Almost a year has passed since I met Valerie at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York City. I had been waiting for a client who wanted to meet me there and then find a place to discuss a project.

I was in my finest three-piece Brioni suit, leaning against one of the endless cosmetic counters, when two women approached me.

“Can you help us?” the older woman asked. She was over fifty and strikingly pretty. The younger woman, the spitting image of her, had to be her daughter.

“Yes, of course I can help you. I would be delighted, but you will have to pay cash.”

“Why?” the mother asked, as surprised as her daughter.

“Because I don’t work here,” I said, unable to contain a smile. “I’m waiting for a client.”

The mother laughed openly. “Well done.”

“Do you mind giving me your daughter’s phone number? She’s very pretty and I’d like to meet her?”

“Of course,” she said without hesitation, or asking her daughter.

Valerie, her daughter, looked like she wanted to strangle me. An expression I’ve seen before.

# # #

We hit it off on our first date.

“You blew my mother away.”

”I wanted to meet you but didn’t know what to say.”

“My mother couldn’t stop talking about it with my father.”

“I’m glad you agreed to meet.”

We saw each other a dozen times over the next few months. Valerie was a trauma nurse at Chicago Central Hospital. Smart as a whip. Loved poetry, the Beatles, hiking, and romance novels. She had a quiet way of speaking, a way of expressing her feelings I found endearing. Her position in the ER was another side of this sweet, beautiful woman. Strong, confident. Skilled. She recounted a few of what must have been hundreds of patient stories too impossible to grasp. Gunshot, knife, and blunt object wounds. Car accidents. Violent marital abuse. The gruesome outcome of Chicago’s never-ending gang violence.

# # #

The real test was meeting Jarred, her fourteen-year-old son.

I looked it up. Jarred is a boy’s name, a variant spelling of Jared, and was the second-oldest person to live in the Bible, reaching the impressive age of 962. Interesting shit.

I drove out to their home in the suburbs well prepared. Linda, my best friend has a fifteen-year-old son. Another sports junkie. I knew Jarred liked hockey and the Chicago Bears. I came with flowers for his mom and a Bears jersey for him. Val made an Italian meal from scratch and the conversation was nonstop. We were laughing and constantly talking over each other.

“How about a game of Scrabble?” Val suggested, remembering I used to play Scrabble a century ago.

We cleared the kitchen table and got to it. Jarred watched while an NFL game played on their living room tv.

After a half hour it was obvious, as beautiful and smart as she was, Scrabble was a blind spot. I was over eighty points ahead after an hour and getting bored. A personal fault and not a good thing, especially on this kind of date.

I ignored my instincts and dropped a seven-letter word that caught Jarred’s attention.

“Was that necessary? Really?” Val said as her son broke up laughing and shaking his head wildly at his mother.

She had no idea what was going on but the kid did.

He caught his breath and said, “He used a blank in his last turn and another just now.”

Val didn’t get it.

“You have a blank in your hand, Mom. There are only two blanks in the game.”

Valerie flushed red. She spun around and grasped the butcher knife sitting next to half a bowl of pasta on the kitchen counter. The red faded into a mask of disappointment.

“So, exactly how much trouble am I in?” I said to Val, then winked at Jarred.

Jarred’s chuckle should have been contagious. It wasn’t.

“If I had known that you cheated at Scrabble, I would never let my mother give you my phone number. You’re a horrible person,” she said, not quite kiddingly.

“Am I a horrible person?” I asked Jarred.

He quickly nodded, quite happy to have seen his mother, who he obviously adored, being made fun of while he was watching. A son’s dream come true.

The fireplace was crackling. The scent of tomato sauce was in the air. The wine I brought was almost gone. The silence was deafening. I walked over to Val, gently removed the cleaver from her grip and said, “It was all Jarred’s idea. He put me up to it.”

Jarred collapsed, laughing again. “Yeah, Mom, it was all me. I called your friend and he agreed to the prank.”

Val returned to the kitchen sink, missing a succession of silent high fives Jarred and I were exchanging.

The evening ended with less joy than it began. Something had changed in Valerie. The smile was there, but it was only on her face.

Val was hurt. My humor had betrayed her trust. The joke was never meant to embarrass, and Jarred was a delight to hang with. I had touched something deeply sensitive in her. Something she hadn’t yet shared. Maybe trusting me at all had been a stretch for her.

“Dinner was great,” she said when I called the next day.

Maybe I was reading too much into it. I had crossed a line of trust, or brought back an emotion or instance that pained her.

We remained just friends until she and Jarred moved to Florida a year later for a job as a head trauma nurse.

That was the first and only time I cheated at Scrabble. Looking back, I’m not particularly proud of myself for such a misread.

Still, on the face of it, it was a harmless prank, just on the wrong girl.

– Arthur Davis