Dweller - Jeff Strand [69]
He checked his watch. The meeting was over.
Good. Now he could finally focus on this cartoon.
He’d heard a rule that if you thought you had Alzheimer’s disease, you didn’t really have it, because those suffering from it were never aware. Was the same true of being a creepy stalker guy? If he was sitting on his living room couch, thinking, “Wow, I’m being kind of obsessive here,” then that by definition meant that he wasn’t a stalker. A genuinely creepy stalker would be unaware of the impact he was having on others. He would walk up to her with a bouquet of flowers and say, “Here, I got these for you. They match your soul.”
And, most importantly, he’d successfully kept himself from actually hanging around the support group meeting. So even if he was a stalker, he was a stalker with restraint.
She was so beautiful, though.
The next Saturday was quite a bit easier. He was still very much aware that he knew (probably) where she was at that moment, but he didn’t obsess over it. At least he didn’t think he did. When asked, Owen answered no to the question of whether all of this talk about Sarah was making him want to rip Toby’s head right off his shoulders and gargle the geyser of blood, so Toby figured that he wasn’t overdoing it.
At the meeting of local artists, Toby was the celebrity cartoonist superstar. He didn’t consider this a good thing, since the sum total of his professional accomplishments was that one cartoon he sold to The Blender, for which he had not yet received his five dollars.
He was about twenty years older than the average person in the room. Most of them had yet to send their work out to a single market. Granted, Toby was forty and he hadn’t really done crap with his drawing “career” until he was in his thirties, but he’d hoped to use this group to acquire knowledge and make valuable industry contacts, not have kids say, “Wow! The old guy sold something!”
Most of the meeting was spent listening to them bitch about how much art sucked these days.
Finally, the torment ended, and they cleared out of the room. Toby wasn’t going to seek out Sarah. Absolutely not. He wasn’t going to do it. No way.
Instead, she found him.
“Hi!” she said, tapping him on the shoulder just as he opened the door to walk out of the building and making him flinch in surprise. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No, no, it’s okay, you don’t scare me. I mean didn’t scare me. I mean you just startled me. How are you?”
“It’s me, from the support meeting last month.”
“Yep, I remember you,” said Toby. “I was the dumb-ass.”
“Did you find your artists’ group this time?”
“Yep, I sure did.”
“Was it worthwhile?”
“Well, have you heard that Groucho Marx quote about how he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him for a member? It was kind of like that. I’m all in favor of people appreciating my accomplishments, but they pretty much suck.”
Great job, Toby! Sell yourself! Refer to yourself as a dumb-ass again! Impress her!
“What do you draw?”
“Cartoons.”
“You mean like Bugs Bunny?”
“No, not animated. Comic strips. Like Garfield.”
“Oh, that’s great! Are you in newspapers?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you’ll get there someday. Are you on your mom’s refrigerator?”
“Uhhhh, no. She died. She killed herself.”
Way to keep the mood light, dumb-ass.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. That was really thoughtless.”
Toby shook his head. “No, no, that’s totally fine. It’s not like you asked me that while we were in a support group for orphans whose parents killed themselves. That would’ve been bad. I would’ve judged you for that.”
“Well, I’m sorry anyway. It must’ve been hard.”
“Yeah…it had its downside.”
“Is your father still alive?”
“Uh, no, actually he died right before she did. Stroke. So you can sort of see the foundation for my mom’s suicide.”
“Wow, I’m really digging myself in deep here, aren’t I?”
“You’re fine. We’ll just say that the awkward dead-parents thing evens out the dumb-ass wrong-room thing, and now we’ve both got perfect records.”
Sarah ran her