about expanding distribution?” I changed the subject and crossed my fingers, toes, and eyes that she wouldn’t notice.
“Pshh,” she waved her hand dismissively. “I can barely keep up with the demand locally.”
“Right.” I understood that was the case, but the money she was leaving on the table was criminal. If she did expand and partnered with a distributor, it might take some of the pressure off of her. She could hire more staff and even a full-time manager.
No, Daphne, stop it!I shook my head. It was none of my business. My life was in California. I always had an entrepreneurial spirit; I’d even minored in business and marketing. But this was none of my business.
“How are things with you?” she asked. “Have you been dating?”
The only dating I did was on TV, and it was for a segment of the show called Dating in the City. Truth be told, I was taking a break from dating after a half dozen failed relationships andthousands of dollars in therapy bills. My breakthrough came when I discovered growing up with an angry alcoholic dad and a clinically depressed mom left me with both abandonment issues and had made me a people-pleaser. Not just your garden variety, oh-I-want-to-make-everyone-happy people-pleaser. No, I would totally morph myself into who I thought my romantic partner wanted me to be.
It started during my freshman year of college. I’d graduated high school early, so I was only sixteen at the time. On my first day of orientation, I met Christian, a goth kid with a black mohawk and neck tattoo. By the end of the week, I was only listening to death metal, goth rock, and aggrotech. I dyed my hair purple, got my nose pierced, and wore black lipstick every day for the entire nine months we dated.
Sophomore year there was Kurt, who was on the rowing team and in a fraternity. He came from an upper-middle class family, and my wardrobe consisted of plaid skirts, khakis, polo shirts, ballet flats, and cardigans. I pledged a sorority and learned to play chess and tennis so I would be able to hold my own when his parents came to visit.
Junior year, I dated Sven. He was a stoner, yogi, and Buddhist from Sweden. With him, I meditated, smoked weed, micro-dosed mushrooms, and, of course, converted to Buddhism.
As a senior, I was in a one-sided ‘open relationship’ with Giovanni, the poet. I never slept with anyone else, but I put up with him sleeping with over fifty other women at least in the six months we dated. Our relationship consisted of drinking wine, talking about our feelings, attending slam poetry open mics, and having sex. There was a lot of sex.
After graduating at twenty, I moved to New York for an internship at CNN. I was there for two years, and one of them was spent with Chad, a Wall Street stockbroker. I cooked forhim, cleaned his apartment (which I did not live in), took his clothes to the cleaners and picked them up, did his grocery shopping, arranged all of his travel, and even made his doctor’s appointments. I was basically his assistant, who blew him every other day.
When I got to Los Angeles, I met Bryan, who owned a CrossFit gym. To date, he was the longest relationship I’d sustained, coming in at just over two years. With him, I worked out six days a week, was on a paleo diet, gave up my one and only vice, Dr. Pepper, and watched ten to fifteen hours of anime every week.
All the men were polar opposites, yet the relationships all ended the same way… I got dumped.
After Bryan cheated on me and left me with a married woman, I took a fearless inventory, which led me to start therapy. It was there that I realized I never went into a relationship being myself. I was whoever I thought those men wanted me to be. I didn’t even know how to be myself in a romantic relationship. So, at the urging of my therapist, I decided to put my personal life on pause until I figured myself out.
The past few years, I’d been in a situationship, if you will. A friends-with-benefits arrangement with Kale Butler, an actor who was based in New York. I’d hook up with him whenever he was in town doing press junkets or working. He worked a lot though, which meant he was usually filming on location somewhere.
Kale was a method actor, and every time I saw him, he was preparing for a role—which meant he immersed himself in whatever the characteristics of his next part entailed. It was the perfect arrangement for me, since I never knew who was going to show up on my doorstep. A Roman gladiator, a blind musician, a firefighter, a monk, or a homeless drug addict. Hedidn’t actually do drugs for that character, but he did sleep on the streets for two months in preparation for the role that garnered him an Academy Award nomination.
I felt my aunt’s stare on me as I pondered whether or not to reveal that I’d been working on myself. I decided that would be a conversation better had when I wasn’t on the brink of barfing and had had more than thirty minutes of sleep. “No, I haven’t. I mean, not really. Only for work.”
She stopped glittering and lifted her head. One overlined eyebrow lifted as she asked pointedly, “Forwork?”
It didn’t surprise me that Aunt Rhonda hadn’t seen the Dating in the City segments onPulsesince she didn’t have a television or a computer. She did have a smartphone but preferred her landline and rarely went online.
“Not like escort work; it’s for the show. It’s a series on dating in the digital age in big cities. I’m doing LA, and we have people in New York and Miami also doing it.”
“How many men have you been out with?”
Math was not my pounding head’s friend as I tried to calculate the number. I’d done four shows and dated five men each time. “Um…I think around twenty.”
“Twenty men?!”
