The Decoy Date Letters

My sister Gail asked me twice why I said yes to this thing with Jarrod, so I finally wrote it out on paper while the front desk was dead. Forty-four years old, receptionist at the Grad College of Liberal Arts, and I spend my lunch breaks drafting fake love letters for my boss. I figured I owed her an explanation.

* * *

Dear Gail,

You asked why I'm doing this, so here it is. Jarrod Tuttlehill is the associate dean of student affairs. He's forty-six, he signs my timesheets, and he is being hunted. His aunt calls him every Sunday with a new woman for him to meet. Jarrod's old girlfriend Denise, the one who moved to Chicago five years ago, still texts him good morning like they never broke up. He showed me the texts once. She sends him photos of her lunch. Who does that.

So his plan is this. If he pretends he's seeing somebody, the aunt stops setting him up and Denise gets the message. But he can't fake a girlfriend out of thin air, so he decided to write letters. Letters to a woman who doesn't exist. Old fashioned, pen and paper, the works. Then he realized he writes like a dean, meaning like a man asking for a budget extension, and he asked me to fix the drafts.

I said yes because it's funny. I said yes because I've been the decoy date twice in my life and I know how it goes, and doing it on paper is easier than doing it in a dress. And I said yes because nothing happens at that front desk between two and four and I was going out of my mind.

Don't read anything into it. He's my boss. It's a project.

Candace

* * *

The first draft he slid under my office door was four pages. Four pages about a woman named Maren, who was invented between eight and nine on a Tuesday. I read it at the desk and laughed out loud at an empty lobby.

He had written things like, "Your intellect illuminates every room you enter." Nobody talks like that. I took out a red pen and went to work.

By Friday I had it down to two pages with actual personality in it. I gave Maren a job at a plant nursery. I gave her a dog named Noodle who hates the mailman. And I gave the two of them a shared history with bad karaoke, because Jarrod had let slip at the holiday party that he once sang "Total Eclipse of the Heart" at The Scholar's Grotto and cleared the room. I wrote that Maren had done the same with "Love Shack" and that they argued about whose performance was worse. That part I was almost proud of.

He came to the desk to pick it up. He read it standing there, which took nerve.

"You cut three pages," he said.

"Nobody in love writes three pages of adjectives. She'd think you were having a breakdown."

He looked at the red ink. "Maren works at a plant nursery?"

"She does now. You're welcome!"

He tucked it in his jacket and walked off shaking his head, but he was half smiling. I counted that as a win.

* * *

Here is where it stopped being a joke, and I'm telling you before I tell Dani, my best friend, so you can both mock me in stereo. He wrote back. Not to me. To Maren. And it was good. The man who wrote "your intellect illuminates every room" sat down with my edits and answered them, and the letter was funny, and it mentioned the karaoke thing, and it said he'd been thinking about Noodle the dog. Noodle does not exist. I invented him. And still my stomach did a flip reading it, because whoever he was writing to, on paper, that night, was somebody I would have liked to be.

I called Dani the next morning.

"You're blushing over a letter," she said.

"I am not blushing. I'm alarmed. There's a difference."

"Sure there is. What did it say?"

"It said he'd been thinking about Noodle."

"The dog."

"The dog, Dani. He wrote a whole paragraph about a dog I made up and I got a little fluttery about it. That's where we are."

She laughed for a solid minute. Then she said, "Honey, you wrote a woman who doesn't exist and he answered her like she does. One of you is going to trip over the line soon. I think it's going to be you."

I hate that she's usually right.

* * *

Then came the voicemail. Ten forty at night, my kitchen, I was doing dishes. His number on the screen, which alone was strange because he never calls.

"Candace. It's Jarrod. It's late, I know, I'm sorry. I just got off the phone with my aunt. I showed her the letter, the one with the nursery, and she read the whole thing out loud to me over the phone like I hadn't read it myself, and then she went quiet and said, well, Jarrod, why didn't you tell me. And then she hung up and she hasn't called back in six days. Six days. Do you understand what that means? That's a record. Denise hasn't texted either. The plan worked."

There was a pause and I could hear him laughing a little, that low laugh he does at faculty meetings.

"So, obviously we quit. We won. We can stop. Except I don't want to. I want one more round. Maybe two. I'll have a new draft for you Monday. Goodnight, Candace."

I stood there with a soapy plate in my hand and listened to it twice. One more round. I went to bed annoyed at myself for playing it a third time.

* * *

Monday I wrote the new one myself, no draft from him. I don't even fully know why. I sat at the desk at three in the afternoon with the lobby empty and wrote a letter from Maren that described a night at The Scholar's Grotto. Rain outside, terrible jukebox, two stools at the end of the bar. And I wrote a kiss. I hesitated over it, I'll admit. I wrote that if he had leaned over right then, she would have let him, and that she thought about it the whole walk home. Then I put it in his mailbox and went home half hoping he'd laugh at it and file the whole thing away.

His reply was in my mailbox Tuesday morning. No joke. Two pages.

He wrote about my perfume. Not Maren's. Mine. He wrote that I wear something with bergamot in it, that I'd worn it the day of the holiday party, that I stood next to him by the coat rack for about ninety seconds and he'd thought about it since. I have worn the same perfume for six years. Nobody has ever noticed, least of all me.

He closed with, "Maren sounds lovely. But I find myself writing to the woman who invented her."

I read it at the desk, then put it in the drawer, then took it back out and read it again. Gail, if you're reading this over my shoulder at Thanksgiving, yes, I know. I know exactly what this is. The question is what to do about it by Monday, when he walks past this desk and says good morning like always.

He did say one more round. I suppose I should answer him.

Tuesday, 4:47 pm. Diary. He said one more round and I am not doing this by mailbox. I put a note in his box before I left work. "The woman who invented her drinks at The Scholar's Grotto at eight. If you'd rather keep writing to Maren, don't come." Then I went home and changed three times like a lunatic.

Tuesday, 7:58 pm. Diary, written on a napkin at the bar because my hands needed something to do. He's walking in. Bergamot was maybe a mistake. Or exactly right. Don't know yet.

Tuesday, 11:52 pm. Diary, home, in bed, still catching my breath, writing this while it's all still true. Everything below happened with both of us