The Boyfriend I Hired Turned Real

My sister Hensley is the one who found the ad, and my sister Hensley is the one who will tell this story wrong for the rest of her life, so I am telling it myself, from the beginning, the whole of it, so that somebody in Quarry Hollow, Iowa gets it right.

I am thirty four years old. I am a large animal vet tech, which means my hands are rough in a way no bride is supposed to have rough hands, not that anyone was checking anymore by the time this story starts. I had been engaged to a man named Sterling Wyndham for four years and two months, and I was unengaged from him with almost no warning at all, eight weeks before our wedding, in the parking lot of the Hy-Vee in Cassville where he had driven us specifically so that I would not make a scene, because Sterling planned everything, right down to where he would leave me.

He did not raise his voice. That was the worst part, if you want to know. He stood by the cart corral with his hands in his jacket pockets and he told me, calm as a weather report, that he had met someone, a twenty six year old yoga instructor named Yardley Fairbrook who did his company’s social media page, and that he did not see the point of dragging out something that was not working. I asked him what, exactly, was not working, because as far as I knew we had spent four years picking out a venue and a ring and a life, and he looked at me the way you look at a form you are about to correct, and he said the sentence I will hear on my deathbed.

“You’re the kind of woman a man settles down with, Corbin. Not the kind he falls for.”

Then he got in his truck and drove off and left me standing next to a cart corral in a Hy-Vee parking lot in my work coveralls, because I had come straight from a calving call, with actual afterbirth still on my boots, which I want on the record because it is the single funniest and worst detail of the whole year and I have earned the right to tell it exactly that way.

I lost the dress deposit. Six hundred and forty dollars, nonrefundable, at Bellamy’s Bridal two towns over, gone the day I called to cancel. I lost the deposit on the fellowship hall at the Quarry Hollow Lutheran church, which the ladies’ committee was kind enough to return half of, because they are good women and half was more than the contract required. And I lost, though I did not understand this part until later, the entire Fourth of July.

You have to understand what the Fourth of July is in a town of eleven hundred people built around one lake. It is not a holiday. It is the whole year’s proof of itself. Quarry Hollow throws its Lake Jubilee on the Fourth, every single year since before my grandmother was born, and it is boats and a greased pole and a potato salad contest judged by the fire chief and fireworks paid for by the VFW post out of a coffee can that sits on the counter of the feed store from March to June, and every single soul in the county comes down to the water for it. Sterling and I had gone every year of our engagement. We had planned, out loud, in front of people, to announce our wedding date at the Jubilee the summer before last, standing on the dock in the evening with the whole town watching, because that is the kind of thing Sterling liked to do, make an announcement into a captive audience. Everybody in three counties knew we were supposed to be married by now. Everybody in three counties was going to be standing on that same beach on the Fourth of July, watching to see what I did with my face when Sterling Wyndham showed up with a twenty six year old yoga instructor on his arm, because word travels around a lake faster than it travels around anything else I know of, and by the second week of June, it had already gotten there ahead of me.

My mother called it “getting looked at.” She said it like a diagnosis. “Corbin, honey, you are going to get looked at something terrible on the Fourth,” she told me over the phone, meaning well, meaning it as a warning, and she was right, and I hung up the phone and sat on my back step with my dog’s head in my lap and I cried in the specific, ugly, hiccuping way I had not let myself cry since the parking lot.

That is where Hensley found me.

My sister is two years younger than me and has never in her life been afraid of a single thing, including our father, which is saying something, because our father, Ulric Marlowe, once made a hardware store manager cry over a warranty dispute. Hensley sat down next to me on the step, took one look at my face, and said, “Okay. We are not doing this. You are not standing on that beach alone getting looked at by the entire county while Sterling Wyndham parades a child down there in a bikini.”

“She’s twenty six, Hensley, not twelve.”

“She is a child to me and she will be a child to me forever, this is not up for debate. What you need,” my sister said, with the particular gleam she gets when she has decided something, “is a date. A good one. A ringer.”

I told her I did not have a good one lying around. I had not so much as had coffee with a man since Sterling. Hensley said that was fine, that was not a problem, that was in fact an opportunity, and she got her phone out right there on my back step and started typing before I could stop her.

What she typed into the search bar, and I am not exaggerating this, was “hire an actor to be your date Iowa.”

I want to tell you I talked her out of it. I did not. I was too tired to talk her out of anything by that point, and some small, mean, hopeful part of me, the part still standing in that Hy-Vee parking lot with afterbirth on my boots, wanted to see Sterling Wyndham’s face do something other than calm.

There is, it turns out, no shortage of options if you go looking for a rent-a-boyfriend in eastern Iowa, and every single one of the first four we found was a disaster. There was a man in Cedar Rapids who wanted three hundred dollars and a signed release before he would even video-call us, which felt less like romance and more like litigation. There was a college kid from Coe who sent us a photo of himself in aviator sunglasses holding a fish he had clearly not caught, standing in front of a truck that was clearly not his. There was a man who described his services as “emotional support arm candy, no funny business, references available,” and when Hensley asked for the references, he sent us his mother’s phone number, and his mother picked up on the first ring and said, “Oh, is this for another wedding thing? He’s very good at weddings,” in a tone that made us both hang up at the same time.

And then there was Waylon.

He was not, technically, a rent-a-boyfriend at all. He was an actor, a real one, with the Riverbend Playhouse over in Denmark Crossing, the little dinner theater that does murder mystery nights and a Christmas Carol every December and, in the summer, apparently, whatever paying work walked in the door, because the Riverbend Playhouse does not turn much of a profit doing Agatha Christie for retirees. His ad, which Hensley found on the community board of the Denmark Crossing Herald website, did not say “boyfriend for hire.” It said: “Professional actor available for social engagements requiring a convincing plus one. Discretion guaranteed. References: theater reviews only, I do not have a mother who will vouch for me, she lives in Tulsa and does not know about this job and I would like to keep it that way.”

I laughed for the first time in six weeks reading that line out loud to my sister on my back step.

We met him two days later at the Rooster and Rye, the diner on Main where I have eaten my breakfast most mornings of my adult life, and I remember the exact moment he walked in because every head at the counter turned, not because he was movie handsome, though he was handsome enough, tall, sandy haired, a face that looked like it had done some living, but because of how he walked in. Like the diner belonged to him and he was glad to see it again. Waylon Ridgely had never set foot in the Rooster and Rye in his life, I would learn later, but he had a gift, the actual gift, the one they cannot teach you at a community theater, for making a room feel like it already knew him.

He sat down across from us, ordered coffee and a slice of pie before either of us had said a word, and said, “All right. Tell me everything. I need the whole file. Names, dates, grudges, who hates who, who I’m allowed to charm and who I need to be a little cold to so it reads as loyalty. I don’t do half a job.”

I liked him before I had finished my coffee. I want to be honest about that, because it matters for later.

We built him a file that afternoon, right there at the counter, on three napkins and the back of a placemat, and it is one of the strangest documents I have ever helped create. Sterling Wyndham: insurance man, drives a truck he did not need, laughs at his own jokes a half second before the punchline, allergic to being wrong. Yardley Fairbrook: yoga instructor, does Sterling’s company’s Instagram, not actually the villain of this, I want to say now, though I did not believe that yet. My father, Ulric: retired lineman, softer than he lets on, will decide within four minutes whether he trusts you and will not be talked out of it either way. My mother: will ask you seventeen questions about your intentions inside the first hour, answer honestly or she will know. My sister Hensley: the general contractor of this entire operation, defer to her on logistics. My best friend from the clinic, a large animal vet named Bromley Stroud who has known me since we were nine: will test you, mildly, do not fail the test, the test involves cattle.

Waylon took notes in a little spiral pad like a detective, and when we got to Sterling’s cruel line, the one about the kind of woman a man settles down with, he set his pen down and looked at me for a second too long, and said, “That’s a coward’s line. Only a coward needs to explain why he’s leaving instead of just going. You know that, right?”

I did not, actually, know that. Nobody had said it to me that plainly in six weeks. I had to look at my coffee for a minute.

“For the record,” Hensley said, watching this happen, “we are paying you a hundred dollars, not asking you to fix her whole soul.”

“Add it to the invoice,” Waylon said. “Consultation fee.”

We agreed on a hundred dollars for the day, which felt like nothing and everything at once, and a cover story: he was Waylon, he was from Denmark Crossing, we had met at a friend’s wedding in the spring, we had been seeing each other three months, nothing too elaborate, nothing that would collapse under a direct question, because Hensley had read somewhere that the best lies are the ones with the fewest moving parts. He asked for one more thing before he left the diner, which was my number, “for logistics,” he said, and texted me that night a list of eleven facts about myself he wanted me to confirm, my coffee order, my dog’s name, the fact that I once broke my wrist falling off a hay wagon at fourteen, small true things a boyfriend of three months would actually know, and I sat on my back step answering them one at a time, and it did not feel, even then, entirely like homework.

The morning of the Fourth, Waylon showed up at my house at eight o’clock sharp, in a truck that was, thank God, actually his, wearing a faded VFW post shirt he said he’d bought at a thrift store in Denmark Crossing “for the texture,” carrying a cooler of ribs he had marinated himself starting the night before, “because,” he said, “a man who shows up to a lake party with a bag of store chips has already lost, and I don’t lose.”

I want to tell you the plan was for him to hang back, be pleasant, be present, let Sterling see me happy and let that be the whole of it.

That is not remotely what happened.

Waylon Ridgely did not attend the Quarry Hollow Lake Jubilee. Waylon Ridgely invaded it, gently, completely, and by nine thirty in the morning had become the single most talked about man on that beach, and I had a front row seat to watching my hundred dollar hired boyfriend become, over the course of one long, ridiculous, wonderful day, something I had no plan for at all.

It started with my father. Ulric Marlowe does not warm to strangers. He shook Waylon’s hand at the tailgate of my truck, looked him up and down the way he looks at a used transformer he is deciding whether to trust, and said, “You any good with a grill or are you one of those men who just stands near it holding a beer.”

Waylon said, “Mr. Marlowe, I have opinions about indirect heat that will bore you to actual tears, hand me the tongs.”

Forty minutes later my father was laughing, really laughing, the big unguarded laugh I had not heard out of him since before the wedding fell apart, because Waylon had gotten him going about some feud my father has with a neighbor over a property line and a row of blue spruce, a feud Waylon had no earthly reason to know about, and had somehow gotten my father to tell the whole ridiculous history of it start to finish while flipping ribs with the confidence of a man who had grilled a thousand Fourths of July, which he had not, he told me later, ever done, not once, he had simply watched enough of them from a distance to know the shape of the thing and had built the rest out of pure nerve.

Then there was my friend Bromley, the vet, who cornered Waylon by the cooler and asked him, flat out, “What’s a bovine’s normal resting heart rate,” which is not a question anyone asks a boyfriend, it is a question you ask a stranger you are trying to catch. Waylon did not miss a beat. He said, “Forty to seventy, higher if she’s stressed, lower if she’s a good milker and comfortable, why, you sizing me up, doc?” I found out weeks later that Waylon had spent an hour the night before reading a cattle husbandry pamphlet in his truck because he’d looked at my clinic’s Facebook page and decided the vet friend would test him, and he was right, and Bromley Stroud, who does not hand out approval easily, clapped him on the shoulder and said, “He’ll do,” which from her is a wedding toast.

My mother asked her seventeen questions over the course of the morning, spaced out, sly, the way she does, working him from every angle, and Waylon answered every single one without once breaking, his coffee order, our fake wedding, our fake friend’s fake wedding where we’d fake met, and when she finally asked the real question underneath all the others, “Does he treat my daughter right,” he did not answer it as the character. He set down his plate, looked at her, and said, “Mrs. Marlowe, I have known your daughter four days and I already think the last man who had her did not know what he had. I intend to treat her exactly as well as she deserves, which I am starting to understand is a very high bar, and I like a high bar.”

I was standing right there holding a bag of ice and I nearly dropped it.

I want to be honest about the middle of the day, because it was not all easy. There was one bad minute, right around eleven, when a woman from the theater crowd, a regular at the Riverbend Playhouse named Everts Tennyson, came up to our blanket with a paper plate of watermelon and said, loud, delighted, “Waylon Ridgely! I did not know you were seeing anybody, I saw you not two weeks ago as the murderer in Death at Cedar Manor, you were wonderful, you nearly made me suspect my own husband,” and laughed her big laugh and moved right along to the next blanket, having no idea what she had just done, and I felt the whole morning tip sideways under me.

Waylon did not so much as flinch. He picked up right where the sentence had left a hole and said, easily, to the two or three people nearby who had heard, “She caught my last show, I do community theater on the side, keeps me humble, keeps me employed in months the insurance work runs thin,” which was, of course, a lie built entirely out of true things, and it landed so smoothly that not one person at that party thought twice about it. Not one. Except me. I looked at him for a long second over the watermelon, and something in my chest that had been braced for six weeks unclenched just slightly, because he had just protected the whole fragile structure of the day without so much as raising his voice, the exact opposite of everything Sterling had ever been calm about.

Sterling and Yardley arrived a little after noon, and I felt it before I saw it, the way the whole beach seemed to turn six degrees at once, the way conversation got thinner and eyes got busier not looking at any one thing in particular. Sterling had on a shirt I recognized, one I had bought him for our third anniversary, which is either the boldest or the most oblivious thing a man has ever done, and Yardley Fairbrook, who I will say plainly was perfectly nice looking and perfectly nice, waved at people with the overbright wave of someone who knows she is being discussed and has decided to be gracious about it, which I respected more than I wanted to.

Sterling made his way over to our blanket inside of twenty minutes. Of course he did. Sterling could no more leave a thing alone than he could leave a room without being the last word in it.

“Corbin,” he said, and then his eyes went to Waylon, and I watched him do the calculation, the same flat weather-report look he’d worn in the Hy-Vee parking lot. “And who’s this.”

“Waylon,” Waylon said, standing, offering his hand, easy as anything. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Have you,” Sterling said, shaking it like it might be contagious. And then, because Sterling has never once in his life been able to leave well enough alone, he looked at me and said, with that same calm, “Well. Good for you, Corbin. Good for you for finding somebody. I always said you’d land on your feet eventually, even if it took you a minute.”

There it was. The same trick, dressed up as kindness. Even you. Even a woman like you, eventually, if she is patient enough.

I felt my whole face go hot and I did not have a single word ready, because six weeks of Sterling’s calm little cruelties had trained me to just absorb them, to nod and let it pass and cry about it later on my back step where nobody could see.

Waylon put his hand at the small of my back, not for show, I would swear to this on anything, and said, easy as Sunday, “That’s a funny way to put it, calling it landing. I’d call it more like she finally cleared some space for somebody who actually shows up. You know how that goes, Sterling, clearing space. I hear you cleared a lot of it, real sudden, in a parking lot.”

The beach did not exactly go silent. But it did something close to it, a ripple of people pretending very hard not to have heard, and my father, forty feet away at the grill, went still with the tongs in his hand, and my mother covered her mouth, and Sterling Wyndham’s face did the thing I had come to that beach half hoping and half dreading to see it do, which is that it stopped being calm. Just for a second. Just long enough for the whole county to see it happen.

“I don’t know what she’s told you,” Sterling said, tight now, “but that’s not really any of your business.”

“No,” Waylon agreed, pleasant as ever. “It really isn’t. Except you made it everybody’s business the day you decided to have the conversation in a Hy-Vee parking lot instead of, I don’t know, somewhere private, like a man with something to be ashamed of might. So here we all are.”

Sterling did not have an answer for that. He looked at me one more time, and for once I did not look away first, and then he turned and walked back down the beach to Yardley, who had the decency, I will give her that forever, to not ask him a single question in front of anybody, just took his hand and steered him toward the dock.

My father let out a whoop from the grill that carried clear across the water.

I am not going to pretend the rest of the day was simple after that, because it was not. It was better than simple. It was the kind of day you remember in pieces for the rest of your life. There was the greased pole contest, which Waylon entered on a dare from my sister and lost spectacularly, going into the lake fully clothed to the sound of the whole beach cheering, and came up laughing so hard he could not stand for a minute. There was the potato salad contest, which my mother won for the eleventh year running, and which Waylon ate three helpings of and declared, loud enough for the fire chief judge to hear, “the finest potato salad in the state of Iowa, and I have had opinions about potato salad in four states,” which won him a permanent place at my mother’s table whether I liked it or not. There was a moment in the late afternoon when he and my father sat on the tailgate of my truck not talking about anything, just watching the kids run the shoreline, comfortable in a silence that four hours earlier had not existed between two strangers.

And there was the moment, close to sundown, when he found me alone for the first time all day, down at the end of the dock where I had gone to catch my breath, and sat down next to me without asking, and did not say anything for a while, which after a day of him talking to absolutely everyone in Quarry Hollow, Iowa, felt like its own kind of gift.

“I have to tell you something,” he said finally, “and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything.”

I braced. I thought he was going to tell me the job was done, that he’d earned his hundred dollars and he’d be heading back to Denmark Crossing once the fireworks were over, and some fool part of me had already started grieving that before he’d said a word.

“I took this job because I needed the hundred dollars,” he said. “I’m an actor at a dinner theater in a town of two thousand people, Corbin, I will take almost any hundred dollars that’s offered to me honestly. But somewhere around hour two of sitting at that diner counter listening to you and your sister build me a file on your own broken engagement, laughing about it, actually laughing, when six weeks out most people would still be in bed with the blinds shut, I stopped doing this for the hundred dollars. And every single thing I said to your father and your mother and your friend the vet today, all of it was true. I don’t know your coffee order because I memorized a text message. I know it because I’ve had breakfast with you three times this week under the excuse of rehearsing, and none of it needed rehearsing anymore by the second one.”

I want to tell you I had something smart to say back. I did not. I sat on the end of that dock with the sun going down orange over Quarry Lake and I cried for the second time that summer, but it was an entirely different kind of crying than the parking lot kind, and Waylon Ridgely, who had spent the whole day being the most convincing boyfriend eastern Iowa had ever manufactured, put his arm around me like it was the easiest, truest thing he had done all day, because by then, it was.

The fireworks went up over the lake right at nine, the VFW post’s coffee-can budget doing what it always does, which is put on a show twice as good as the money should buy, and the whole town of Quarry Hollow stood on that beach with their heads tipped back, and I stood there with a man I had hired four days earlier to be a lie, who had turned out, somewhere in the marinated ribs and the greased pole and the potato salad and the eleven true facts, to be the realest thing that happened to me all year.

Sterling and Yardley left before the fireworks finished. I heard later, from my mother, who heard it from three separate sources by the following Tuesday because that is how word moves around this lake, that things did not go the distance for them either, that by September Yardley had moved her Instagram management business two counties over and Sterling had gone back to eating breakfast alone at a diner in Cassville, which is a fact I am ashamed to admit gave me a small and entirely un-Christian amount of satisfaction, and which I choose to let myself have, once, in this story, and then let go of for good.

Waylon and I did not stay a secret arrangement for hire. We did not need to invent a story about how we met, because by the following spring the true one, the diner counter, the napkin file, the greased pole, had become the story my whole family told at every gathering, the one my father tells with the tongs still in his hand, the one my mother tells with all seventeen questions restored in full, the one Bromley Stroud tells with the bovine heart rate line as the punchline every single time.

Last month Waylon asked me to marry him, on the same dock, at the end of the same day, one year to the date, no audience this time except my dog and the sound of the lake going quiet for the night. He did not have a speech ready. He said he’d tried to write one and it kept turning into a monologue, which he said was a professional hazard, and instead he just asked me, plainly, if I would let him keep showing up, every single Fourth of July and every ordinary day besides, for the rest of both our lives, and I said yes before he had finished the sentence, because I had already watched him mean every single word he had said to me since the moment he sat down at that diner counter and ordered pie before he had said his own name.

We are getting married in June, at the Quarry Hollow Lutheran church, the fellowship hall deposit fully refunded this time and put right back down, and the reception is going to be at the lake, because where else would it be, and I have already told my sister Hensley that if she ever again introduces herself as the woman who “found him on the internet,” I will personally correct her in front of the entire guest list, because that is not what happened. What happened is that I was standing alone at the edge of my own life, getting looked at by an entire county, and my sister loved me enough to go looking for somebody who might stand there with me, and what we found instead, hiding inside a job for a hundred dollars, was a man who never once, not for one single hour of one single day, had to pretend to be anything other than exactly who he already was.

Sterling Wyndham told me once that I was the kind of woman a man settles down with, not the kind he falls for. I think about that line sometimes, on ordinary Tuesdays, with Waylon in the next room running lines out loud to nobody the way actors do, and I have decided he was right about exactly one thing and wrong about everything else. I am the kind of woman a man settles down with. I found out this year what it looks like when the man falls for you first, and settles down after, and means every single day of it in between.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.