The Department of Lost & Found Read Free

was not the man who one might dream of when one dreamt of men. Since he left me two days after discovering the burrowing lump of insidious cells while feeling me up during ho-hum morning sex, this might go without saying. As if to prove this point, I took a sip of my chamomile tea and hit reply to his e-mail.
    I’ l show you how ready I am.
    The Department of Lost & Found
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    I swirled the lukewarm tea around in my mouth and clicked my mouse to insert a table into the blank white space underneath the e-mail header. On the left side, I typed “why I loved you,” and on the right, “why I didn’t.”
    - Idiot
    - Makes a lot of money at a job that a chimpanzee can do
    - Tendency to stare too long in the mirror to the point of vanity
    - Not good-looking enough to have the right to pull off above behavior
    - Your moles
    - Boring—I never missed not having dinner with you because it was a snoozefest
    - Tiny penis (note to readers: this isn’t necessarily true, but surely, he didn’t know that)
    - Amazing ability to drop your blue-blooded family’s name into any conversation with important people
    - Insecure twit
    And that was just the right-hand column.
    In the left, I put a question mark, but conceded that we had, indeed, dated for two years, so that didn’t seem entirely fair. So instead, I hit the delete key and wrote:
    - Has good decorating taste
    - Makes decent pancakes
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    a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h
    Both of the characteristics were true. When we first moved in—
    actually, when Ned moved in with me, which is why I was the one who got to kick him out—Ned didn’t rest until our one-bedroom was sharp enough to nearly be photographed for Architectural Digest .
    Ebony floors. Rich leather headboard. Deep crimson foyer. And yes, he did make a mean weekend breakfast. On the rare Saturdays when I was in town and he wasn’t toiling away as a vice president at Goldman Sachs, he’d wake up before me and serve up the most perfect silver-dollar pancakes that a girl could ever dream of.
    But before I got too wistful, I realized that these two attributes also meant that I could tick off another trait in the right-hand column.
    - Aforementioned domesticity would lead me to the conclusion that you should, perhaps, examine your sexual preference.
    And then I thought of one more.
    - Leaves cancer-laden girlfriend for ridiculously named hussy It was true. If Ned and Agnes were to ever procreate, their kids had no chance at being cool. This was a fact.
    I went to press Send, but then remembered the very purpose of the original e-mail. “I’ll leave your clothes with my doorman by 5:00 tonight. I don’t want any future reminders of you around to stink up my karma.”
    Send.
    t h i s wa s n ’ t t h e first time I’d been faced with packing up my romantic history. And certainly, if it hadn’t been for the nuclear The Department of Lost & Found
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    drugs coursing through my body and the diabolic cells they were trying to stomp out, this wouldn’t have been the hardest. No, that title fell to Jake. So as I pulled out Ned’s seemingly endless amount of staid blue pin-striped suits and threw them—literally threw them, he could have Agnes iron them for him—into a duffel bag, it was hard not to think of Jake.
    I met Jacob Spencer Martin when I was twenty-five. I’d moved to the city only three months before, fresh out of Yale Law, to join Dupris’s first election campaign, and given the clip at which I worked, I wasn’t looking for anything romantically. To be more precise, I wasn’t looking for anything. But on a damp October evening, Sally begged me to join her for a girls’ night out. “We haven’t seen you in a month,” she said, and she wasn’t incorrect: I’d been holed up in my crappy cubicle in midtown making last-minute calls encouraging people to get out and vote. When she put her figurative foot down and told me that if I didn’t come out, she’d never speak to me again (she has a knack for