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had to be it!
    Not wanting to find out, I said goodbye to Tadd and left the store in a daze, forgetting all about my new winter coat.
    I still felt unsettled later that night when I met my friend and editor, William, for a drink at a divey bar downtown. He lives a few sketchy blocks away from the bar in an ultramodern condo built in an old meatpacking plant. He keeps insisting his neighborhood is about to change for the better. Since it hasn’t yet, I made sure the cab dropped me at the bar’s front door. I tried to ignore the slouching teenagers in oversize sweatshirts and droopy pants as they scanned the street for the Five-O.
    Inside, the bar was dark and slightly honky-tonk. A Steve Earle song was playing on the fifties-style jukebox, and the tables were made from rough-hewn pieces of wood. A beefy man in his fifties with a full sleeve of blurry tattoos was tending bar. There were a few half-empty bottles of hard alcohol on the ledge behind him. The air smelled like peanuts and stale beer.
    Next time, I was meeting William in my neighborhood.
    I ordered a pint of Harp and carried it to William’s table by the jukebox. He was wearing a navy sweatshirt with white lettering across the front. As usual, his bright yellow hair was sticking straight up.
    “Yo, A.B., what up?”
    “Are you still allowed to talk like that at your age?”
    He rolled his kelly-green eyes. “Geez, thanks for making me feel all good about turning thirty-six.”
    “Shit, was it your birthday?”
    “Pretty sure I saw you eating two pieces of cake at my office party two days ago.”
    I smiled. “It was three pieces, actually.”
    “The girls must hate you.”
    “Sometimes.” I took a long drink and wiped the foam off my upper lip. I stared into the amber liquid, watching the reflected ceiling lights float gently on its surface.
    “What’s up, Anne? You seem . . . gloomy.”
    “I guess I’m feeling my own age these days.”
    “Because of the Cheater?”
    That’s his name for Stuart since the breakup.
    “That, and . . . I don’t know . . . do you ever feel like you’re going to be single forever?”
    William sighed. “I know I’m going to regret this, but . . . what’s really going on?”
    I thought about the disoriented, winded feeling I had when Tadd told me he was married. How I’d felt that feeling before. How maybe it was the reason I’d stayed with Stuart longer than I should have.
    “I guess I feel like I’m never going to meet the person I’m supposed to be with. I keep thinking I’ve met him, but it never seems to work out.”
    “How many times have you thought that?”
    “Four.”
    “That seems like a lot.”
    “I know, right?”
    William dug a handful of peanuts out of the bowl in front of him. “Can you explain something to me? Why do women always think there’s one particular person they’re supposed to be with?”
    “Men don’t think that?”
    “Um, no.”
    “Huh.”
    “So,” he asked again, “are you going to enlighten me?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know what anyone else’s excuse is, but I blame my mother.”
    He laughed. “Of course you do.”
    “She is the one who named me after the main character in Anne of Green Gables. ”
    “So?”
    “So . . . being named after a character in a made-to-be love story is a recipe for thinking that life should imitate art, particularly when you look just like her.”
    I said this in a mocking tone, but sad to say, it’s pretty much the truth. I do look just like Anne of Green Gables (red hair, green eyes, pale skin, a smattering of freckles across my nose), and I did grow up thinking the perfect man for me is out there, that it’s only a matter of time until I meet him.
    “It’s a book, Anne,” William said practically.
    “I know, but . . . don’t you think those kinds of things happen in real life sometimes?”
    “You’re hopeless, you know that?”
    “Don’t remind me.”
    D espite my best intentions, I never quite managed to