Chapter 6

“When would this crazy brother of mine get out of this house today?!” Toby interrogated with a blunt tone. Anytime that he spoke in that manner, Booker knew that he was up to no good. Booker was busy trying to select the best fit for his outing on that day. He had been engrossed with the dresser for no less than twenty-five minutes since they woke up.

“Okay, I know that tone. Toby, now, what are you up to?” Booker inquired, racing over to the direction of his room. Peeping through the slightly opened door of Toby’s room while he expected an answer from his brother, who was still very much engrossed with his cell phone.

“You know. Sometimes, I wonder why a fine-looking young man like you would spend the most of his days on his cell phone, skimming through his social media pages. Yet, with no woman to call his own,” Booker added.

“So, you are trying to get at me this morning, right?” Toby raised a brow, staring at his brother with a sarcastic countenance.

“Maybe I should remind someone now that they are older than I am. And they should be married,” Toby responded.

There was another moment of silence between them before they burst out laughing. “But seriously, Booker, you should be thinking about marriage soon. You deserve a happy home, you know?” Booker nodded in affirmation of Toby’s words, but since he knew that there was no way that he was winning the conversation that day, he quickly raced out of the house, hoping that by the time he returned. The conversation would have changed.

For most of that day, Toby was engrossed in searching for the best woman for his brother. He skimmed past pictures of ladies that looked too wild, but the one chat that he wanted so badly was that of Linda. “I mean, if only this lady knows that I am in for so much good with her. Just, maybe she would be a little bit nice with conversations.”

Not long had Toby soliloquized when Linda uploaded another picture of her at the gym. Toby is familiar with all of the gyms in Florida. He knew from her pictures that she wasn’t resident in Florida, and that became a persistent line for him.

“Is it like you don’t want to chat up with me because you feel that I am a mile away?” He added to the pile of messages that he had sent to her when he saw that she wasn’t responding to his messages.

Once again, just like previous times, Linda ignored his message while keeping him on the red checkmark. This infuriated Toby. He would have let that go and kept trying to get her attention, but he realized that the picture uploads of Booker weren’t working for her. What do I do next? He thought to himself. A lot of ideas stormed the floor of his mind, but none seemed to make sense to him.

Hours passed into the dusk of that day, and he decided to go all blunt with her. “You know, I am actually on the lookout for someone whom I could make a life with someone to build with. I saw your picture and thought just maybe you might be the one for me. This is not encouraging, I must confess,” he added and deleted his numerous chats with her while he resorted to seeing his favorite love-struck television program.

He was still a little eaten up by the quest to find the perfect woman for Booker, but the love-struck scenes from the show that he was seeing distracted his troubling mind. He always had this habit of fantasizing about a dream life for himself and his brother, and so while the show aired, he had begun to see a similar play out with Booker. Ten minutes passed while he was seated on the sofa when messages began to pour in repeatedly.

For the few moments that his phone beeped, he heard. But Toby wasn’t willing to check on his messages. He just wanted to get distracted by his favorite show, and then when Booker came back from his outing, he would tell him about what he had been up to. 

Thirty minutes had passed, and the show was finally over. He went into the kitchen to prepare his choice delicacy of Waldorf salad when he heard his cell phone beep once more for the umpteenth time that evening. “Who the hell could this be?. Might be someone from my class in college,” he muttered with a reluctant tone.

Picking up his phone, he realized that the bulk of his messages was from the dating website that he had joined. He wondered who it was that sent him a ton of messages on Mingles. Opening the application, he saw that Linda had responded to all of his messages.

I am so sorry if you think I am not responding to your messages. I have a ton of messages sent in from people I don’t even know. I am new here and checking in on your profile. I feel like you are also new here. Well, the name is Linda. What’s yours?

Toby was impressed by her response. For the first time in the last three days that he had joined the dating platform, he felt like he might have misconstrued her lack of response as a sign of gross disrespect. “I am so sorry for bugging you. I have always been unlucky with love, and I was hoping a woman like you would change that story line.”

In a matter of seconds, Linda responded, “Oh! Nice to meet you. Is that you on your profile picture? Oh, you are one of those people who love to use other people’s pictures to hunt after cute women.”

Toby smiled. He was impressed by her choice of words. It seems like I wasn’t wrong about this one after all. I think I might just have found Booker a woman. Those moments came within a short moment of self-thought. He didn’t want to waste his chances with Linda.

“I am sorry if there are men like that, but my name is Booker Rogers, and that is me on my profile picture,” he responded. His response was so fast, and luckily for him. Linda had all of the time in the world to share with him for that moment.

“Well, not to waste too much of your time. Do you mind telling me about you? If you do not mind me asking,” Toby sounded as respectful as possible. In all of the times that Linda had been on the dating site, she had never had a chat where the men were empathic about the way that the woman felt about their line of questioning. She was impressed with his choice of words, and she didn’t hold back from telling him that it was her first impression of their chat.

Linda was the sort to easily catch a bad vibe from a first chat. It was a trait in her that she loved to tag as being classy. Deep in her mind, she feels like it is one of the many reasons that her college friends avoid her. The excuse about stealing their boyfriends was just a line that made it all seem presentable. “I actually enjoy the time chatting with this Booker guy. I miss as well go ahead to marry him if I am not careful!” She iterated to herself at intervals, especially in those times that he typed something that made her smile.

The duo went on to share details about growing up. Linda told Toby about how she was raised by a single mum in the remotest part of Philadelphia. She talked about her travails through school and how she had been finding it hard to get love to work her way. Toby was impressed by her profile. Beyond the pictures and the chats that they shared. He felt like he already knew her personally.

Toby detailed to Linda about the rough times that he shared with his brother while growing up. He spoke about how they were abandoned by their biological parents when they were only kids. They were left in a foster home in Florida, and it was while they were young that their foster parents nurtured them until they died in a ghastly road accident. 

“Honestly, if anyone had told me that I could survive till this day, I would never have imagined it,” he commented after he had given background about him and Booker.

“Don’t we all feel that way, sometimes? At the end of the day, I think it is a good thing that we are at least surviving, Booker. Don’t you think so?” She responded to his chat almost immediately. Their chat on the first day was a total irony of what he had been trying to achieve three days prior to that time. It was as though they were best of friends who had lost touch for a very long time, and they were trying to chat up about life. Their style of the chat was seamless and effortless, and Toby didn’t have to ask so many questions before they were divulged.

While their conversation on that day went on extensively, he didn’t realize that he had disclosed way too much about Booker’s life. He spoke about how Booker ended up joining a gang but had to tell a lie that he was into business at the moment. What surprised him in all of their chat was that they had a rare kind of flow that made him realize soon enough that Linda was a nice person to chat with. She didn’t judge him nor his brother for the kind of life that they had lived.

Their conversation went on through the entirety of that day. They exchanged contacts, and then they began to speak like they had known each other for a while. Actually, Toby is the sort to easily have a conversation with random people. The experiences that he had from childhood made him the way that he is. The only flaw with his conversation with Linda was that he didn’t know if Booker was going to like that he had already told her so much about him. Toby knew how Booker loved to keep his life private. For one who was a part of a major gang in Florida, it didn’t come as a surprise.

“I would get away with this anyway. He owes me this one at least,” Toby sighed as he admitted to himself that he was definitely doing the right thing for Booker.