Originally Published in Front Porch Review, Volume 9, July 2017

I recognized my supper date as soon as she rode into the Olive Table parking lot on a knobby-tired Mongoose Sabrosa 3×9 mountain bike with a pink basket and a Greenpeace flag on a fiberglass pole. My ex-step-daughter spotted me, waved a gloved hand, and smiled.  I think it was a smile.  Maybe the chinstrap of her purple helmet was too tight.

“It’s good to see you again, Gwen,” I said walking toward her.   “You’ve grown up.”   Which was the most insipid comment I could make to a forty-something female I hadn’t seen in a two decades.

“Is that your car, John?” she asked, pointing an accusing finger to my gas guzzling 1993 Nissan 300ZX twin turbo.”  I nodded.  “You never drove a sports car when you and Mom were married.”

“Your mother was always between job,” I said with a shrug.  “We were living on a teacher’s salary and helping you with tuition at Iowa State.”

Gwen pulled out a bike chain, as I straightened my Green Bay Packers tie.  I’m not sure why I decided to dress up for the occasion.  “You could lock the bike in my car trunk.”

“No thanks.  I’ll just use this sugar maple.”  She wore black sweat pants and an Amnesty International sweatshirt—sort of the Pillsbury Dough Girl look.

“Let me help you.”

“Nonsense.  You’ll soil your suede sports coat.”  That’s when I noticed the PETA sticker on the bike frame.  Gwen did a twist and a loop of the chain, and the bike was secure.  “I’ve got it.”  She popped up, shook the dirt off her pink riding gloves, and grabbed a large cloth bag from the bike’s front basket.  “I’m ready.” 

I approached the restaurant door with big loping strides, then caught myself and slowed down so we could walk together.  I’m six-three; she barely topped five feet.  “A little cold for biking, isn’t it?”  The evening temperature had dropped to the low-forties with a crisp wind coming from the north.

“You’d be amazed what a good bike can do in snow.  And I always dress in layers.” She took off the helmet and shook out her curly brown hair. I’d remembered Gwen as “attractive” teen.  But then that had been twenty-three years ago.

She caught me staring at her footwear, a pair of cross-trainers held together with bookbinding tape. “These are my ‘wet streets’ shoes.”

As I reached for front door, a greeter pushed it open.  “Good evening, Mr. Liebbe.”

“Good evening, Chelsie.”  The eager high school girl seemed pleased I’d remembered her name.  She’d been in my Advanced Composition class last year.  For her final project she’d written an ambitiously horrible history of cosmetology.  “We’ve got reservations for two.”

“William will seat you, and Bobette will be your server.”

“William” turned out to be Bill Jeeter who’d failed Intro to Fiction twice for submitting ineptly reworked fantasy fiction he’d downloaded off the web.  He passed the class the third time around, just before he dropped out of school.  I’d heard he was working two jobs to make the payments on his Camaro.

“Good evening, William.”

“Good evening, sir.” He smirked as he put the menus on the tables.  “Bobette will be ….”

“… our server.  Yes, thanks, Bill.  Good to see you again.  How’s the car running?” 

“Purrs like a kitten, Mr. Liebbe.”

As we slid into the booth, Bobette magically appeared.  “Bobette” turned out to be Barbara Ann Waxpole an undistinguished George H. W. Bush High School graduate.  She wore wire-rimmed glasses.  Her hair color was in transition.  Her white blouse was spattered with a light Alfredo sauce, while her knee-length khaki skirt featured the marinara.  A bright floral tie hung from her neck.

“Mr. Liebbe, what an honor!  Do you remember me?”

“Certainly.  I still use your comparison/contrast essay on cheese spreads as a model in Composition class.”  I looked at her nametag.  “Did you change your name?”

“Bobette’s my stage name.  I’m doing commercials locally, plus dinner theater.  I played Liesel in The Sound of Music at the Hilltop.  What can I get you two to drink?”  She took our orders and sprinted off. 

“Do you know every restaurant employee in the city?”

I shrugged.  “I’ve been teaching in this town for thirty-three years.  My insurance agent, my mechanic, and my accountant are ex-students.”

“Bobette is clearly a fan.”

“That’s the trick, to be served by your fans.  You don’t want the surgeon taking out your appendix to hold a grudge because of the C you gave her on a sophomore English final.”

She laughed politely at my little joke.  I didn’t remember her laughing a lot in the three years I was married to her mother.  But then I rarely saw Gwen.  She was away at college the whole time.

Bobette appeared with decaf coffee, herbal tea, and a brown stain on her left sleeve. Gwen ordered the vegetarian lasagna.  I hesitated.

“It won’t bother me if you eat meat,” she said.  “Vegetarianism is my personal choice.” 

After I ordered the 8-ounce sirloin in a Jack Daniels sauce with a side of linguine, Gwen slid out of the booth. “Excuse me.  I need to fix my hair and things.”  She grabbed her cloth bag and disappeared without elaborating.

About the time our salads arrived, I saw an attractive middle-aged woman dressed in a simple black sheath walking toward me.  I paused.  The woman was Gwen, hair in place, the “layers” stuffed into her big cloth bag. 

“Wowser!”

Gwen slid back into the booth. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”  She placed the large blue napkin on her lap. “Even if I am your long-lost ex-step-daughter who you have to be nice to.”

“I don’t have to….”

“But you were.  Always.  Nice to me, that is.  Even when Mother was being impossible.”  

The comment just hung in the air for a moment.  “The dress looks great on you.”

“Thank you, John.”  She picked up her salad fork and began removing the cucumber slices.   “It isn’t meant for biking, but it packs well.”

“I can see that.”  I stabbed at my lettuce.  “I’m glad you called.  It’s been a long time since we talked.”

“I live here now.  Been here for six months.  I thought it was crazy not to.”

Over salads we caught up on each other’s lives. 

When I met and married Gwen’s mother, I’d already been teaching for seven years.  That was the year Olivia worked the McGraw-Hill booth at the Iowa State Teachers Convention in Des Moines.  She was gregarious, attractive, well-traveled, and a gifted liar. 

The last day of the convention Olivia mentioned, casually, that she had a daughter who was a first-year student majoring in engineering at Iowa State University, twenty-five miles up I-35 from Des Moines.  “I wish I had a car so that I could pop up and see her.”

I offered to drive her despite my suspicion that having a nineteen-year-old daughter meant Olivia wasn’t twenty-eight as she had initially claimed.    That was how I met Gwen.  She graduated from ISU three years later in the spring after the divorce became final. 

Gwen’s first job was working on the design team for JD AgTech in Waterloo.  Her biological father ran a family farm outside of Waverly, Iowa, about a half-hour drive away.  She got a chance to get to know him for the first time and realized that the circumstances of her mother’s first marriage were not as Olivia had always claimed. 

Two years after that her father walked Gwen down the aisle when she married a co-worker. Her mother didn’t attend because she was working the hospitality desk at the Majestic Hotel in Kawalla Lampour.

  “My husband, Aaron, was an engineer, like me,” Gwen explained as she removed the last of the croutons from her salad, “except my promotions came twice as fast as his.” 

I’d heard the story before, in slightly different language, in a lengthy email Olivia sent from Brugge in Belgium where she was working at a diamond exchange. 

“The marriage lasted a decade.  The divorce was antagonistic but not fatal.  We had no children.  Aaron got custody of our Yorkie,” she told me.  “I missed the dog even less than I missed Jason.”  Gwen caught herself.  “Doesn’t that sound terrible?”

“No,” I told her, “it sounds pretty normal.”  I shook my head.  “Your mother once sent me a postcard from Everglades City, Florida.  All it said was ‘I’ve met a dwarf who trains bears.’”  Gwen laughed at that.

“Why does she still write you?”

“I have no idea,” I told her.

Actually, I had a long list of ideas, but none of them seemed appropriate to speculate on while out with Olivia’s daughter.

Gwen reached across the table and patted my hand.  “Mother was the person who told me about Elizabeth’s death.  She gives me regular updates on your successes.”  She saw the expression on my face.  “And, yes, that probably falls under the category of Facebook stalking.”  She shook her head.  “What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry for your loss.  Your wife must have been a very special woman.” 

Chelsie arrived with the entrees.  “Bobette’s getting first aid.  I’m helping out,” she said, putting down the plates, “It’s so cute when people your age hold hands.” 

“People our age?”  Gwen mouthed as Chelsie departed.  I was in my mid-fifties.  She was a decade younger.

We fell into a comfortable conversation as we finished our salads.  “After the divorce,” she told me, “I took time off from work, climbed a volcano in Ecuador, lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica, and worked on a sustainable agricultural plan for a Mayan village in the hills of Zacapa.”

“That sounds like something your mother would do.”

“Correction.  It sounds like something my mother would claim to have done.”

“Duly noted, and corrected.”

She accepted my apology.  “To celebrate my new freedom, I bought a $1,500 mountain bike that was promptly stolen at gun-point in Guatemala City.  But I came back from Central America with three patent ideas.  At JD AgTech you aren’t young or old; you’re fast track or derailed.”

I sipped on my coffee, trying to make it last.  “And where is your metaphorical train?”

“Derailed at the moment.  Because of the bees.  It’s a long story.”

“I’m in no hurry.  My girls are in college now.  There’s no one at home waiting up for me.”

Before she could say anything, Bobette appeared.  The white surgical bandage wrapped around her left hand was already smeared with garlic butter.  She leaned toward me and whispered, “Mr. Liebbe, what happened to your other date?”

Gwen laughed and then reassured her, “It’s still me.  I just slipped into something more provocative.  I wasn’t keeping his attention in the sweats.”

Bobette understood.  She stepped back and used a cloth napkin to remove something from her glasses.  “Could I interest you in dessert?”

I looked down at our half-eaten entrees and then back up to Bobette.  “Why don’t you wait about twenty minutes, and then ask us again?  She nodded and left without a word.  I turned back to Gwen.  “Bees?”

She put down her fork. “My father ran a hog operation, but about the time I started working for AgTech the bottom dropped out of the sow belly market.  His beekeeping hobby kept him afloat.  By the time Aaron and I divorced, my father had devoted himself full-time to bees and was producing 185,000 pounds of honey annually.”

Gwen’s face became animated as she spoke.  “Two years ago, mites attacked his hives.  In 1988 there were 200,000 honeybee colonies in Iowa.  Now there are less than 40,000.  It’s all because of the varroa jacobsoni mite.” 

I noticed her eyes were a deep brown.  I caught myself staring.  Gwen blushed slightly, and then self-consciously took a large bite of lasagna on which she choked.

“Aren’t there chemicals?”  As soon as I said the word, I knew I’d erred.  She was Miss Organic Ex-Step-Daughter of the World.

“There’s Fluvalinate, but the mites have built up a tolerance.”

“So how does a design engineer become a honeybee savior?”

“I haven’t yet.  I’ve done some research.  I contacted the entomology department at Iowa State and picked their brains.  I talked with a high school girl in Elgin who has had success with compounds from the perilla plant, especially perilly acetate.  It’s interesting stuff.”

“But?”  Gwen hesitated.  “I know there’s a but,” I told her.

“Entomology isn’t my job.  I’m a design engineer.  I put in my eight-hour shift, but every other waking hour I spend with bees.  It’s affected my performance.  My team leader says I’m unfocused.  I lack the fervor I used to have.  Plus, I declined a choice assignment in China since it would take me out of the country for a year.”

 “So, is there hope for the bees?”

“My father’s optimistic.”

“And you?” 

“I suspect I have a career move in my future.  Maybe graduate school.”  Gwen pushed aside her plate.  “How about you?” 

“I’ve taught in the same classroom for the last twenty-five years.  I was pretty comfortable until Elizabeth fell ill.  Then everything was upside down.  I don’t handle change well.”

Bobette swooped by on the way to another of her tables, making a point to ignore us.  I noticed her right tennis shoe was untied and the strings from her apron were flapping behind her back leaving greasy streaks.

“After Elizabeth’s death I drowned myself in alcohol and self-pity until finally my girls did an intervention. After I sobered up, I started a Mock Trial team at school. And now I’m the literary magazine advisor.”

“Sometimes events surprise you.  Tonight, for example, has been….pleasant.”  Gwen daubed her lips with the blue napkin.  “Actually more than pleasant.”

Bobette arrived with the dessert menu and described each choice in dramatic detail.  I ordered the high calorie, high fat content, New York style cheesecake with molten fudge.  Gwen ordered the peach sorbet. 

There was an awkward silence after Bobette left.  Gwen eventually broke it.  “Maybe we should do this again?”

“I’d like that.”  And as soon as I said it, I realized how much I’d like it.

“Why?”

“Good question.” I took a deep breath.  “I admire your passion, the way you live out your beliefs, your unwillingness to compromise on the things you value.  Plus you’re an attractive young woman, much like your mother.  But….”

“There’s always a ‘but.’”

I pushed away from the table to get a little space between us.  “But there’s this ex-step-daughter thing.”

She laughed, and then stopped herself.  “No.  Obviously that’s not funny.  You want to do the right thing.”  Gwen scrunched up her face.  “You are not Woody Allen. And I never thought of you as a stepfather.  You were just one of a string of men that popped in and out of my mother’s life.  You should know that.”  She reached out for my hands and pulled me closer. “I was 19 when you met my mom.  By the time I was 22 you were gone from my life.  Now I’m 43.  That book is closed.”

I did the math again.  “I’m a decade older than you.”

“Yes, I know.  That bothers me a little.  That’s why I waited so long to call you once I got to town.  But I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker.”

The comment caught me by surprise.  “Deal-breaker?”  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bobette approaching with our desserts. “How about breakfast on Saturday at Fresh Deli, followed by a morning at the graphic novel exhibit at the Figge Art Museum?”

Bobette placed the sorbet in front of Gwen. “I’d prefer a twenty-mile bike ride followed by a hockey game.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Well, figure something out,” Bobette suggested as she set down my cheesecake. “I mean you’re obviously into each other.”

We stared at the desserts until Bobette finally got the hint and left. “What if we did Saturday lunch instead of breakfast,” she said. 

“I’ve never been to a hockey game,” I admitted. “You’ll have to explain it to me.”  I took the New York style cheesecake with molten fudge and slid it over to her along with the fresh fork.  I drug the peach sorbet and dessert spoon over to my side. 

“I ordered the sorbet,” she protested.

“Yes, but you wanted the cheesecake.”  Gwen blinked.  “How many miles have you put on your bike so far this week?”

“Sixty.”

“It’s not like you have to count calories.”  Before she could say anything, I dug the spoon into the sorbet and began eating.  “Besides,” I told her, “I should try new things.” She finished the cheesecake before the check arrived. 

Gwen looked at her watch.  “It’s getting late.  I’ve got bees to look in on.” We split the tab.  Gwen gave Bobette a generous tip, then disappear into the Ladies Room to change back into her biking clothes.

As we walked out of the restaurant I told her, “I could give you and your bike a lift.”

She shook her head.  “The night air will do me good,” she said.  “Plus it avoids that awkward moment when you walk me to my door, and you don’t know what to do.”

“Oh, I know what to do.”  I leaned down and kissed her. Gently. I touched her hair and drew her closer for a second kiss.  “No awkward moment.  No problem,” I said softly when we finished. 

Finally, I walked her to her bike and watched as she unchained it.  She stuffed her cloth bag into the front basket along with her heels. “So there’s no way to convince you to go bike riding with me on Saturday?”

“If I tried biking 20 miles to prove I wasn’t too old for you, I’d have to ride the last 3 miles on a gurney.”

“That’s not I’m image I’m comfortable with.”  Gwen strapped on her helmet.  “I’d consider going to the graphic novel exhibit on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“You take everything that you own that’s leather—billfolds, belts, shoes, jackets—and give them a decent burial.”

“I’ll donate everything to Goodwill, except my orange Toni Lama boots.”  Before she could say anything I added, “Gwen, you don’t want to completely emasculate me before the second date, do you?  There will be plenty of time for that after Saturday night’s hockey game.”

Gwen smiled.  “Mother always said you were a complicated man.”  She mounted the bike and turned on the headlamp and the rear flashers.  She put a reflector vest on over her other layers.  “I’ll be done with my bike ride by 11:00.  Pick me up at noon for lunch and the museum.  I’ll email you directions to my house.  Text me if you get cold feet.”

Gwen was almost out of the lot before she swung back in a wide arc and rode past me.  She turned again and rode back.  “You are an excellent kisser,” she called out as she passed me again.

“Right back at you,” I shouted as she coasted out of the drive and into the night.  “Much like your mother,” I said softly, and sighed.