COMPLICATIONS

I put on my best sympathetic smile and slipped into the rattan employee chair across the slender glass-topped coffee table. “I'm Gene. Welcome to our store. Is everything all right? Buck asked me to assist you.”

The woman's face puckered at the name and she smiled a sour little smirk. “I'm sure he did. He ran out of here when I had to remind him who I am.” She cleared her throat and batted big fake lashes against her cheek. She'd been very careful not to mess them up with the tissue. “My name is Gloria Everett. I'm here to see if there are any new matches for me?” She took a second run at smiling, this time aiming for sweet and maybe even a touch coquettish no matter what year was on her driver's license and I smiled back. Smiles make everything better. There's a page in our employee manual saying so and it's the only true thing in that whole binder.

“Let me go and check. I'm...” I hesitated. I didn't know quite what to say. “I'm sorry that Buck couldn't help you. I'm sure he must have had an emergency.”

Gloria started to scoff. “Oh, I'm the emergency. He and I...” She blushed. “We dated.”

I looked at her for a moment and it dawned on me: one of Buck's “bags”. He liked to talk about them in hunting terms. Mark and I privately called these women “road kill”. Buck had a thing for going through the files looking for women who matched his particular preferences: not too young, not too old, not too freshly divorced or dumped. He liked them best when they were most worried they'd started to go a little stale on the counter. He said it made them “grateful” which is the worst thing I'd ever heard someone say without meaning it as an insult. Buck had racked up a lot of “bags” over the last couple of years. He'd left his youth in the '60s and his pride in the '70s. He was turning the '80s into a smorgasbord of one-night stands with our female clientele. It was grotesque. It was like hearing a bad joke in its hundredth retelling every time he walked into his office with a stack of file folders. We could hear him through that cheap hollow- core door, calling them on the phone and giving them the same pitch: This is Buck from Til Death Do Us Part. I was doing some work going over potential matches for you and, well, I don't quite know how to say this but the computer has suggested that we might be an excellent match...

Mark and I giggled – well, I giggled and he chuckled - when we first caught on but that turned into disgust over time. It wasn't that I was a prude by any means. Hey, we're big boys and girls, if there's no harm in it then why not? I'm all for people having sex, trust me, but Buck was such a manipulative old troll. To watch him snare a lonely woman with that song and dance was to watch a woman give up.

Everything about Gloria suddenly made sense. “I see,” I said. “Let me go to the back and find out if the computers have come up with anything new for you. It will just take me a couple of minutes. Feel free to relax and I'll be right back.” I gave her another friendly smile – no teeth, never show teeth to someone who feels vulnerable – and disappeared into our office.

Mark had been listening at the door. As I crossed the drab beige back room towards the filing cabinets to find her in them he followed me, whispering, “I remember her. She’s one of Buck's first catches. Two years ago, maybe? Yeesh.” He reflexively, habitually reached up and smoothed his hair away from his forehead in the mirror. “Were they fighting?”

I found the folder and peeked inside while it was still in the drawer: zilch in the way of prospects. There were no computers, of course, at least not in the back. We turned their surveys into little bubble sheets with special pencils and sent those off to corporate and a computer there supposedly shuffled the deck to make matches but that only happened when someone first came in and then once every couple of months after that. It was September of 1982 and the Computer Age was all around us but the actual computers were all down the concourse at Radio Shack. Most of the time it was us playing matchmaker with whomever struck our fancy. The computers were big in the ads, though, them and the whole bit about taking death predictions into account when we paired them up. That was the company's specialty, the thing that set it apart until everyone else copied them. We made new clients get a death test in a little alcove off to one side of the lobby and filed that with their paperwork. On the questionnaire, after all the stuff about hobbies and religious beliefs, they had the option of confidentially expressing a preference for someone whose death might coincide with their own – you know, stick together two CAR ACCIDENTs who both hope to die beside their eventual mate – or whether they wanted someone whose death would be radically different from their own. One time we got a guy in whose card read MURDER and he wrote at the bottom of the questionnaire, in huge letters, “NO GUNS!!!” I don't think he cared whether we set him up with his murderer just as long as he didn't have to get shot when it was time to go. Now that is a man who has made peace with the Fates. There was very small print at the bottom of the questionnaire specifying that due to computer error and, I will always remember, “the fickle ways of Destiny” the company couldn't guarantee that they would find a match or if they did that everything – including their death – would go exactly as desired forever and ever. People didn't stop to read that, though. They didn't want to think about all the bad possibilities. They wanted to think about love and romance and getting laid.