I ordered a dish that sounded good but turned out to be drippy eggs floating in tomato sauce. I couldn’t eat it. Carrie offered me a piece of her bread with a cooked egg on it. We walked through a suburban neighborhood, and she continued to talk, about her family and her job as a freelance radiologist. We walked around a lake, and I noticed her wristwatch was set to three hours earlier. I asked why, and she said she wanted to be synced up to my time—maybe a sign that she did really like me.

Yet, I still felt uneasy, insecure, the same feeling I had growing up when my family talked over each other and I didn’t say much because why bother if no one listened anyway. She led me to her apartment where, from her living room window, I could see a sliver of the Pacific. She ran to shut her office door where piles of papers covered her desk. She asked if I wanted anything. Besides a bottle of beer and a jar of peanut butter, she didn’t have much in her refrigerator. “I hate grocery shopping,” she said.

In the corner of her spotless bathroom was a jumbo Lysol spray, and on her sink, a bottle of lavender liquid soap.

***

Carrie accompanied me to my first reading in the area. After a day of feeling dejected, at least the audience looked at me, listened and laughed at my story. I sat back down and Carrie touched my shoulder. “You were the Skype Lori up there,” she said, “the confident Lori.”

Thank heavens I got out of my insecure mode, conversed with other readers and exchanged books with a writer who read a funny story about bedbugs.

“That bedbug story was gross,” Carrie said, still recovering from pneumonia. “I should go home, but let’s go to dinner.” She ordered two vodka drinks and now her foot touched mine. She looked at me.

Maybe it was a pride thing; I wanted her to acknowledge, even indirectly, that we had a relationship, if only a Skype relationship, that we traded intimate stories and acknowledged we liked each other.

She drove me back to my friend’s house. When we got out of her car, she gave me the hug I imagined I’d get when we met, or maybe it was just a drunken hug. I asked if she wanted to see me again and she said yes, of course, and she liked me. She held my hand, caressed it. We gave each other another long hug, and she drove off. Maybe she was shy and needed to loosen up.

The friend I stayed with had been going through her own relationship hell with her live-in boyfriend, and while they argued, Carrie and I Skyped. I said, “Now you’re the Skype Carrie,” and she smiled and showed me her dog lying on her leg. She looked into the camera, both of us more at ease with the computer screen in between us, a safety net, only our virtual hearts on the line. “Maybe this is a Skype relationship,” I said.

I rented a car and drove to her house, but, again, she talked and talked and wouldn’t make eye contact. We walked around a lake, and there again I was no longer Skype Lori, and by dinnertime, I felt baffled. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked.  “Go?”

“I want you to stay,” she said, as if it were a no-brainer. “We could make dinner.”

She asked me to help her make a grocery list. At the bottom, I wrote bottle of vodka. “Ever since the accident,” she said, “I’ve had a hard time organizing anything.”

“Accident?” I said.

“I was in a skiing accident,” she said, “a couple years ago. Sustained a traumatic brain injury.”

She couldn’t work for a year, maybe two. Since then, she built up her freelance practice. She drove from clinic to clinic. “It’s better,” she said, “that I don’t work with the same people day in and day out.” She said most people got on her nerves. I wondered if her brain injury made it difficult to go grocery shopping or make eye contact or get along with others.

Carrie pushed the grocery cart while I grabbed basic foods: cheese, bread, milk. In the soap aisle, I grabbed a three-pack of Ivory and threw them in the cart.

“Don’t you need soap?” I said, barely containing my laughter.

“I don’t use bars!” she said. “They’re breeding grounds for bacteria!” She took the bars out of the cart. “I only use liquid soap. And I’m pretty well-stocked with it.” She looked at me sideways, not sure why I was laughing and practically on the floor.

She didn’t remember telling me about her ex walking out on her when she went on about liquid soap. Now she laughed, too. “You’re a weird one,” she said.