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“Chels, if you don’t stop blowing smoke, you’ll dry faster than I do.”
“Not the time,” she’d snarled. “And not the place.”
This was months ago. A lot had changed in between. Chelsea’s business had really taken off. She’d moved into a fancier apartment in the same building.
I knew why she wasn’t leaving. The flat’s super looked like he’d come out of a steamy romance novel. He was a tattooed, full-bodied, red-hair-in-a-man-bun kind of guy.
In other words, he was everything that Chelsea wanted in her partner. I knew he liked her too. But he was waiting for her to make a move.
And she was waiting for him to do the same thing.
While this went on, Padford’s kids got six months older and their antics got worse. Of late, they’d taken to flushing copious amounts of steamed veggies down her toilet.
Chelsea called me in the middle of the night last week saying that Padford had come crying to her because the super was out of town and “she couldn’t go potty”.
The poor soul had to be in her eighties. She wasn’t supposed to deal with these things.
“What did they stuff in her toilet this time?”
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Broccoli and steamed carrots. She’d been making vegetable stew. She was pretty stoked about it. Told me she’d learned the recipe from YouTube. Impressive, actually, given her age.”
I giggled. “And I’m guessing you had to go in and save the day.”
“I swear, Rors, that wasn’t even the worst of it. I tried to tell her she needed to stop feeding those pesky little rug rats veggies. They’re at that age when they thrive on Coke and chicken nuggets.”
“You’ll make a great grandma someday.”
“Hey, I’m gonna tell my grandkids I spent my twenties partying and getting high to Lana Del Rey. What else am I supposed to do right now? Anyway, she got really upset when I told her they hated her veggies.”
I resisted the urge to laugh out loud. “Chelsea! Talk about putting your foot in your mouth. Why would you say that?”
“It was a reflex, okay? And then she gave me this look—I swear Rain does the same thing when she wants some of my dinner—and I knew I had to backtrack.”
I was laughing so hard now that tears were running down my eyes. I’d also begun snorting like a piglet in a farm.
“She made you eat her stew, didn’t she?”
Chelsea’s face looked dramatically injured. “I had chicken wings waiting for me at home, okay? With glazed honey and red chili oil. And they were fried. And I had cold beer. But NO. I had to have two bowls of that stew. Can you think of anything more tragic?”
I patted her shoulder, feeling infinitely better than I had for the entire last hour. “I absolutely cannot.”
She sighed and looked at me from the rim of her cup. “So. I called Ali right after I spoke with you.”
Her handyman-cum-detective.
Ali was a short, stocky man with the most unassuming, dad-like face you’d ever see. He looked like a middle-aged stockbroker who worked at Wall Street and came back with a practiced “Honey, I’m home!” every evening.
But this was deceptive, because in real life, the man had literally eaten Agatha Christie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I didn’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily.Heloveddetective novels. He even had a little notebook where he’d write down his favorite fictional cases and make notes and bullet points on everything, from what the protagonist had for breakfast to what they wore to bed.
That made him an invaluable asset to Chelsea’s company. There were many cases where people came looking for partners for all the wrong reasons.
It was usually easy to spot the gold-diggers, theI need to marry because my parents won’t buy me a house otherwiseclub, and the ones who just wanted to get laid.
Chelsea hated these three groups. Her agency was primarily meant to bring people who were looking for commitment. That was her thing. If they just wanted a hook-up, there were a hundred other platforms they could go to.
Didn’t stop the occasional Chad from trying, though. One time, she had a man tell him he’d come to the agency to get laid because “girls who come here have to be desperate for dick, right?”
Ali was like the weeding machine. And he was fantastic at it.
