Page 11 of Falling into Place

Chapter Seven

Brooks

“Those poor kids.”

“Which ones?”

“The Martin siblings. Over there, by the meat counter? Lost their mom last year. Accident on I-35 during that storm. Haven’t seen the dad out in public since. I heard at the nail salon he’s so depressed he barely speaks. I think the older sister’s taking care of the other two. Such a shame.”

—Whispered in the baking aisle of Homeland grocery store, sixteen years ago

“It’s go time.”

Brooks cocked an eyebrow, holding the door open as Sasha entered his house like a woman on a mission. His other brow joined the first when Macy appeared in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?”

“You think I was gonna miss this?” she asked as she passed.

Brooks sighed and moved to close the door, but a hand shot out.

“Whoa.” Macy’s husband, Mark, had nearly been hit in the face. “Easy, bud.”

Brooks allowed Mark entrance (and gave him a pass for the bud ) but extended his other arm. “What the hell?”

“Come on,” Mark said with a laugh. “Macy said if my parents agreed to take the kids I could come watch.”

After he closed the door, Brooks leaned the back of his head against it. “I thought this part was supposed to be about me. Does this require an audience?”

Sasha spoke from where she knelt on the floor, messing with the laptop she’d opened on his coffee table. “We’re all engaged in the process.”

Macy sat on the couch. “What she means is we don’t think you’ll do it right.”

“How could I mess up my own dating profile?”

Sasha and Macy laughed simultaneously for far too long, and Mark just looked at him with something like pity.

“I hate you all.” He pushed off the door and headed for the kitchen. This was going to be a long night, and he’d need a beer or three to get through it.

“I’m here in solidarity against the Martin women,” Mark whispered as Brooks brushed past him. “Give me a signal, like a wink or head scratch, and I’ll fake a migraine so they have to take me home.”

Brooks bumped his fist. That was more like it. “I’ll get you a beer.”

When he returned, his sisters were huddled together on the couch, Sasha furiously typing as if she had a term paper due in the morning. But he’d never actually seen her work this hard for anything school related.

He sat in the armchair and waited for a few seconds, expecting them to pause and ask for input.

“What are you doing?” he asked when they didn’t.

“Filling out the ‘About Me’ section. It’s free text,” Macy said without looking up. Sasha didn’t seem to have heard him.

“Need anything from me?” he deadpanned.

“Nope.” Apparently Sasha had heard him.

Mark just shook his head and took a pull from his beer.

Not that Brooks was surprised—this was about how it had gone with the write-up for the debut article, which would go live on the website first, followed by the print issue. Sasha wrote the whole thing, which he only let slide because it was mostly describing how the entire endeavor would go down.

He’d put up a dating profile.

Go on real dates (no setups like on The Bachelor ).

Report back about the venues and, if he wanted to, how the dates went (good or bad). Sasha promised readers they’d be along for the ride if he met someone special, despite his skepticism it would happen.

The one thing he’d been allowed to choose was the photo in the spread, and only because he’d put his foot down. Sasha had wanted one of the more brooding images, but he fought for the one where he was smiling, remembering it was Carly’s snarky comment that had lightened his mood that day.

The incessant tap of Sasha’s fingers against the keyboard did the exact opposite, grating on his nerves more with each second that passed.

“That’s perfect,” Macy murmured. “Oh, wait.” She grabbed the laptop and typed something of her own, then handed it back to Sasha, who read the addition and smiled.

“Nice,” she said appreciatively.

“Seriously,” Brooks said loudly.

“Shh, calm down. I’m just doing a few basics, like you’re a man, no kids, you’re a doctor, you’re from Oklahoma, blah blah blah.”

“Can we skip my profession?”

Sasha looked up and frowned. “What? Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, I just feel like women only want to go out with me because I’m a doctor.”

“Why do you think that?” Macy asked at the same time Sasha said, “What women want to go out with you?”

He eyed Sasha. “If the notion is so shocking, why did you ask me to do this?”

“I didn’t mean it that way, obviously. You haven’t been going on dates, so how would I know women had been suggesting them?”

“It doesn’t happen a lot, but I only get approached by women at the hospital where they know what I do.

Maybe they think I’m rich, or something?

” If they saw his student loan statements they’d probably run in the other direction.

Plus, the general public tended to put doctors on a pretty high pedestal, and if that’s what he was starting with, there was a good chance he’d let them down.

Sasha pursed her lips. “You don’t go anywhere except work, so that’s the only place women can notice you.”

Okay, fair.

But as a rule, he preferred not to admit when Sasha was right. “Regardless, I’d rather start with something more important, like common interests or values.”

Macy looked on the verge of arguing, but Sasha spoke first. “Fine. I’ll just put you work in health care.”

“Thanks.”

“Okay, now we’re getting to the questions.” Sasha settled back into the cushions. “What are you passionate about?”

Brooks eyed her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

“Can’t I just do this myself?” When she’d said she’d come over tonight, he’d envisioned sitting at the kitchen table on his own, giving serious consideration to these questions, with Sasha available to help if he wasn’t sure how to answer something.

“You type too slow.”

“I do not.”

“Just answer the question, Brooks,” Macy said.

Brooks signaled at Mark with a wink, but his brother-in-law was looking at his phone and didn’t notice. Brooks sighed. Evidence-based medicine and broad-scale education about the importance of advanced directives probably weren’t good choices for this.

“Um, helping people, I guess? Health and wellness?”

Sasha nodded. “What else?”

“I don’t know.”

After a pause, Macy suggested they come back to that one. “What’s next?”

“What are two things you like doing with leisure time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Brooks!”

“What? For fourteen years I didn’t have leisure time.

Since then, I’ve sort of wandered around, unsure what to do with myself when I’m not working, worried I should be studying for an exam or preparing a Grand Rounds presentation.

” Nearly a year later, and he still didn’t know how to relax.

“I started that garden a few weeks ago. Can we put that?”

Sasha’s expression said no . “Do you read?”

“Sometimes.” Usually medical journals.

“Watch TV?”

“Yeah, sports, usually.”

She typed something, and Brooks made a mental note to double-check her answers before they submitted anything.

“What are three things you’re thankful for?”

That one was easy. “My sisters, my nephews, and basketball.”

Sasha sniffled and Macy put her hand to her heart.

Mark coughed.

“Oh, um.” Brooks tapped his knee with his fist. “Right, and my brother-in-law.”

“How about I just put family, friends, and basketball?” Sasha’s voice sounded a little wobbly.

“Great.”

They continued on like that for an hour, moving through several different sections of the profile. Just when they were finishing up, his phone dinged.

Carly: My mom thinks the tomatoes don’t get enough sun. She wants to know if that part of the garden gets a lot of shade.

Shit, he didn’t know. He thought he’d picked a good part of the yard, but there were several trees nearby.

The thought that he’d already killed everything he’d planted was depressing, but he tried not to go there yet.

He set an alert on his phone to remind him to check and made a joke to make himself feel better.

Brooks: definitely not as much as my sisters have thrown my way tonight

Carly: What’s going on?

Brooks: they came over to set up my dating profile

Carly: Both of them?

Brooks: yes

Carly: Are you okay?

Brooks: no

Brooks: save me

Carly: Why didn’t you just do it yourself?

Brooks: Sasha offered to help but now i know it was a trick

Carly: She’s sneaky. She once convinced me to go see a horror movie with her even though she knew I hated them. The title was really obscure and she convinced me it was a romance. I slept with the light on and a bat under my pillow for two weeks.

“Who are you talking to?” Macy asked.

He looked up. “What?”

“You’re smiling at your phone.”

Both his sisters were looking at him now. He attempted another SOS signal to Mark, but the bastard was still focused on his phone.

It wouldn’t be a big deal to tell them it was Carly. They knew she was his stylist and that they’d be talking and spending time together. But the way they were looking at him told him they’d read something into it that was all wrong, and he didn’t have it in him to deal with it.

“Just a friend. No one important.”

Highlights from the dating profile of Brooks Martin:

What are three things you couldn’t do without?

-Coffee

-Sneakers

-Thunder basketball

What life experiences have shaped you the most?

-Achieving my degree

-The death of someone close to me

-Growing up with two sisters

What person shaped you the most?

-My high school basketball coach

I spend a lot of time thinking about:

-Coffee

-The meaning of life

-Health care in America

-My cat

-Tomatoes

-Kindness

-The metric system

-What really happened to Amelia Earhart

-Coffee

I like:

-Going to the same coffee shop so often that the barista knows my regular drink

-Airports

-The huge oak tree in my front yard

-The way my nephews scream when I jump out at them while playing hide-and-seek

-When my phone autocorrects normal words to ridiculous ones

-Recycling

-Eggs over easy

-The roar of the crowd when the Thunder make an unexpected comeback

Four things I’m good at:

-Driving

-Opening jars

-Finding the best local coffee shop in any given city

-Killing spiders

Something new I recently learned is:

-Seersucker is a kind of fabric (I think)

My self-summary: I’m gonna be honest here.

I’ve been focused on my career for a long time.

Like, over a decade. After going through the process of filling out this profile, I’ve realized maybe my sisters are right (they’re the ones who put me up to this): I’ve sort of forgotten how to have fun.

I’ve become an introvert, which I think is okay sometimes, because after a hard day I think I’ll always be the kind of person who wants to come home to the comfort of my home (and my dog-cat) rather than blow off steam at a bar, and because I work in health care sometimes my brain just needs peace and quiet to recharge.

And I think that’s important for anyone I might date to know that about me.

But I want to get back out into the world and figure out what, besides my job, I enjoy.

I want to learn how to play and have fun again.

Because I was fun, once, I swear. I know it’s in there somewhere because it comes out every once in a while and surprises the hell out of me, in a good way. I want something to look forward to.

If anyone out there is going through the same thing, or if you aren’t but you’re okay with a guy who’s kind of quiet but who might surprise you and who cares about doing good in this world, while at the same time hoping he’s bettering himself, we might be a good fit.

Or not, but we won’t know if we don’t try, right?

I guess that’s another thing you can expect from me: honesty.

And if my sisters’ experience with dating has told me anything it’s that not all men put that quality high on their list, and that’s a shame.

Case in point: I made my sisters let me fill out this section on my own, and after they read it, they both laughed and asked if I was messing with them.

When they realized I was serious they tried to delete it and rewrite it for me.

I won this round, but be warned I have two sisters who like to meddle in my life and think they’re always right (they’re about 50/50).

Anyway, looking forward to meeting you.