Snapshots

Cow Pie Bingo-1

Cow Pie Bingo

“Come on, Evan,” Karen needled, “it’s for a good cause.”

Evan closed his eyes and counted to ten. He did not want to do this. When he reopened them, his administrative assistant was looking at him with a wide, pained stare, and he resigned himself to his likely fate. “What, exactly, will I have to do if—and it’s a big ‘if’—I agree?”

A smile split her face as if he’d already agreed. Sure, it was probably bound to happen, but she didn’t need to know that. “Well, like I said, it’s a kissing booth. All you have to do is stand there in your booth, and when a pretty girl walks up with tickets, you take them from her and give her a kiss.”

“Oh, I see. You’re selling tickets only to pretty girls.” Evan scowled and mentally kicked himself in the ass for making such a petty comment, even if he had been handed a textbook opening.

“Oh, Evan, please?” She bit her lip and looked as desperate as the New England Patriots in the final minutes of Super Bowl XLII. “Of course they won’t all be pretty, but it’s just a little kiss—a peck even.”

“How long do I have to be there?”

“‘Do I’? You said ‘do I’, not ‘would I’. Only one hour. You man the booth for one single hour from two o’clock until three. There’ll be three booths, and the women can get in whichever line they want. So you’ll do it?”

Evan groaned and delayed the inevitable, searching his mind for a reasonable excuse. “You said the event is tomorrow. Why the last-minute notice?”

“Grant Myer was going to do it, but he caught a bad cold, so now he can’t. He did it last year for that library fundraiser and said it was fun. He even lined up a couple dates from it.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “He was actually looking forward to doing it again.”

What could he say? Karen was a terrific assistant and always, always went the extra mile. He was single—well, divorced, anyway. He just plain didn’t have a good excuse to say “no.” Besides, she was right, it was for a good cause.

Evan’s sigh and slumped shoulders didn’t even begin to express his reluctance. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

Karen hooted and bounced like he’d just handed her front row tickets to a Lady Gaga concert. “Oh, thank you so much. I promise, you won’t regret it. It’ll be good for you, anyway. You’ve been single for two years and you never go out on dates.”

Yeah, well, there was an explanation for that. Karen, intuitive woman that she was, beat a hasty exit from Evan’s office, having extracted his promise.

Evan closed his eyes again and leaned back in the comfortable leather chair. He took a deep breath and tried to settle his tumultuous thoughts. The reason he didn’t date anymore? He’d tried after the divorce, but couldn’t seem to work up any feelings of attraction toward the women. At first, he’d put it down to being disillusioned by his bad marriage, but to be fair, there’d never been much of a spark there, either.

After considering the thought that he simply might not be a particularly s****l being, he’d finally discounted that notion when he’d found himself eyeing other men when jogging in Kramden Park. Noticing men—fantasizing about them, even—and not taking a second glance at women? He’d had to consider the possibility that he was gay.

Possibility. Right. It was way past time he at least admitted it to himself. He was gay. He just couldn’t understand how a man could get to the age of thirty-two without figuring out something like that earlier, and now he had no idea what to do about it. For that matter, he wasn’t sure whether or not he even wanted to do anything about it.