She had a good point. When did Julie become so observant? I wondered. And when did she learn how to negotiate like that? She was growing up way too fast.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said.
We shook on it, and then I pulled her into a hug. When I let her go, she looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“What was that for?” she asked.
“Growing up,” I said. “Being adorable. Surprising me. Being you. Do I need to go on?”
“No, you’re making me nauseous as it is.” There was a knock at the door. Julie leaped off the couch and opened it. Joe Cochran stood there with another bouquet of flowers.
“You didn’t have to bring me more flowers,” I said.
“I didn’t bring them for you. They’re mostly for me in case I didn’t do a good enough job showering after our day in the dump,” he said with a grin. “They’re very fragrant. Mind if I carry them the rest of the evening?”
“I’ll take my chances.”
I took the flowers from him and put them in the vase. I told Julie not to wait up, gave her a kiss, and we left.
Joe took me to dinner at Audiffred, a French bistro that was, appropriately enough, located on the street level of the historic Audiffred Building at One Market Street down at the waterfront. It was constructed in the late 1800s by a homesick Frenchman, so the building had such typical Parisian architectural motifs as a mansard roof, decorative brick battlements, and tall, round-topped windows.
Audiffred was a fancier place than I’d dressed for, but the San Francisco dining scene had adopted the L.A. philosophy that you can go anywhere in jeans and running shoes as long as you have the attitude to pull it off.
Well, if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of, it’s attitude. It’s a shame that won’t pay the mortgage.
Joe ordered a steak, well-done, with fingerling potatoes and sautéed spinach. The menu noted that the cow who sacrificed himself for Joe’s meal was a vegan and never consumed hormones. I’d never seen a cow’s diet mentioned on a menu before.
I ordered rack of lamb, but when I asked the superficially perky waitress whether my sheep was a vegan or not, she just gave me a blank look. She didn’t even crack a smile when I asked what the fish liked to eat before they ended up on the plate. Joe was amused, though, and that’s what counted.
“They take themselves way too seriously here,” he said. “And the food isn’t good enough for them to be so snooty.”
“Then why do you come here?”
“The food is fair, the decor is nice, and the place has been a friend to the fire department for over one hundred years.”
“You mean they donate money?”
“Better than that,” Joe said. “They donate booze.”
He explained that the Audiffred Building was one of very few in the city that survived the devastating 1906 earthquake and the fires in the aftermath.
“The owner of the saloon that was here offered the firefighters a barrel of whiskey each if they saved the building from the flames,” Joe said. “They did, and to this day firefighters drink here for free.”
“Maybe the waiters are just snooty to you because they know you’re not paying for the drinks,” I said. “I’m not a nurse or anything, but should you be having alcohol after what happened to you the other night?”
Joe touched the bandage. “This? Ah, it’s nothing. I’ve been hurt worse.”
“You have?”
“I’ve got a nasty burn on my back from a fire a couple of years ago,” he said. “It’s not a pretty sight, which is why I wore a shirt to dinner.”
“I wondered why you did that,” I said.
He went on to tell me the story of how he got burned. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of the details, except that it involved a blazing tenement, a staircase that gave way, and a narrow escape. As he told the story, his whole face lit up, and he got more and more animated, the words spilling out in an excited rush. It was a memory he didn’t mind reliving and a story he liked to tell, even though it was an experience that left him physically scarred for life.
I know that’s part of what you do on your first couple of dates: You tell stories about yourself that show you in a really great light, or that illustrate aspects of your life and your character that are important to you. But sometimes you reveal things about yourself that you didn’t intend.
The story certainly proved Joe was caring, brave, and heroic, but that’s not the message I took from it. What I got was that he liked fighting fires. No, he loved fighting fires. The risks meant nothing to him. The accident that happened years ago and the one that happened the other night were near-misses he was bound to experience again.
Just another day at the office.
He loved battling fires the way Mitch loved flying fighter jets. The reasons why I was attracted to Joe weren’t a surprise to me. He was great-looking, with a body I wanted to devour, and had a personality that reminded me of Mitch’s.
But the more he talked, and the more attracted I became to him, the more my anxiety intensified.
Was it fear of a new relationship? Or was it something else?
Our dinner was served, and Joe asked me about how I balanced single motherhood and working for Monk. I think he asked me because he wanted to eat his steak before it got cold, and he couldn’t do that and tell another rousing firefighting anecdote.
So now it was my turn to tell a story about myself that would show what a clever, funny, caring, strong, terrific person I was. My vague anxiety turned into a very clear and definable panic. What story could I possibly tell that would accomplish all that? I didn’t think I had one.
“I don’t think of it as balancing single motherhood with anything else. Julie comes first, before me, before anything. I just try to make it through each day without screwing up too badly.”
“How did you end up working for Monk?”
Okay, that was a good story. But unlike Joe’s stories of his harrowing brushes with death, it wasn’t one I enjoyed telling. I was much better at telling funny anecdotes about Mr Monk’s bizarre, obsessive-compulsive behavior, though I always felt guilty afterward, as if I were breaching a trust.
“Someone broke into my house late one night. I walked in on him and he tried to kill me. I killed him instead. The police couldn’t figure out why the intruder was in my house, so they called in Mr. Monk to help them investigate.”
Joe set down his fork. “You killed a man?”
I nodded. “I didn’t mean to; I was defending myself. I still can’t believe I did it. When you’re in a situation like that, I suppose instinct takes over. I did what I had to do to survive. I was lucky; there happened to be a pair of scissors within reach. If there hadn’t been, I’d be dead.”
I never thought of myself as capable of violence, certainly not of killing someone. It was a memory I tried to avoid. It scared me. It wasn’t so much the attacker himself, the fight, or the fact that I almost died that terrified me. The nightmare was imagining what would have happened to Julie if I were killed.
What would he have done to her? And if she escaped, what would her life have been like after losing both of her parents to violent deaths?
Maybe it was that fear that gave me the ability to fight back so hard, to kill rather than be killed. It gave me an edge I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
After that experience, I immediately enrolled Julie in tae kwon do class, despite her protests. I wanted to be sure that if she were ever attacked, her instincts would take over, and that her instincts would kick ass.
I could see that Joe wanted more details about the killing, but he was kind and perceptive enough not to ask. So he moved past that.