See Jane Date by Melissa Senate Page A

with someone else? And who wanted him to know that I was so desperate for a date that I had to ask my only ex-boyfriend to attend a function with me? A family function, no less.
    Max and I had met in the men’s department of Macy’s. He’d been buying a shirt; I’d been looking for a birthday present for my uncle Charlie. And when I’d spotted Max, looking miserable and confused while sliding pants on a rack, I was smitten. Smitten enough to risk asking him if he thought an uncle would like the sweater I was holding. (Now there was a great way to meet marriageable men in New York. Only single guys bought their own clothes alone.)
    Oh, wait a minute. Scratch that. I was forgetting that Max Reardon hadn’t been a marriageable man. After a year of pretty serious togetherness, he’d fallen for someone at work, and that was that. Well, that had been that for him. I’d been left with a broken heart at age twenty-three. I immediately lost twelve pounds because I couldn’t eat. Then I gained twelve pounds because I couldn’t stop comforting myself with the Häagen-Dazs Eloise and Amanda brought me every day. I’d ended up exactly where I started: heartbroken and seven pounds overweight.
    After two weeks of watching me cry and blow my nose and mope, Eloise had decided that she, Amanda and I should pretend we were tourists in New York every weekend. Each month we did a different borough. While Eloise and Amanda handed out tissues, I cried up the stairs to the Statue of Liberty’s chin, gazed swollen-eyed through the viewfinder on top of the Empire State Building and sobbed over the railing of the Staten Island ferry. I cried while staring up at the World’s Fair globe in Flushing Meadow Park. Cried through a Mets game at Shea Stadium. Cried during a Lilith Fair concert at Jones Beach. By month five, my tear ducts had dried up. I was over Max enough to notice how beautiful the flowers were at the Bronx Botanical Gardens and how incredibly cute some of the Yankees were. I’d tried to sell Gwen on the idea of The Broken-Hearted Girl’s Guide to New York City, but she told me it was too gimmicky.
    Max had been my first real boyfriend, and I hadn’t had a real relationship since. Except for Soldier of Fortune Guy and two other short-lived romances, plus a couple of dates here and there with a maybe that always fizzed out, I’d been totally single.
    Why? Amanda had Jeff. Eloise had her Russian. And I was surrounded by a Tapas bar full of women sitting across from men. What was my problem? Truck drivers and construction workers seemed to think I was cute enough to merit a catcall, so why couldn’t I wrap a man around my little finger the way my friends could? The way Natasha Nutley could?
    Amanda slid back my Cosmopolitan, and I slurped a sip.
    â€œNix calling up Max, Jane,” Eloise said. “I totally forgot that your family knows Max. You can’t pass him off as the new love of your life, and you can’t pretendyou’re back together. Bad idea. I’m really sorry I even brought him up.”
    I sent Eloise an it’s-okay look. We all went back to chewing, gnawing and sipping.
    Amanda pointed at me with her stirrer. “Do the blind date thing, Jane. All you need is one guy to bring to a wedding. What have you got to lose?”
    Eloise and I stared at her. There was no need to add a sarcastic response.
    My silence, though, was enough of an answer for Amanda. She whipped out her cell phone. “Jeff, guess who’s willing to go out on blind dates again? Jane! Shut up—that was, like, two years ago! Got anyone for her?” We all waited. “No! He’s bald! No, too short—Jane’s five-six. Hmm. Oh, that guy? No way—he’s cute, but an idiot! Jane’s an editor—he’s gotta be smart. Ooh—yes! Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…he sounds really good! Set it up.”
    Sounds good? So Amanda had never