One Date, One Man, Never Twice: My Rule After the Divorce novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Decree Day
The day her divorce is final Dee makes a rule to her sister, one date, one man, never twice, and a bike mechanic's hand lands on hers at the bar.
My rule was one date, one man, never twice, and I said it out loud the first time with my mouth full of pastrami.
Jackie stopped chewing.
We were standing at the counter of a lunch place near my office.
Nobody sits down for lunch in the produce yards at noon on a Friday.
I work the front office at a produce wholesaler three blocks away, and I had forty minutes.
"Say that again," Jackie said.
"One date. One man. Never twice."
"You were divorced yesterday."
"I got my name back yesterday," I said. "Dee Hrabosky, and nobody else's."
The clerk on the fourth floor of the courthouse had stamped the decree.
In the same line I had filled out the form that gave me Hrabosky back.
I had carried my husband's last name for twelve years, and it took one form and a pen on a chain to stop.
He had been gone for fourteen months, so the stamp changed nothing but the paper.
Still, I had gone to bed in my own rowhouse the night before and listened to every pipe in the wall.
"Okay," Jackie said slowly, and put her sandwich down on its wax paper. "Why never twice?"
"Because the second time is when they start getting tired of you."
She looked at me for a while.
My sister is forty-one, with two kids, a bob she cuts herself, and a Steelers sweatshirt she wears to funerals.
She knows exactly what Rich said to me at his mother's table, because I called her from the bathroom afterward.
He said I had run out of surprises.
Then he found a woman at his firm who hadn't.
"So you want a man a night," Jackie said.
"I want a man once," I said. "Then I want him to go home thinking I was great."
"And?" Jackie said.
"And I never want to find out what he thinks on the third date."
Jackie's face softened.
"You haven't been touched in almost two years."
"Thanks for the reminder."
"I'm not mocking you." She pointed a pickle at me. "I'm saying you'll freeze up."
"I won't."
"You'll sit in a bar with a seltzer and tell some poor kid about your sump pump."
I laughed, because it was true.
"Then start tonight," she said.
I opened my mouth.
"Butler Street," Jackie said. "I'll drive you and sit for exactly one drink."
"And then?"
"Then you're on your own, and I want a picture of the bar so I know you didn't chicken out."
I wanted to say no.
What I said was, "Fine."
The bar was a narrow place in Lawrenceville with a tin ceiling and a jukebox that only played songs from before I was married.
Jackie lasted one drink and half of another.
At the door she held my face in both hands and said, "Tell me the rules."
"One date, one man, never twice," I said. "Nobody stays till morning. Nobody texts after."
"You've thought about this."
"Since the courthouse."
"Go get your tire kicked," she said, and left me with my beer and a ten-dollar bill under the coaster.
I took out my hair clip, because it was Friday and nobody here knew me.
My hair is heavy and dark, and it has lived in a bun for most of my adult life.
It came down over my shoulders, and I felt every head in the room not turn.
I was standing at the end of the bar waiting for the bartender when a man leaned past me for a pint glass.
He wasn't pushing in.
The bartender had slid the glass down the wood, and the man reached across my arm to catch it.
His hand came down on top of mine.
It was a warm hand with long fingers.
Black grease was worked so deep into the creases of the knuckles that no soap had ever got it out.
He didn't take it away.
I looked at it, and then up at him.
He was young.
He had black hair that curled at the nape of his neck and blue eyes.
His nose was flat across the bridge from some old crash.
"Sorry," he said.
"You're not."
"Not very," he said, and his thumb moved once across my knuckles.
My whole arm went hot to the shoulder.
I had not been touched on purpose in so long that I felt it in my teeth.
"You fix something for a living," I said.
"Bikes," he said. "There's a shop on Polish Hill. I live over it."
"Name?" I said.
"Nick," he said.
"Dee," I said. "Dee Hrabosky."
"How old are you, Nick?"
"Twenty-four."
I let that sit.
I was thirty-six, I had a mortgage, and I had a rowhouse full of a marriage's worth of towels.
"I'm thirty-six," I said.
"Okay," he said.
"That doesn't bother you?" I said.
"Should it?" he said. He didn't smile, and he didn't lean in, and he didn't ask for a thing.
Most men my age would have asked what I did.
He just stood there with his hand over mine, waiting to see what I would do with it.
I turned my hand over under his, palm up, and let his fingers fall into mine.
I heard myself breathe.
I thought about the rule, and about Jackie at home in Carrick with her phone in her lap, waiting for her picture.
Then I leaned in until my mouth was against his ear, and I smelled soap, cold air and a little chain oil.
"I have a rule," I said. "Walk me out."
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