Blackjack

Each summer, we invite some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. Here is the final instalment on this year’s theme, second acts’.

- KIRSTY GUNN

By the time she got up to her room she'd decided she wasn't going to stay. First thing in the morning it would have to be, because it was too late to leave now. She would have missed the last flight back down, and facing that long train ride again... it was out of the question. So it would have to be tomorrow. But first thing. Because she couldn't stay here. She couldn't.

Checking in, she'd wondered for the umpteenth time what she was doing even being in this situation in the first place thinking about it all day on the train for that matter. Letting the kids talk her into it, a date with a stranger, staying overnight and all the rest of it. What kind of a madcap idea was that, at her age? Brendan had said everyone does it, Mum, and had set the whole thing up, with Kit agreeing. That their father had been gone for a year now and she was still young, that it was time she met someone new, they said, and that they would just go ahead and register her on an app they'd seemed very excited about, scrolling through images at a pitch and downing their gin and tonics.

Then it was a case of: This one? That one? What about him? And he looks nice, doesn't he, Kit had said, peering into the image on the screen as if she could read the man's heart right there. He's a bit like Dad, even, don't you think? And look, Mum, he likes the things you do. See? The symphony, and all that? They've got a great performing arts centre up there. And you can't stay in the house forever, miles from everyone. It will do you good.

So, all right then, she had let them organise. "Meet" him, whoever he was, after she'd booked into the hotel he'd suggested where they could have a leisurely breakfast the next day and then wander round the city, if they got on, taking it in. He was from a small town, too, the kids said. He'd also lost his wife about a year ago and was learning to get over it.