sometimes there's a reason

I met a girl at a bar several weeks ago. We talked. We laughed. And at the end of the evening we exchanged numbers. A couple of days later, I called and left her a message. I never heard from her again. But I had more than enough to keep myself busy without worrying about a girl and a phone call that was never returned.

Among these new busy-keeping things were a new job and new job related procedures to be committed to memory. There was also a whole new set of people and personalities that needed to be learned…who to trust, who the office tattletale is, who do you stay away from until they have had their third cup of coffee.

And then there was Fred, the office nut-case. Fred worked in our shipping department until one day last week, when he was found sitting amidst dozens of half packed boxes and sobbing uncontrollably.

Once calmed enough to talk, Fred told us that he and his wife had been separated for several weeks and were currently in the process of getting a divorce. He was certain she was seeing other people and simply couldn’t bear the fact of her being with some other man. He told us that if he ever found her with someone, he would kill her, the guy she was with, and himself.

Homicidal tendencies not being conducive to his typical shipping duties, Fred was told by the boss to take the rest of the day off and go get some help.

Later that night, he was arrested for stalking his soon to be ex-wife…thus violating the protection order that she had put out against him a few weeks earlier. According to the newspaper article the following day, page six of the Local section, he was apprehended but somehow got away from the officers, running handcuffed into the woods.

Two days after he was found, still handcuffed, hiding out in his neighbor’s tool shed, I stumbled upon a cocktail napkin stuffed in a pocket of my jacket. And on this napkin was the number of the girl that I had met many weeks prior.

Experiencing a ‘what the hell’ moment, I decided that one last call was in order. So I dialed and, to my surprise, she picked up on the second ring.

After reacquainting…the bar, the conversation, exchanging numbers, never hearing from her since…she told me, “I really wanted to call you, I just had no idea how I would explain things.”

“Explain what things?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news, but have you heard about that guy who was arrested the other day?”

“The shipping clerk, you mean?”

“Exactly,” she replied. “Well, that’s my husband. I had no idea how I would explain things…I really wanted to go out with you but have been scared that he’s going to do something crazy.”

“You mean like kill me, kill you, and then kill himself?” I answered, having just heard this same thing from her husband’s mouth not two days earlier.

“Exactly,” she said again. “I was pretty sure that if you ended up dead, I wouldn’t be getting asked out on a second date.”

“Well, death does tend to put a damper on things,” I agreed.

Shortly after, we said our goodbyes and her number was quickly discarded in the nearest trash can.

As the cocktail napkin came to rest upon an empty Wendy’s hamburger wrapper, I realized that sometimes there’s a good reason why you never get a return call from someone you meet in a bar.