Swim

wrong.”
    I pulled a notebook out of my purse and flipped to a fresh page. Part of me thought this was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. Another part—the part of me that had been eyeing a little Craftsman bungalow on Sierra Bonita—saw this guy as a potential gateway into a large and lucrative new market. There were only so many college seniors who needed my help and whose parents could afford me, and college apps would keep me busy only through the January 15 deadline. But personal ads were a year-round concern, and there was probably a limitless pool of the lovelorn and vocabulary-challenged who’d be willing to pay... let’s see...
    “How much work are we talking about?” I asked.
    He’d come prepared. Reaching into a hard-sided backpack, he pulled out a manila folder, and pulled from that threepages. The first one had a screen name (Lonelyguy 78) and a picture of the fellow in front of me, wearing a suit and a tie and a forced, dorky grin.
    I stared down at the picture, then up at him. “Was that, by any chance, the shot they took for your employee ID tag?”
    He squirmed, pulling the cuffs of his shirt down over his wrists. “You can tell? I know it’s not the best picture, but they needed a head shot, and that was the one I had on my computer.”
    I shook my head, then studied his face. He was decent-looking. The photograph didn’t do him credit. “That’s the first thing. Get a new picture. One that doesn’t make you look like a narc.”
    He pulled a pen out of his pocket and wrote the words No narc on the front of the folder. Then he pulled a plastic bag of red pistachios out of his backpack and offered them to me.
    “No thanks,” I said automatically, even though I adored anything salty, pistachios most of all—and of pistachios, my favorite were the ones with dyed shells that stained your fingertips red.
    “You sure?” he asked, holding the open bag toward me.
    “Well, maybe just a few,” I said.
    “Go nuts,” he told me, and smiled. “Joke.”
    “Got it,” I murmured. I picked up my pen and studied the pages he’d given me, zeroing in on his screen name. “‘Lonely-guy’? Good Lord. Was ‘Desperateguy’ taken? Or ‘I might kill you and cut up your body in my basement guy’?”
    “They only give you twelve letters for your screen name. What’s wrong with ‘Lonelyguy’?” he asked, offering me more pistachios.
    “It’s a little needy,” I said, and tried not to sigh as my mind flashed to Rob. His confidence, the way he could walk into a room of overcaffeinated writers or anxious executives and lure them toward him with a self-deprecatingjoke, was what I’d loved most about him. I winced, and mentally swapped “liked” for “loved,” and then downgraded “liked” to “appreciated,” then reminded myself firmly that the most important adjective as far as Rob had been concerned was now, of course, “taken.” I scanned the rest of Lonelyguy’s profile. Turn-ons, turnoffs, preferred body type, hair colors and eye colors he’d consider, as if a woman could be ordered up like a meal at a restaurant, where a diner could swap french fries for mashed potatoes and insist on his dressing on the side.
    Under “my date,” he’d checked off ages from twenty-five to thirty-five. For body types, he was willing to consider “fit” and “slender.” I’d urge him to throw in an “average,” given that plenty of fit and/or slender women—didn’t necessarily see themselves that way.
    “It used to be swim.”
    I looked up, startled. “Huh?” “Swim. My screen name. SWM. For Single White Male.” He shook his head, embarrassed. “Talk about generic, right?”
    “Do you like to swim?”
    “Sure. I guess. But nobody here really does it. Have you ever noticed that? People go to Malibu and the only ones in the water are the surfers and the dogs.”
    I nodded. I’d noticed. I’d even bought myself a wet suit and spent a few Sundays bobbing around in the rough waves of the frothy blue-green water, figuring—hoping—I’d look like a surfer who’d lost her board, or, alternately, a dog owner who’d lost her dog.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Ruth Saunders.”
    “Ruth the truth,” he said, sweeping the litter of pistachio shells into his empty paper cup.
    “Just Ruth will be fine,” I said, and flipped briskly throughthe rest of the pages. “Okay, now...”
    The sound of Caitlyn’s high-heeled boots on the hardwood floor made us both look up. “Am