The text message was a masterpiece of petty, passive-aggressive fiction. Carol Ann, known to everyone as Cici, stared at her phone screen with a satisfied smirk. At sixty-two, she wasn’t too old for a little well-deserved mischief.
“Oh, George! What a wonderful evening! Dinner was divine. I haven’t laughed that hard in years. I’m so glad we reconnected. Can’t wait for our golf date next week! P.S. You’re a much better kisser than you used to be. 😉”
She read it over twice, her smirk widening. It was perfect. It would infuriate her ex-husband, Richard. The man was a fortress of stoic indifference, but she knew his one unshakable vulnerability: his ego. The idea that his former wife of thirty-five years was not only moving on but was apparently having a far better time with his old business rival, George Henderson, would drive him absolutely bananas.
It had been three years since the divorce. It was amicable, as these things go. They’d simply run out of things to say to each other. But lately, a low-grade irritation had been brewing in Cici. Richard had gotten a new sports car. He’d taken a cruise to Alaska with his golf buddies. He seemed to be having the time of his life, while she was still figuring out who Carol Ann was without him.
So, this little message was her grenade. She wasn’t actually dating George Henderson, of course. The man had the personality of a damp sponge and a putting green for a hairline. She’d run into him at the grocery store, where they’d exchanged exactly five words about the price of avocados.
But Richard didn’t need to know that.
With a flourish, she hit “send.” The satisfying whoosh sound signaled the missile was launched. She pictured Richard’s face—the confusion, the indignation, the sputtering—and she giggled, pouring herself a celebratory glass of pinot grigio.
Her phone buzzed almost instantly. That was fast, she thought, her heart doing a little flip of triumph. He must have been staring at his phone.
But the name on the screen wasn’t “Richard.” It was “Pastor Jim.”
The glass of wine halted halfway to her lips. A cold, sharp dread, colder than the chilled wine, shot through her veins. No. No, no, no, no.
With trembling fingers, she tapped the message. It was her message. The entire, horrible, flirty, lie-filled message. Sent not to “Richard,” but to “Pastor Jim,” the kindly, soft-spoken minister who had presided over her granddaughter’s baptism just last month.
Her world shrunk to the glowing screen of her phone. The walls of her cozy living room seemed to press in on her. This was a catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Pastor Jim’s response was a study in polite, bewildered concern.
“Carol Ann? This is Pastor Jim. I believe you may have sent this to me by mistake? I’m… flattered? But I’m also quite confused. I haven’t seen you since little Sophie’s baptism, and I’m certainly not much of a golfer! I do hope you’re well.”
Cici let out a sound that was half-groan, half-sob. She dropped her phone on the sofa cushion as if it had burned her. Of course. Of course she’d done it. “George” was right next to “Pastor Jim” in her contacts. In her gleeful haste, her thumb had betrayed her.
Her first impulse was to throw her phone into the disposal and move to a remote cabin in Montana where no one would ever find her. Her second, more rational impulse was pure panic. What did one say in this situation? “Sorry, Pastor, that graphically detailed lie about a romantic evening was meant for my ex-husband to make him jealous”?
She was too humiliated to think straight. She considered pretending it was a prank, but Pastor Jim didn’t seem the pranking type. She thought about claiming her phone had been hacked, but by a hacker with a specific vendetta against her dignity?
While she was frozen in a state of pure horror, her phone rang. The screen flashed “Richard.” The real target. Her blood ran cold. Why was he calling? Had Pastor Jim called him? Were they comparing notes? Was there some kind of pastoral ethics hotline she’d inadvertently triggered?
She answered, her voice a shaky whisper. “Hello?”
“Cici?” Richard’s voice was not angry. It was… strange. Amused. “I just got the weirdest phone call from Jim Henderson.”
Cici’s mind went blank. Jim Henderson? George’s brother? The quiet, sweet man who ran the animal shelter? What did he have to do with anything?
“Jim?” she stammered. “Why on earth was Jim Henderson calling you?”
Richard let out a low chuckle. “Well, it seems he got a text message from you. A rather… affectionate text message. He was terribly embarrassed. Thought maybe you’d had too much sun at the garden club luncheon today. He called me because he was worried about you and thought I should know.”
The room spun. She hadn’t sent it to Pastor Jim. She’d sent it to Jim Henderson. George’s recently widowed, painfully shy brother. The man who blushed if you said “good morning” too cheerfully. She had just told a grieving widower that he was a wonderful kisser.
This was worse. So much worse.
“Oh, Richard,” she moaned, burying her face in her free hand. “It was a mistake. A horrible, stupid mistake.”
“I gathered that,” Richard said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in years. “So, let me get this straight. You were trying to make me jealous by pretending to date George Henderson? George? The man who wears socks with his sandals and calls a well-done steak ‘cuisine’?”
There was no point in lying. The jig was up, in the most spectacularly humiliating way possible. “Yes,” she whispered.
To her utter astonishment, Richard burst out laughing. It was a full, deep, genuine laugh that echoed down the phone line. “Oh, Cici. Only you. You couldn’t just call and ask me to lunch like a normal person?”
“I… I didn’t think you’d say yes,” she admitted, feeling like a complete fool.
“Well, for what it’s worth, your plan worked,” he said, his laughter subsiding into a warm chuckle. “I was plenty provoked. Mostly at the thought of you subjecting yourself to an evening with George. I was about to call and stage an intervention.”
She managed a weak smile. “So what do we do now? I have to call poor Jim Henderson and explain that I’m not a cougar with a death wish and that his brother is a terrible kisser, which I wouldn’t know because I’ve never kissed him.”
“I’ll handle Jim,” Richard said, his voice softening. “I’ll tell him it was a prank that went wrong. He’s a good guy. He’ll understand.”
The kindness in his voice undid her. “Thank you, Richard.”
“But as for you,” he said, and she could picture him smiling, the crinkles around his eyes deepening. “You owe me a lunch. A real one. Tomorrow. And you can explain to me in person why you felt the need to go to such dramatic lengths to get my attention.”
And as Cici hung up the phone, her face still flushed with embarrassment, she realized something. Her idiotic, humiliating, message-sending disaster had somehow, miraculously, worked. It had just hit the wrong target on the way to the right one.
She picked up her glass of wine, her hand finally steady, and took a long sip. Maybe technology wasn’t so bad after all.