The Sit Boy
Many Little Heartbreaks (Part II)
← The Sit BoyIt was late on Friday afternoon. Dixon was finishing a Zoom call in his still overly bright office when a text came in. The photos from the little temporary camera were ready for pick up at the photo processing lab. It had been a few weeks before Dixon had taken the film to get developed. He was still dealing with the pain he felt leaving Margaret waiting for him. He had no way to get ahold of her. It had become a haunting that lurked there throughout his days, occasionally popping up to compete with all of the other grief on his mind. Yet another message something was sending him, perhaps a message that he needed to get to thinking about.
The Zoom session was a team call to discuss final plans for a big event Dixon was preparing for in Las Vegas. It was coming up in a few weeks and things were getting tense as they always did in the closing phases of any event planning project. Millions of dollars were on the line. Many many people were now engaged. Executives were looking over the thousands of decisions people like Dixon had made with an eye on where they could put their little executive fingerprints. As the call was wrapping up, a private chat message popped up from a woman named Meg in the Dallas office.
Meg: “I heard you’re single now. Is this true?”
Dixon: “How did you hear that?” Dixon genuinely wanted to know. He had told almost no one. There was at least one person at the company that knew, but he wasn’t sure how else this would have gotten out.
Meg: “I’ve got my sources ;)”
Dixon thought about this. She was obviously being cute, but Dixon was being Dixon. He wanted to know her sources. This was his private business and he seriously did not want anyone’s pity.
Dixon: “Yes, it’s true. For a little bit now. It was very sudden.”
Meg: “Oh shoot, well, hey, I hope you’re OK. Can we grab a drink in Vegas?”
Dixon again thought about this. He had a hard and fast rule against dating, or sleeping with, three kinds of people: co-workers, clients, and the attendees at his events. Sadly, this ruled out just about everyone in his normal daily orbit. But he knew it was for the best. It could only lead to trouble.
Dixon: “Sure, I’d love to hang with you, but just know that I’m not single, single.”
Meg: “Oh, you started seeing someone?”
Dixon: “No, I mean, I’m not up for being single yet. I hope you understand.” He did hope she understood.
Meg: “That’s cool. I just wanted to see how you were doing,” she said, probably lying to either Dixon or herself.
Dixon: “Cool. I’ll see you in Vegas. Have a great afternoon.”
Meg sent back a peace emoji, a red heart emoji, and a galloping horse emoji. Dixon didn’t understand the last one, but she was from Texas.
Dixon got off the call and drove to the photo lab to pick up the pictures. Magnolia came along for the ride, against her strong wishes. She would have much preferred to stay on the sofa, basking in the soft cushions and she hated riding in cars. She mostly panted and shook on outings. Dixon told her to calm down and dragged her along for the ride. She begrudgingly acquiesced.
Flipping through the pictures, Dixon’s heart started to ache. There was the portrait of Margaret with her long coat and cowboy boots that he had taken outside the gallery. The portrait of him doing his Singing in the Rain thing on the lamp post. The wedding pictures. A picture of Margaret licking the sugar off her fingers outside the Krispy Kreme. He desperately wanted to lick something of hers, but it wasn’t her fingers. There was nothing in the pictures that would help identify her. He put the pictures back in their envelope. He looked at Moo Moo and said sadly, “well, that’s that. I guess we’re still stuck with a person out there that hates us.” Maggie tilted her head at him. He scratched her ear and said, “yeah that’s true. There’s at least two people out there that hate us.”
Dixon had developed something resembling a routine in recent months. There was work of course. He was also exercising religiously and was enjoying something that appeared to be ripples in the area of his stomach. Not a six-pack or anything, but progress. And there was the dating routine. The dating app got checked once in the morning and once at night. Bobby and Brooklyn checked it hourly.
There was a date scheduled, somewhere on the calendar, every week. Sometimes more. Bobby and Brooklyn had begun keeping score in a spreadsheet that Dixon did not entirely want to know existed. He had been forwarded a screenshot of it once, against his better judgment. He noted the elaborate points tracking mechanism. Good grief, he thought to himself.
He had told everyone, every match, in every conversation that progressed past the third exchange, about his ‘intentional dating’ thing. Some respected it. Some paused, recalibrated, and continued on. Some directly told him it was odd. One woman had simply written: Guys don’t say no to sex. You must be married. Another woman planted a big kiss on him in a parking lot after a first-date dinner, which he politely accepted. But he still carried forward with the idea that sex would just complicate things at this point.
Bobby’s next pick, he was told, had an amazing vinyl collection.
“Dixon. Dixon, listen to me,” Bobby said. He was speaking with the urgency of a man delivering news that he himself was excited to hear out loud. “This one is fascinating. She is mid-thirties. Maybe a little young for you, but she runs something cool in social media. She sounds extremely hip. She flies to New York every Tuesday because she has friends there that she says she can not give up. She has two thousand records. She knows all the music people. And she is, I am telling you, exactly . . . exactly the kind of person who is going to expand your worldview.”
Dixon groaned silently. She sounded too cool for him. But he loved music, so maybe they would have that in common.
“Bobby,” Brooklyn interrupted, “she flies to New York every Tuesday on whose dime?”
“Brooklyn, I don’t know, and I don’t care. And anyway that’s between her and her HR department. . . and maybe the IRS,” Bobby complained.
“I’m just saying, women who fly to New York every Tuesday usually either have an expense account or extremely bad financial sense.”
“Brooklyn, you are being negative. Dixon, go meet her!” Bobby said, raising his voice more than a little, which was directed more at Brooklyn than Dixon.
Her name was Sloane. Of course it was, Dixon thought. She had short platinum hair, cut at an angle and large blue eyes. The sweater she wore had been three different sweaters before someone with a strong design aesthetic, probably Parisian, took them apart and put them back together as one garment. The black skirt she wore was short in a way that implied confidence. Her boots were angular in a way that looked to Dixon to be expensive.
Dixon had accepted a date at a wine bar, even though he didn’t drink, because it was easier to just say ‘yes’ than try to find someplace alcohol-free and have to explain that situation for the 9,000th time. Sloane was sitting at a small table near a window, the light giving her hair a warm glow. Dixon captured a mental portrait of the scene, rather than pulling out his camera, which is what he wanted to do. Sloane had an empty glass in front of her and a paperback that she was making notes in with a pencil.
She looked up as he was regarding her, framing her portrait in his head. “You’re Dixon?” she asked brightly.
“Yes, I’m Dixon. It’s so nice to meet you Sloane,” said Dixon, extending his hand somewhat awkwardly. Do cool people shake hands, he wondered? She shook his hand warmly.
“You look like your photos. That’s very rarely true with dating apps,” she said. She was not wrong about this. Dating app photos were a genre unto themselves. Dixon thought someone should do an exhibit of images of people “as they show up on a date” side-by-side with the highly curated photos they have selected for their dating profiles. Often this looked like two completely different people.
“I do try to use photos that are recent. I don’t want anyone to be surprised when I show up,” he said.
She put a bookmark in the paperback. “That’s refreshing. Please have a seat,” she said with a hand gesture to the chair across from her. “What are you drinking?” she asked warmly.
“You know, I don’t really drink. I don’t mind if you do, of course. It’s just not my thing. I’m thinking maybe sparkling water today.”
“I appreciate that and that sounds very nice.” She raised a hand, waving to the bartender without looking, as if she did this all the time. “Sparkling water for him. I’ll have another of these, dear,” she said pointing to the empty glass in front of her. The bartender nodded and smiled from across the room. She turned back to him. “Tell me three things,” she said abruptly.
“Three things,” Dixon repeated. It wasn’t a question. It was more of a thought processing exercise in his head.
“Three things you actually think about. Not bio things. Thought things,” she added.
He turned this over in his head for a moment. Serial first-daters often had a routine. A go-to question they asked. An outfit they wore. It was likely a comfort for them in what they expected to be a nerve-wracking experience.
“OK, I think the dogs at singles’ dog parks might be happier than the singles,” he said, thinking quickly and feeling good about this first response. He kept thinking even while Sloane was responding.
“Oh that’s deep. And probably true. OK, two more,” Sloane requested.
“I am concerned that people are obsessed with Tame Impala in an unhealthy way,” he said. This was his attempt to both sound like he knew what a Tame Impala was and to insert music into the conversation.
“Debatable. They have resurrected a Bee Gees-esque sound that the young folk are attracted to. Anything that captures over a billion spins on Spotify is doing something right. And. . . oh, I have a song that you desperately need to hear. I will send it to you. OK, last one.” She said all this rapidly without taking a breath.
“I think I might have made a mistake buying a Toyota,” Dixon said with just a hint of desperation in his voice.
She laughed. Actually it was more like a snort. A short, surprised snort-laugh, the reaction of a person who had not been planning to laugh.
“Oh, I think we’re going to get along great,” she said, wiping a little tear from her eye.
Sloane knew music unlike anyone Dixon had ever met. The two thousand records were organized by something she called vibe lineage. Dixon needed her to explain it twice. As best he could understand, it was her own private tracing of who had stolen what from whom across half a century of recorded music. Of course, she had seen all of the bands he had seen. She had also seen many of the bands he had not. She had recommendations for him. She would hook him up with what he should be listening to next.
She explained that she flew to New York on Tuesdays and back on Wednesdays because her company had an office there and because she had friends there that she just could not lose. She had bought her house in Atlanta because New York City was too expensive. Her job was interesting and still there. The friends were also still there. Both were essential, though largely unrelated.
Dixon nodded. He understood the distinction.
After the second drink for her and the second big sparkling water for him, Dixon needed to pee. He went to the bathroom and carefully read the signs on all the doors in the process. When he returned to the table, Sloane suggested they walk two blocks to a smaller, darker, bar that she said would have better music. They sat in the back. It was moody and had a noticeably more intimate vibe. Sloane scooted close to Dixon to the point that their thighs were touching, side by side. She put her hand between his knees and gave him a deep look.
“So what are you actually looking for,” she asked.
“That is a big question. Honestly, I have no idea. Something. . . more,” he said, trailing off.
“That’s a refreshing answer. Most guys just pretend like they’ve got it all figured out,” she said.
“Something kicked me off my rock. Now I’m. . . I’m in transition.”
“Everybody’s in transition,” she said a bit more sharply.
“Yeah, I guess so. Mine’s just a little bit more expansive than most. How do you decide where to go next when you don’t have any direction in mind? I’m anchored here, but only by stuff. If I ditched the stuff, then nothing would be keeping me here. But I also wouldn’t know where to go.”
She watched him for a moment. He could see her considering him, considering what he had said. Her eyes didn’t give much away, but Dixon read it as compassion.
“You’re lost, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Maybe a little,” Dixon said plainly, not sadly. He just said it and he knew it was true. Then he added, “yes.”
A moment passed.
“Sex!” she said, suddenly. “We should change the subject. Let’s talk about sex,” she gave him a smile that told Dixon that her compassion was real and that she was moving on to what she considered a lighter topic.
“Sex. I’ve heard of it. I have a son. I’ve ‘obvi’ done it at least once,” he said disarmingly and trying to sound hip.
“What do you like? I want to know,” she said and scooted even closer. He could feel the warmth of her leg against his. She took her hand out from between his knees and put it gently into his wavy hair.
“You know, I’ve been on this ‘intentional dating’ thing. It’s like a diet, a diet for sex, I guess.”
“I know,” she said. “Bobby told me.”
“What? For fuck’s sake. Bobby told you?!” Dixon wondered what else Bobby had told her.
“Oh stop it. He’s your friend. He thought it was very gentlemanly of you and I agree with him.”
Dixon laughed. He laughed for a touch too long.
“Okay,” she said. “So I get it, you’re not ready to do the deed. Got it. But I want to talk about it.” Her eyes, the ones that generally hadn’t been giving much away, were giving Dixon a real deep eye fucking. “I will start. I’m gonna tell you what I like and then I will ask you what you like. Because that’s how I know if a person is interesting.”
Dixon considered this for a minute. He was definitely more interesting in this department than he had let on to anyone lately. He had experience with couples, group sex, and a lot of things that his suburban Southern neighbors would likely find quite upsetting, none of which upset his liberal/progressive Northwestern US mind. He doubted she would say anything that would truly surprise him.
“Okay. Go for it,” he said, giving her a good eye fucking right back.
Sloane put her cheek next to Dixon’s and in a quiet voice, dripping with sexual intent, she explained to him in the simplest and most plain-spoken way what she liked. It involved spanking, and the spankings in this case were not to be aimed at her ass, although that was fine too she assured him.
She told him this with the same casualness she had used to call the bartender earlier. She did not lower her voice, or glance around or act nervous at all. She was just a woman, staking a claim to her sexuality, in a very specific way. Dixon didn’t think she was trying to shock him and he wasn’t actually shocked. He just had questions.
“So. . . OK, I’m trying to picture this. How does that work exactly? I mean, like, are we talking with my hand. . . and how hard?” He actually had his hand out in the shape of a paddle and was kind of swatting at the air lightly. His Virgo brain was wrestling with the details, while his Libra sun wanted to give her exactly what she wanted. Wherever she wanted it.
“You’ll figure it out,” she said, “or at least we’ll have fun trying.” And with that she pulled him close and kissed him. Dixon sank into the kiss, which turned into something more of a make-out session. It went on for a good while. He had his hands on her cheeks and he was thinking that this was a person that really knew how to kiss. She was using just the right amount of pressure with her lips and just the right amount of tongue. He liked it.
A bartender came up and asked, pretty casually considering the scene in front of him, whether they wanted another round. Dixon pulled away and had to give his lips a quick wipe with the back of his hand. He was blushing. Sloane was not. She sat up straight, smoothed her hair, and looked like she had very much enjoyed herself. “Thanks, we’re good,” she said to the bartender, who walked away non-plussed.
“Too much?” she said, mildly. She seemed amused in some way.
“It is not too much,” Dixon said carefully. “It is, informationally, exactly the right amount. I just don’t think I ever knew that was a thing.”
“Maybe you haven’t been asking the right questions,” she said, and now she was genuinely amused.
“Yes, you’re right. I have, I am just realizing, not been asking the right questions.”
She smiled. It was the first fully unguarded thing she had done all night.
They talked for another hour about other things. Music, mostly. She told him he absolutely had to hear this new song called Wild Nights. It would drive him wild. It was not Tame Impala, but it was in the genre. The band was less known. Dixon promised to give it a listen on the way home. Dixon gave her the name of some of his favorite designers. People that made boots and sweaters that she would probably really like. When the bar staff started turning chairs over, he walked her to her car. They stood there for a while, talking, dancing around the awkwardness of whether they should start making out again, or whether someone was going to make a move. Dixon very very much wanted to, but he didn’t. Instead, as suddenly as she had done a lot of things that evening, she grabbed Dixon’s belt on either side of his hips, pulled him towards her, and gave him a kiss that literally made him stand on his toes. It was a kiss Dixon would not soon forget. When it ended, she backed away and looked down into her purse for her keys. She did not invite him over. She did not ask if he would call. Earlier in the evening she had said she did not believe in the part of dating that required pretending you didn’t know what you wanted.
“Look,” she said after she pulled her keys out of her bag. “I know you don’t know where you’re going or what you want. I just want you to know, when you finish whatever work you need to do, I’d be up for a hang again sometime. See ya’ round Dix.” And with that she turned, got into the car, waved through the window and started to drive away. Then she stopped and rolled the window down. “And you never told me what you like sexually. If we get back together again, I will look forward to hearing your answer.” She smiled, blew him a kiss and then rolled the window up and drove away.
Dixon drove home in the RAV4. He sat in his driveway for a full five minutes with the engine off. That woman is more honest than anyone I have ever met, he thought. I am not nearly cool enough to hang with her, but I would like to be that person someday. I am, currently, not that person.
He texted Bobby: Bobby. Sloane was indeed incredible as you said. She is also so far past where I am in my life right now that I cannot see her from where I am standing.
Bobby: Talk to me.
Dixon: I’m just not there now. Not yet anyway. Not because of her. Because of me.
Bobby: That is the most grown-up thing I’ve ever heard you say. And you have always been the grown up between at least the two of us. (Brook absolutely does not count.)
Dixon: I know. I hate it.
Dixon: Oh, by the way, you have to hear this song Wild Nights. It’s by some band with an animal name. She says you’ll be obsessed. You have to listen to it and let me know what you think.
Bobby: Dude, that chick is so dope. Wild Nights is a swanky jam.
He met Maria on a Saturday afternoon the old fashioned way. He was kayaking and so was she.
He had begun going to a small lake in the Chattahoochee National Forest north of the city on weekends. Brooklyn had suggested it. She had read an article about how, forty minutes outside the Perimeter, you could find quiet you could not find inside it. The lake was small. The boat rental was a wooden shack with a man named Earl who knew Dixon by his second visit and waved him toward whichever kayak he liked. Dixon had taken to going every Saturday he was in town. He took Magnolia. She rode on the front of the boat wearing a little orange life jacket with a pink bow attached on its back. She surveyed the surface of the water with the deeply suspicious expression of a small dog who had decided water was, on balance, not exactly her friend.
He was paddling along the eastern shore on a perfectly pleasant afternoon when another kayak came up alongside him. Its pilot was a woman with long dark hair, braided down her back. She had perfectly smooth skin and perfectly symmetrical features. Had Dixon asked one of his A.I. tools to generate an image of a “perfect 30 year-old Latina woman” a picture resembling this woman would have likely popped up on the screen.
“Excuse me,” she said, in thickly accented English: “Your dog?”
Dixon regarded her briefly and thought about saying something clever, but decided not to chance it with what might be a language barrier. “Yes, she’s my dog. Her name is Magnolia.”
“Very good . . .she. . . is,” she said haltingly.
“Thank you. She acts more like a cat than a dog most of the time,” he said smiling.
She laughed.
She wore a wetsuit zipped halfway over a bikini top. She paddled with an ease that suggested she had spent a lot of time on the water. Her English was deeply accented, but the accent wasn’t Spanish.
“Me am. . . Maria,” she said pointing to herself.
“Hi Maria. I’m Dixon. What language do you speak?” Then without waiting, in Spanish as bad as her English, he added, “Hablas espanõl?” He was hoping she might speak Spanish. His Spanish wasn’t great, but he understood most of it.
“Un poco, soy Brasileña,” she said.
Shoot thought Dixon. His Portuguese was far worse than his Spanish.
Maria was Brazilian. She was twenty-nine. She had been in Atlanta for six months for graduate school and was planning on staying. There was work here. She was making friends here. And going back to São Paulo had stopped feeling like the obvious thing to do. After fumbling with English for a bit, they landed on Spanish as a way to communicate.
Dixon had a natural aptitude for languages and he enjoyed the challenge. He spoke French fluently. He had learned it as an exchange student in high school, gone back again to live in Nice for a year in his twenties, and he could still, in a pinch, conduct business in it. Unfortunately, his Spanish was contaminated by his French. He pronounced the words the way a French speaker would have pronounced them. He put the wrong vowels in the wrong places. He gave the silent treatment to consonants that Spanish very much needed one to pronounce.
Maria’s Spanish was its own situation. Her Spanish had been contaminated by Portuguese in different and incompatible ways than his French.
Together, in halting Spanish, they sounded like nothing either language had previously produced.
“You speak Spanish,” Maria said, after a while, “like a French person trying to be fancy in Spanish.”
“I have been told this before.”
“Es. . . encantador. Muy encantador.“
“Gracias. No es. . . divertido?” he said, stumbling badly over the ‘v’.
“No es exactamente un cumplido. Es una descripción. (“It is not a compliment exactly. It is a description.”) This she said confidently and perfectly. This Dixon understood perfectly and clearly.
“Gracias de. . . de. . . todos.” (“Thank you anyway,” sort of.)
They paddled for another half hour. They had coffee at the little boat marina afterward. Decaf for him, espresso for her. He asked if she would like to do this again sometime. She said yes.
They had four more dates. They went to a Brazilian steakhouse where Maria spoke Portuguese with the host and Dixon understood roughly six percent of the conversation but enjoyed all of it. They went to a movie that turned out to be in Italian with Spanish subtitles. They watched it in a language neither of them really understood. They both enjoyed being with each other. Another time, they went to a small concert at a coffee shop. They also walked Magnolia at a park near her apartment in Buckhead, which Maggie really enjoyed.
He liked Maria. In fact, he liked her a great deal. Somewhere around the third date he realized he had not been quite this himself with anyone else in Bobby’s Parade. The third language thing had something to do with it. There was no posturing available in halting Spanish. You could only say what you meant. Neither had the vocabulary to embellish. The sentences were simple. The sentiments were real. He told her, in his French-accented Spanish, things he had not said to anyone in months. She told him, in her Portuguese-accented Spanish, things she had told to no one in Atlanta. They laughed about how badly they were each saying these things. The badness was the point.
On the fourth date, walking back to her car after the coffee shop concert, he asked her what she wanted.
She thought about it.
“I want children,” she said. “Not now. In a few years. I want a family. I want what my parents have. I want a house that I own, with a garden, with chickens. I would like, very much, to have chickens.”
“Chickens,” Dixon questioned.
“Sí.”
“Beuno.”
They stood looking at one another for a long minute. Dixon felt that she had something she needed to say, but she was probably struggling with the words.
“And. . . you are how old, Dix?” she asked with a serious look on her face.
“I am older than you,” Dixon replied, with seriousness that met the question.
“Cuántos años? . . .how much?” she asked. She wanted to know specifics.
He told her how much.
She nodded slowly. She did not look upset. She looked like she had been doing arithmetic in her head, and the arithmetic had come out the way she’d quietly suspected.
“My father,” she said carefully, “is your age.”
“Yeah, I would guess that to be the case,” Dixon replied.
“I like you, Dixon. I like. . . spending time together. But I want children. Do you want that?” she asked, her voice sounding more concerned.
“No, I don’t. I have a son. I don’t want to start over at the beginning of that road again,” he was speaking English now. She understood.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I want to be a mother.”
“I am sorry too,” he said. “You will be a great mother. You’re one of the warmest, most loving people I have ever met. Your smile lights me up. No child could ask for better.”
“You know, Dixon, you told me that you wanted to be free once. I think you are free.” She looked at him and gave him a small comforting smile. Dixon just nodded.
They didn’t kiss that night. They hadn’t kissed on any of the nights. They had a long conversation about it in their worst Spanish yet. At some point Maria laughed, helplessly, because they were trying to break each other’s hearts in a language neither of them spoke. Dixon laughed too. When they finally hugged goodbye, it was the hug of two people who had decided to be friends. Which they were, for a long time afterward.
He drove home in the RAV4. He did not cry. He thought he might. But he didn’t.
If someone had asked Dixon what the worst thing that could happen to him on a date was, he would probably have said something along the lines of him doing something embarrassing to himself. Maybe he would spill a drink or get soup down the front of his shirt. Perhaps he would say something awkward, which he was known to do at times. He was, in fact, prone to blurting out awkward things, because he didn’t have much of a filter attached to his brain. It wasn’t that he feared being stumped by a difficult question or that he wouldn’t know what polite thing he should do. He mostly had his act together in these respects.
But if someone had reframed the question in a different way and asked him to consider what the worst, most embarrassing, thing that his date could do, well, his answer, whatever it was, would fall far short of what happened on a Tuesday night when he met Becca.
Dixon had been through a lot on his dates. He had been stood up, faced off with racists, ghosted, dealt with drunks and druggies, been catfished and even propositioned to be a “Sugar Daddy” quite explicitly. There had been women that had casually suggested “going shopping” after coffee dates or others that were just simply there to have a free meal. There were also those that looked nothing, not a thing, like their pictures. And those that were boring or not that interesting. A Scorpio had even slipped through the net once, although she wasn’t actually a Scorpio. She was on the cusp of Libra, but had decided to take on the persona of a Scorpio, which Dixon found extremely shocking. It was, to him at least, the equivalent of a person being sorted into Hufflepuff and deciding to wear the costume of Slytherin in life, just because they pictured themself as more evil than the average person. It had been rough out there in the dating trenches.
None of this really prepared him for Becca.
They had texted for about a week. She was thirty-nine and worked in software at a fintech firm. She had suggested, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about food, that they go to a Thai restaurant Dixon liked near Piedmont Park. She had also suggested, in a different exchange, that it could be fun sometime to “theme” a date. ‘Old Hollywood’, she had said, or something. He hadn’t really thought any more about it. There certainly was no discussion of a plan to actually theme a specific date. It was a passing comment and the idea had not been mentioned again.
It’s important to be clear in recounting what happened next. The date was scheduled on a weeknight. It was not a holiday. It was not Halloween. There were no fundraisers happening. It was not Pride month. It was not, by any indicator, an occasion for a costume of any kind. It was just a regular Tuesday night.
Dixon arrived at the restaurant at seven, and was seated at a table by the window. The table was all the way across the restaurant from the front door. This provided Dixon a view to see the entire restaurant and it allowed him to see the door as he waited for Becca to arrive. This also meant to walk to the table, Becca would have to cross the entire space to get to him. Dixon planned to watch for her and rise when she came in, maybe even walk up to the front of the restaurant, give her a hug, say hello and walk her back to the table.
About 7:05PM the door opened and a woman came in and began a conversation at the host stand. Dixon couldn’t hear the conversation, because he was all the way across the restaurant. But he watched the conversation closely, because the woman appeared to be. . . Raggedy Ann. Everyone in the restaurant noticed Raggedy Ann at the host station. Dixon, and everyone else watched, as the host turned in Dixon’s direction, stretched out his arm, and pointed right toward him. Dixon could see his lips moving and he knew what he had said: “he’s right over there ma’am.”
Raggedy Ann looked toward Dixon, smiled a smile that was accentuated by her make-up, and began the long, long, walk across the restaurant.
Now, let’s back up for a moment, in case you do not recall who or what Raggedy Ann actually is and looks like. Raggedy Ann was a children’s doll. She wore a blue dress with a white pinafore. She had red yarn for hair. Her face was white with two precise circles on her cheeks and a black triangle nose. She had striped stockings and black Mary Janes.
Becca was in a full Raggedy Ann costume. She was wearing the dress and had on the red yarn wig over her brown hair. She had white face paint on, completely covering her skin. She had the circles on her cheeks and the black triangle nose. And the striped stockings with the black shoes. She had clearly committed to this in a way that suggested she had not put this together in the last hour. This had been planned in advance.
For Dixon, time suddenly felt compressed and moved very slowly. He saw every detail, but it was as if a strange fog had settled around his head. He couldn’t hear anything. All sound had stopped. He cocked his head to the left. He squinted his eyes a bit. He couldn’t move. Inside his brain five words were held in amplified suspension: ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?’
She walked across the dining room toward him, apparently in slow motion, at least to Dixon. All the other diners watched her. Everyone had stopped eating. She arrived at his table. She pulled out a chair and sat opposite him. The noiseless restaurant seemed to be in a state of suspension.
“Hi, Dixon,” she said brightly, but with a childlike voice.
There was a long pause as time started moving again. Dixon brought his head back upright, but his eyes were still partially squinted at the children’s toy sitting across from him.
“Um. . .Hi . . .Becca?” It was not meant to be a question, but it absolutely came out that way.
This was, for a long moment, all either of them said.
He waited. He waited for her to acknowledge the costume. He waited for her to laugh. He waited for I know this is weird, but or I lost a bet or I came from a thing. He waited for any frame at all. Funny, theatrical, sincere, political, satirical, psychological. Anything.
She did not provide one. She picked up the menu. She began to read it. Her mouth moved as she read, the pink circles moving up and down as she studied the menu.
The waiter came. He looked at her. He looked at Dixon. Dixon held his eye, communicating, he hoped, I know, I do not know either, please simply take our order. The waiter, who was a professional, did exactly that. “Would the lady like a drink?” he said brightly.
“Yes,” she announced. “I will have a Shirley Temple with an extra cherry please.” She gave a giggle that sounded like that of a little girl.
The waiter turned hurriedly to Dixon. “And for the gentleman? Might I suggest whiskey neat?”
“Yes, please, that sounds perfect,” said Dixon. He didn’t plan to drink it, but it would be there just in case.
“And to eat?” the waiter asked politely of the doll.
Becca ordered the pad see ew. Dixon ordered the green curry. The order was in. ‘NOW FUCKING WHAT?’ Dixon thought. ‘OK, pull yourself together. . . just go with it. . . yes. . . go with it.’
“So, you’re in software?” he asked dryly.
And with that, they ate. They talked. They talked about things Dixon later could not remember. He was in the conversation, but apart from it. And throughout the next 92 minutes and 30 seconds, the face paint did not come up. The red yarn hair did not come up. The black triangle nose did not come up. She did not bring it up. And he did not ask.
At one point Becca laughed at something with her childlike girl doll laugh. A small flake of pancake makeup detached itself from her left cheek and fell into her noodles. She did not appear to notice. Dixon did not point it out. They continued talking.
At minute 103, Dixon paid the check. He gave the waiter an enormous tip. The kind that says, ‘I am so so sorry about this. I had no idea. I would like to come back to this restaurant again, please.’ He stood and helped her put on a coat that she had left with the host. It was a normal black peacoat that she put on over her costume. The peacoat made the whole composition somehow more disorienting rather than less. They went to the parking lot.
In the parking lot, with the light from the streetlamp making her face paint glow slightly blue, she leaned forward quite suddenly and kissed Dixon directly on the mouth. Dixon’s eyes went wide for two reasons. First, he hadn’t expected this at all and second, he wasn’t quite sure what passersby might think about seeing a children’s doll kissing a man on the street.
The kiss left a clear impression of the white pancake makeup on both of his lips and the area just below his nose as well as his cheek.
“I had a really nice time,” she said. Now she seemed to be using a different, more adult voice. This voice he hadn’t heard through the entire 110 minutes they had been together. She didn’t sound childlike. She sounded like a software developer. A software developer in a costume.
“Can we do this again?” she asked very brightly.
This caused some record needle in Dixon’s brain to go skittering and across the surface of whatever record was playing the odd soundtrack of his life. His eyes widened.
He said something kind. He said something gentle. He said something that was a sentence and had words, but mostly came out in the shape of thank you, take care, be safe. He helped Becca / Raggedy Ann with her car door. She gave him one last big smile with her painted face and pink circles. She waved as she drove away. It seemed like the look in her eyes was hopeful. He imagined that she might call a friend on the way home and relate that the date had gone well and she hoped to see him again.
Dixon walked slowly to his new RAV4. The white makeup was on his face and a small piece of red yarn was stuck to his pants. He didn’t know about the makeup until he looked at himself in the rearview mirror at a stoplight on the way to the freeway. He laughed at himself. The laughter broke a tension he had been sitting with for the better part of the last two hours. He could not stop laughing. He had to pull over. He had tears streaming down out of his eyes, which made the pancake makeup run and smear on his face.
When he stopped laughing and pulled himself together. He picked up his phone and texted Bobby a single word.
Dixon: Bobby
Bobby: Talk to me. How was the date?
Dixon: It has led me to reassess my position on your parade.
Bobby: What happened?
Dixon: It’s too hard to explain. I love you friend. But I am out.
Bobby: Out of what?
Dixon: The parade.
Brooklyn came the next Sunday morning. She brought coffee, decaf, for both of them and they sat out on the back porch overlooking Dixon’s large yard of mowing hell. Magnolia curled up on her lap. She very much liked Brooklyn.
“So?” Brooklyn said.
“So.”
“Bobby says you’re done with the dating thing. Do you want to talk about it?” Brooklyn was just about the kindest person anyone would ever meet and she was oozing kind, empathetic energy in this moment.
“I’ve been dating for months. I think my premise was wrong,” Dixon said, his voice growing soft and sad.
“In what way?”
He waited a moment. He was on the verge of tears. “I thought that if I found a person then I’d have a reason to stay here. Anywhere actually. Just find a person and the rest of it will take care of itself,” he said.
“It’s not a bad theory,” Brooklyn comforted.
“But I have found something out over these last few months,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“Every time one of these things ends, it’s a small breakup. It’s not a real one, in any sense. You haven’t known them long enough to have built anything together. But each ‘almost-something’ ends, and each ending feels small but painful. A little version of being the one not chosen, or the one who couldn’t choose, or the one who walked away. Or the one that left them sitting at a table and that now most likely hates them. These many little heartbreaks accumulate. They add up in a way I did not anticipate. I have had, in the last few months, more breakups than I had in my entire life combined.”
Brooklyn nodded and put her hand on his. Dixon was shaking. His throat was tight and quivering as he spoke.
“And the original one, the big one, is still there. Lying on top of all the little ones. Every small one is a reminder that the big one happened. Every small one is another small confirmation that I am, currently, the person who keeps getting left behind. Even when I am the one doing the leaving. It feels like that. I’m looking so hard for that person, because I want to be chosen. Is that irrational?” he asked.
“It’s not irrational. Rejection in any form is hard and you’ve had a lot of it,” she said quietly.
“And I have that feeling. That big feeling. That I was left behind like the trash in this house,” he was crying now.
She put her arms around his shoulder and let him cry.
“You’re not trash,” she said.
“I’ve been trying to find a person to have a reason to stay, but everything is telling me that I can’t find my person when I don’t even know myself. That I can’t stay here where it is safe. That I have to leave this place and all this stuff behind. That all signs are just saying the same thing. All the signs are saying I need to go.”
Brooklyn just held him a while as he cried.” Maybe, Dixon, being left behind was the way to get free.” Dixon sobbed.
Finally, he looked up at her through his teary eyes. “I don’t think I can do this by myself. How do I . . .?”
“We’ll help. Don’t worry. We can help you through the details,” she said very sincerely.
A long moment passed as Dixon thought about the next words.
“Yes, it’s time. It all has to go. All the stuff. All the things that make me feel like trash here. And I need to go. You’re right. I have the chance to be free, but I have to get rid of the things keeping me anchored here.”
“We’ll make it happen. Together. We’re your friends,” she reassured him. “I’ve heard of people doing Estate Sales after divorces. We’ll find someone to help.”
He looked out at the yard. The parade had certainly not led to any easy or safe decisions. It had only postponed the decisions. The months of evenings and weekends had filled up with many small heartbreaks to compound the pain that he was already feeling. The house behind him was still the house behind him. The change Mama Honu had foretold had not been a parade. The change was going to be bigger than the safe path.
He sat on the porch for a long time after Brooklyn left. He sat until the sun began to dim through the trees of the back yard. Then he stood up. He went inside. He walked through the house. He carefully looked this time. He looked in each room. He poked his head in every closet. He looked in all the drawers. He was mentally taking an inventory and making a plan. He finally made it downstairs and stopped short of the door to the garage. He put his hand lightly, almost imperceptibly, on the knob as if it might burn him. He looked down at Magnolia by his feet.
He did not open the door. “Not today,” he told Maggie. “I’m still not ready for that.”
But he had put his hand on the knob, which was a thing he hadn’t done anytime in the last few months. He stood there for a few more moments in the dark hallway in front of the door, a door that he was not yet ready to open. Then he turned around. He picked Moo Moo up in his arms and they went up to bed. He slept all night for the first time since August.
Published May 16th, 2026 from Park City, Utah.
All text, images and music copyright (2026), Slightly Moody Creative LLC and Joe English.