Flamingo Diner. Sherryl Woods

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СКАЧАТЬ a Congressional aide. I’m sure he has friends he could call. We could double.”

      “Which date is this for you and the aide?” Emma asked suspiciously.

      “Second, why?”

      “That’s okay, then.”

      “What are you talking about?” Kim demanded. She sounded genuinely perplexed.

      “If it were your first, then you wouldn’t know yet whether his friends are likely to be awful,” Emma explained patiently. “If it were your third, you’d probably be breaking up at the end of the evening and that could put a real damper on things for those of us relegated to being witnesses.”

      “I am not that predictable,” Kim protested.

      “I could run through the list,” Emma teased the woman she’d known since their first year of college when they’d shared a dorm room. “We could start with Dirk, freshman year in college. I believe you made a list of his attributes and flaws after the second date and canceled the third. The pattern has been repeated more times than I can count.”

      “God, I hate having a friend who knows my entire life inside out,” Kim grumbled. “Do you want a date tonight or not?”

      Emma hesitated. “A Congressional aide, huh?”

      “He’s mine, but I imagine that’s where his pool of available friends comes from.”

      Emma hated politics. Living in the nation’s capital had given her a jaundiced view of the men—and women, for that matter—who wielded power as if it were their God-given right. They might come to Washington full of high ideals, but it seldom took long for them to learn the art of backroom deal making. As fascinating as it was to watch it all unfold, she had no desire to get too close to that particular fire.

      “Never mind,” she said finally. Another dateless night wouldn’t be so bad. She had a great book sitting on her nightstand. “Call me when you’re going out with an investment banker.”

      “You’re too picky,” Kim said, a charge she made frequently.

      “And you’re not picky enough,” Emma retorted, as she always did.

      “But at least I play the game. You can’t find gold if you’re not willing to sift through all the other stuff. Trust me, the right man is not going to fall from the sky.”

      “Try telling that to my mother,” Emma said, laughing.

      The story of the night her father literally fell into her mother’s arms on a dance floor was family legend. Don Killian and Rosa had been inseparable from that moment on. That was probably what had fueled Emma’s romantic expectations. She wanted that same kind of bolt-from-the-blue feeling to strike her one day. It wasn’t likely to happen with a guy who had one eye on the restaurant door to see if anyone important was coming in, and the other checking out his next day’s schedule on his handheld computer screen.

      “Kim, do you really like this guy you’re going out with tonight?”

      Her friend hesitated, then sighed. “He’s handsome. He’s smart. And he’s very nice. What’s not to like?”

      “Handsome is superficial,” Emma said, dismissing it. All of the men Kim dated were handsome. They were all intelligent, too. Some weren’t so nice. She was relieved to hear that this one was. “Nice is fine. Nice can be terrific, in fact, but I worry that you’ll decide that’s the best you can do. You deserve spectacular. You deserve fireworks.”

      “I know,” Kim said, her good cheer back as quickly as it had faded. “Which is why I keep looking. Stop worrying, Emma. I won’t settle for anything less. If I were willing to settle, I’d have married Horace Dunwoodie the Fourth. He was handsome, nice and disgustingly rich.”

      “But boring,” Emma reminded her.

      “My point exactly.”

      “Okay, then. Now I’ve got to get back to these boxes,” Emma said. “Have fun tonight.”

      “If I didn’t think I would, I wouldn’t be going on a second date with the guy. I have less patience than I used to. Some men don’t even make the cut after the first date.”

      “By the way, why haven’t you told me his name?” Emma asked. “Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the last time you told me the name of one of your dates was back in college. In fact, it was old Horace, who followed Dirk. There have been dozens and dozens of nameless men parading through your life since then.”

      Kim laughed. “Why make you remember somebody who’s not likely to last, anyway? This way, if I ever do call a man by his name, you’ll know we’re at least to the fourth-date stage. If I introduce you, you’ll know that picking a wedding date is imminent. If you recall, I had five dates with Horace.” She uttered an exaggerated sigh. “I had high hopes for him for a time. It must have been the size of his bank account that blinded me to his obvious flaws.”

      “At least you have a sense of humor about it,” Emma said. “If I had to endure as many bores as you do, I’d be totally depressed.”

      “There’s no point in crying, not when all it does is leave your eyes red and puffy. By the way, did you really call because you’re worried about your social life or is something else on your mind?”

      “Just a little homesick,” Emma admitted. “I couldn’t wait to get away from Winter Cove and Flamingo Diner and my family, but there are still times when I miss it all like crazy.”

      “Then you should have called home, instead of calling me,” Kim chided. “Do it now and tell your folks hi for me. Are they doing okay?”

      “They sounded good when I spoke to them over the weekend. I need to get down to Florida, though. I really do miss them.”

      “Then go,” Kim said, suddenly serious. “Take it from someone who’s lost a parent, you don’t get a second chance. I’ll come with you. It’s been a long time since you’ve taken me down there for a visit. There’s not a restaurant here in town that can make arroz con pollo as good as your mom’s.”

      “We’ll do it,” Emma promised. “The weather starts to break down there in October.”

      “October’s good. We’ll talk about the specifics when I see you Sunday morning. Bye, sweetie.”

      Emma hung up feeling better than she had before she’d called, even if she was facing another dateless night alone with a good book. There were worse fates. She could list at least a hundred of them while she was checking in the rest of the new inventory.

      But before she could get back to work, the phone rang. Wiping the sweat from her brow, she picked it up and tried to inject a gracious note into her voice. “Good morning, Fashionable Memories.”

      “Sis, is that you?”

      “Andy?” Her sixteen-year-old brother was a quiet, well-mannered kid who was not in the habit of making long-distance calls to chat with his big sister. “Is everything okay?”

      “I guess.”

      “You СКАЧАТЬ