The Last First Kiss

Dave was more than a little surprised, when he picked up his messages that evening, to find Kara’s among them. Not only was it the only phone message that didn’t describe some symptom in depth, but he and she hadn’t had any contact in—what, eighteen?—years, and now twice in one day?

Exactly what was up and why did he feel so uneasy about it?

Dropping his mail onto the coffee table, Dave made his way over to the phone on the kitchen wall.

“Only one way to find out,” he said aloud. But even so, he didn’t begin dialing immediately.

It wasn’t that he wanted to renege on the unofficial agreement to reciprocate when she asked. After all, Kara had produced the much sought after game. Then again, how hard could it be for her? She did work for the company that put it out.

Still, she didn’t have to deliver it herself—or even give him the game in the first place. Once upon a time, he would have bet his last dime that she wouldn’t have given him the time of day, much less gone out of her way, to bring him something he needed.

He also wouldn’t have thought that there was a kind bone in her excessively skinny little body. But her treatment of Gary in the waiting room showed him he’d been wrong in his assessment of her. Or at least the “new” her.

No, none of that was holding him back from immediately keeping his word. What was stopping him was the hour. He’d just walked in and it was after eleven. Added to that, he was bone tired.

He had no one to blame for that but himself, he thought. Himself and the endless line of sick people who just kept on coming. Clarice had finally closed the doors two hours later than the clinic’s official closing time. And he’d gone on treating patients until there was no one left in the stale-smelling waiting room.

Now, two steps beyond dead tired, he was too exhausted to even get anything to eat out of the refrigerator. One way to lose weight, he mused. That sandwich Kara had pulled out of her magic bag was practically the only solid thing he had to eat all day until Clarice had called her grandson to bring some food from the Thai takeout place in her neighborhood. He hadn’t really recognized what he’d eaten, but whatever it was had substance to it and ultimately had helped to keep him going, which was what counted.

His mind came back full circle to Kara. Okay, she’d given him a game and her sandwich. If nothing else, that meant he needed to return her phone call.

And if, God willing, she didn’t answer, well, at least he was on record for trying. Recorded record. He punched out her numbers on the keypad and crossed his fingers that she didn’t answer, but he might as well have saved himself the trouble. Kara picked up her phone on the second ring.

“Hello?”

Her voice sounded a bit sleepy, he thought. An image of Kara in bed, wearing nothing but the moonlight breaking through her window, suddenly popped up in his head.

He really needed that social life he was sorely missing out on.

“Hello?” he heard her say again.

He dove in. “Kara, it’s Dave. You called.”

At the sound of his voice, Kara dragged herself up into a sitting position. She’d fallen asleep on her sofa, playing a portable version of the game that was bedeviling her and the staff she supervised. She struggled to clear the fog from her brain. She didn’t even remember shutting her eyes.

Squinting, she tried to make out the time on the cable box across the room. The numbers swam around, and she gave up.

“Right. I called,” she murmured, dragging her hand through her hair, trying to figuratively drag her thoughts together at the same time.

“About anything in particular?” Dave pressed. She sounded sluggish. He thought back and couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t going ninety miles an hour. “Because if this can wait, or you just called to yank my chain, it’s been a really long day and I’ve got an early call tomorrow in the hospital—”

She wasn’t about to give him a chance to hang up. From the sound of it, she was going to have to make an appointment to talk to him on the phone if she didn’t speak up quickly. So she did. “Our mothers are trying to set us up.”

“What? With who?” he asked incredulously.

Was he kidding? “What do you mean, with who? With each other. At least,” she amended, backtracking just a step, “I know mine is, and whatever mine does, yours usually does, too.”

When did this happen? It wasn’t making any sense. She must have made a mistake. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

She took a breath and explained how she’d come to this conclusion. “After I came back from your clinic, my mother called me at work to see if I’d given you the game.”

“She obviously knows how dependable you are,” he observed dryly.

Her back instantly went up. “I’ll have you know that I am—Never mind.”

This wasn’t the time to allow herself to get into an argument with him. They were both tired. Things could be said that couldn’t be retracted. The best way to prevent that was not to start anything at all. Besides, she had a far more important point to get to. She couldn’t allow herself to get sidetracked.

“Anyway, she wanted to know how you looked. More accurately, she wanted to know what I thought of the way you looked.”

So far, he wasn’t hearing anything that should have set off any whirling red lights for her. “Natural question,” he commented. “We haven’t seen each other in almost two decades.”

She stopped her narrative, struggling with her temper. Was he for real? Or was he just baiting her? If it was the latter, maybe he’d learned a thing or two since they’d last seen each other. But somehow, she doubted that. He’d always been too upstanding to stoop to anything.

“Were you always this naive, or did you just suddenly decide to go back to your childhood?”

He really wasn’t in the mood for this. “If you’re going to insult me—”

“Tempting, but I’ll save that for some other time. Right now, hard as it is for me, I need to ask you for your help.”

Dave interpreted her question the only way he knew how. “You have a medical question?”

“No, I have a mother question. Or rather, a solution to a meddling-mother situation.” He was very quiet on the other end. Was that a good sign, or had he fallen asleep? “Our mothers want to get us together. I never told you,” she segued quickly, “but I once overheard them talking about how terrific it would be if, when you and I grew up, we’d get married.”

His voice was stripped of all emotion as he said, “No, you never told me that.”

“At the time I heard it, I thought it was too gross to repeat,” she explained. “But it obviously has never stopped being on their minds.”

He was trying to follow her logic and found that there were gaping holes in it. “And you think that your mother calling you to see if you delivered the game to me is actually some kind of a confession on her part that she’s trying to get us to the altar?”

She knew he was mocking her and forced herself to swallow a few choice words. “Her asking me what I think of your looks is pretty transparent.”

Where was all this going, anyway? “So you called to warn me?”

She shifted the phone to her other ear. “No, I called to get you to cooperate with an idea I have.”

He really didn’t like the sound of that. “This never turned out well for any of the characters in those sitcoms you always liked so much,” Dave pointed out.

That he remembered she used to watch them astonished her. She told herself it meant nothing and kept talking. “What if you and I pretend to go out together? Pretend to, you know, like each other.”

It sounded as if she were forcing herself to endure a fate worse than death. “Assuming I’ve had my rabies shots,” he said sarcastically, “how is this going to teach our mothers a lesson? This is what they want—according to you.”

Kara sighed. “You really don’t have an imagination, do you?”

“I have one,” he told her. “I just don’t let it go off on wild tangents.”

She took offense and shot back through gritted teeth, “Okay, Davy, let me spell it out for you. We go out. We pretend to fall in love, and then we have one hell of an argument, making sure that we have this fight where our mothers can hear us. After the argument, we go through the throes of an agonizing ‘breakup.’ A devastating breakup,” she specified, really throwing herself into the role, “where we both act as if there’s no tomorrow—”

“Being just a little melodramatic, don’t you think?” he interjected.