A Perfectly Imperfect Match (Matchmaking Mamas) Read Free Page A

couched rejection.
    Maybe eventually they’d work this thing out, she thought. At least she could hope.
    Elizabeth threw herself into the next number and tried to put this unpleasant episode behind her.
    * * *
    Her apartment felt lonelier than usual as Elizabeth let herself in later that evening.
    She’d deliberately left a light on when she’d departed earlier for the Bar Mitzvah, anticipating that she just might need help in being upbeat when she came home.
    Unfortunately, the light didn’t manage to do the trick—that aching loneliness was still waiting for her.
    Or rather, it had ridden home with her in the car, growing more and more acute with every mile that brought her closer to her empty apartment.
    Locking the door behind her, she threw her keys and purse onto the top of the small bookcase near the door and stepped out of her shoes.
    Maybe she needed a pet, Elizabeth mused. A warm, happy puppy to jump up and greet her as she came through the door.
    For a split second, she actually considered it. She certainly had an abundance of love to give to a pet. But then she thought of how guilty she’d feel about keeping the poor thing cooped up in the apartment while she was away at work. Considering how sporadic and unstructured her engagements were, the puppy wouldn’t be able to have anything that resembled a normal, regular schedule.
    Besides, she reminded herself, Mrs. Goldberg had Lizzie and she was forever telling her how lonely she was for actual company ever since “her Albert” had passed on. The feline, while fairly affectionate, still didn’t fill the gap she had in her heart, the older woman had confessed sadly.
    No, the cure for this loneliness that kept wrapping its tentacles around her lately was just more work, Elizabeth decided. It was while she was playing that she felt whole, as if she was contributing something worthwhile and beautiful to the universe. The violin was capable of making its audience both laugh and weep, and she could make it do both with aplomb.
    Elizabeth glanced at the answering machine as she walked past it. The red light was blinking, telling her she had messages.
    One, she knew, was bound to be from her father. That wonderful man always called her every night, no matter how busy his day had been, just to check in on her.
    Now there’s something to really be grateful for, she told herself. Not everyone had a father like that, a man who had single-handedly raised her and her two younger brothers while he was juggling a full-time career as a physician.
    With very little warning, he’d been blindsided by his wife’s sudden onset of pancreatic cancer and just like that, he’d found himself a widower with three young children.
    Rather than farming his kids off to a female relative, or gladly abdicating his role to some full-time nanny he paid to raise his children, he’d painstakingly rearranged his life so that he could be there for every school play, every concert, even every parent/teacher conference. Elizabeth would forever be grateful to her dad for all the sacrifices he’d made over the years. There wasn’t anything that she wouldn’t do for him—and she knew her brothers felt the same way.
    Maybe that was part of why she was having such trouble finding someone to share her life with, Elizabeth thought. She wanted to meet a man who had the warmth, the integrity, the sensitivity that her father had. She supposed that her standards were just too high.
    But then, her father met those standards. So wasn’t it reasonable to believe that there might be someone else in the world like that? Someone who, in addition to all the aforementioned attributes, could also make her world stand still.
    That was how, she remembered, her mother had told her that she’d felt the very first time that she’d met her father.
    It was one of Elizabeth’s most cherished memories, sitting beside her mother, flipping through an album of old photographs. She remembered it was raining that day.