Evolution of Love by Robb Grindstaff

Evolution of Love by Robb Grindstaff

In the beginning, she took a seat at a small table across from the man. He looked nice. Thirties, about her age. Glasses, short hair, clean cut. She couldn’t quite bring herself to make eye contact as she adjusted in her chair.

“So,” she said, “we’ve got, what, three minutes, right? Is that how this works?”

“Your first time at speed-dating too, I see. Good. I was afraid I’d look like a complete idiot if my first date was experienced at this sort of thing.”

He smiled at her. She liked his smile and finally met his eyes, then glanced at his name tag.

“Hi, Steven. I’m Dempsey.”

His gaze drifted down to her name tag, as if to verify her assertion or possibly to check the spelling. She got a lot of requests to repeat her name or to spell it. Perhaps a bit unusual for a girl’s name, but her parents were the unusual type.

“Hi, Dempsey. It’s nice to meet you. And please, call me Steve.”

“Okay, Steve, so what do we talk about in our three minutes before we use it all up with introductions?”

“I have no idea,” he chuckled. “I’ve never really been great at conversation when I first meet someone, so I don’t know why I thought having a timed event would help. Maybe just knowing if I couldn’t think of anything to say, there’d be no more than three minutes of uncomfortable silence.”

“I’m the opposite. Especially if I’m nervous, it’s hard to shut me up. I just start babbling to fill gaps. So relax, you’ll be fine. No awkward silences with me in the room.”

She forced herself to stop talking for a moment. The awkward silence descended.

“Tell me, Steve, what do you do for work?” She tried to remember the three basic questions she had chosen to ask every ‘date’ this evening. She wanted to learn something about each person, but mainly she wanted to ask and listen rather than rambling on about nothing and the three minutes would be over without her date getting in a single word. She didn’t normally, but if in an uncomfortable situation, or in the presence of someone who was nervous, she would chatter nonstop.

Steve cleared his throat and took a sip of water before answering. Very methodical, she thought. A sign of intelligence, rationality.

“I’m a scientist,” he said. “More precisely, a research microbiologist. But that’s too boring to talk about here. I can’t even explain it in three minutes. What about you?”

“I’m a pediatric nurse at the children’s cancer center.”

“That must be terribly hard, you know, to deal with children who are so sick, especially when one dies. I really admire that, but I couldn’t do it. I like dealing with microbes. Wow, I probably just sounded very uncaring and insensitive, didn’t I?”

“Not at all,” she reassured him and reached over to pat the back of his hand, which still gripped his water glass like a trapeze bar. “Maybe it means you’re too sensitive, that you would have difficulty dealing with death.”

“How do you deal with that?”

“My faith gets me through the rough times. Faith that they will get better, and faith that those who don’t get better go to a better place. God gives me the strength to keep smiling and I always try to give each child hope.”

Steve took another sip of water. She wasn’t sure if he was thirsty or if that was an excuse to withdraw his hand from her touch. The look on his face told Dempsey she’d gone too far. She’d already deviated from her plan by bringing up religion in the first minute. He squirmed a little and glanced at the timer. She jumped straight to her second question to break the two seconds of silence and deflect attention away from an uncomfortable subject.

“ What do you do for fun in your spare time?”

“I suppose that’s why I’m here. I haven’t had any spare time in so long, I haven’t even had time to meet people, women, you know, to date or become friends or have relationships. Besides my research in the lab, I write articles for research journals or participate in panel discussions at institutes or attend seminars. But I’ve completed my PhD now, and I’ve got a tenured position, and I realized life was going to pass me by if I didn’t start getting out. A coworker recommended this as a way to jump right into the deep end, so to speak.”

“Yeah, I definitely think we’re in the deep end of the dating pool here.” She looked around the room at the other couples—some in animated, lively discussions, some glancing around the room in agony over each ticking second. “But I think we’re doing fine, keeping our heads above water. Don’t you think?”

He agreed.

Their time ran out and the emcee blew a whistle to signal all the men to move to the table to their immediate right. She didn’t have a chance to ask her third question.

“It’s great to meet you, Steve.”

He took her extended hand and shook it gently. He had soft hands and kind eyes. Dempsey liked something about him. Too bad she’d blown it with all her God-talk. Even though he was her first speed-date partner, and she had nineteen more to go over the rest of the hour, she didn’t hesitate to place a checkmark beside his name on the form in her hand. He probably didn’t do the same in return, which meant there would be no exchange of phone numbers or email addresses or any way to get in touch with him again.

Dempsey settled in for the rest of the event, sometimes getting through all three of her questions with plenty of time to spare, sometimes not even needing her questions to keep the conversation flowing.

One man was way too old for her. A few were too young. Some, she could tell immediately, weren’t the least bit interested in her. Dempsey was quite comfortable in her skin, and she knew she was pretty, in a slightly overweight girl-next-door kind of way, but she wasn’t ‘hot,’ which was okay with her. The guys looking for hot would have to suffer through three minutes with the taller than average, big-boned girl with the beautiful cotton candy blond hair, her best feature.

Several men seemed very interested in Dempsey, but she wasn’t interested in them. It made her feel shallow and hypocritical to admit she didn’t find them physically attractive. One man had yellow teeth and his halitosis wafted across the table. She had to lean back in her chair, which she thought probably made her seem very stand-offish.

The night ended with only the one check-mark on her form. If Steve didn’t check her name too, her night would turn out a total waste.

***

On the second day, her cell phone rang just as she finished putting away the last of her dinner dishes.

Steve.

***

“I’m really glad I went because I met you,” Dempsey said over dinner on their second date, “but I will never, ever do speed-dating again. It was a horrible experience. Not fun.”

Steve laughed. He had a hearty laugh, Dempsey thought, and he’d definitely relaxed more and talked easily. He’d seemed more nervous on their first real date than during their initial encounter.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I could’ve stopped after the first three minutes and been done for the evening. Yours was the only name I checked. It’s definitely not for me. But it worked out quite well that we connected. And it was the first time for both of us, and we were paired up on the first round. So random.”

“I don’t know if it was random,” Dempsey said. “Things always have a way of working out for the best, don’t you think?”

***

They never said it out loud, but by their fourth date, they both knew they were in an exclusive relationship, just taking things very slowly. Not that either of them had other prospects queued up. Steve called her to say good morning at seven each weekday, knowing she would be sitting on her patio reading the newspaper and having coffee, getting ready for her workday. They would chat for ten minutes before he had to say goodbye and begin his commute to work.

She called him on her lunch break every afternoon.

He told her all about his work. He said it was great to have someone to talk to about it who wasn’t another scientist but who could understand the concepts he was so thrilled to analyze each day. Dempsey’s nursing background made her the perfect person for this. He didn’t have to oversimplify things for her to understand, and her genuine interest and intelligent questions could keep him talking about his latest findings for hours. When he apologized for going on and on about his research, she waved her hand dismissively and asked another insightful question.

***

She called him on the afternoon before their sixth date, in tears, to cancel that night’s plans for a movie. She wouldn’t be good company tonight, she explained through her sobs. She’d lost a precious little one from her floor that day.

Steve arrived at her doorstep within half an hour, uninvited, with a bouquet of flowers and a box of tissue—gift-wrapped. They sat on Dempsey’s couch and he held her while she told him all about little Talia, who never complained, always smiled, who let the other kids draw pictures with washable markers on her smooth scalp.

Steve kissed Dempsey that night for the first time. When she’d sobbed herself hoarse, exhausted, he tucked her into bed and kissed her again before turning out the light, feeding her cat, and locking the door behind him as he left.

He called at seven the next morning to see how she was doing.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m much better now. Talia was such a gift, and I’m just so blessed to have had her in my life for a few months. Thank you for being with me last night. I needed that, and it means a lot to me. Oh, and thanks for feeding Kitteh.”

***

Steve cooked for Dempsey on Saturday afternoon at his place. A gourmet meal. She had no idea he was an amateur chef—professional quality. The pecan-crusted salmon, flaky and firm, basted her tongue in a myriad of delicate flavors. White asparagus spears—spargel, he called it—imported from Germany, which he steamed to perfection, with a white cream sauce which perfectly complemented the salmon. A wild rice with truffles. Dempsey had never eaten truffles before. She knew what they were, and she knew they were expensive. She learned they were delicious beyond anything she’d imagined.

They sat on the couch with a glass of fine wine and kissed for hours before she finally pulled herself away.

“I have to get up early tomorrow. I should go.”

“You don’t work tomorrow.”

“I’m filling in as a substitute Sunday school teacher for first graders tomorrow. You could come to church with me, if you want.”

Steve poured himself another glass of wine and chuckled. “No thanks. That’s not really for me.”

***

Tuesday night, Steve once again held Dempsey as she cried, this time over little Bradley, three years of age.

“At least he’s not in pain anymore,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” Steve said once she had settled into acceptance. “How can you believe in God when you see these children suffering every day?”

“I believe when I see the joy and love in their faces despite their troubles. I believe when I see the miracles of healing every day. And I have to believe that when we lose one, they’ve gone to heaven. How could I see this every day and not believe?”

“So you believe in a God who would strike innocent children with horrible diseases, then thank him when modern science cures one, and thank him when one dies because he’s no longer suffering. I just have trouble wrapping my head around that logic.”

“And you believe in a God who is inherently evil, inflicting children with illness, and you think it’s up to science to come to the rescue and save them.”

“That’s not what I said.” Steve stood and paced back and forth in Dempsey’s living room. “That’s not what I believe.”

This is our first fight, Dempsey thought as she tried to swallow her anger.“What exactly do you believe in?”

“I believe in what I can see,” Steve said. “What I can measure.”

“These microbes you study, the microscope you see and measure them with, before that microscope was invented, before scientists could see them, did those microbes exist?”

“Of course. We just didn’t know about them yet.”

“So even though you couldn’t see them, they still existed?”

“I know the point you’re trying to make, but that’s not the same.”

***

Steve didn’t call Dempsey at seven the next morning. Dempsey didn’t call Steve during her lunch break. Steve didn’t call Dempsey that evening.

He showed up at her doorstep without calling first.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to fight anymore.”

Dempsey pulled him inside with kisses until they collapsed on the couch. They didn’t come up for air until Kitteh jumped on Steve’s head and scratched his ear.

“Come to my lab on your next day off. I have something I want to show you.”

***

Dempsey squinted and adjusted and tried to focus on the translucent gray squiggle.

“What am I looking at? What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“It’s a new bacterium.”

“You’ve discovered a new germ?”

“Not discovered. Invented. Created. We made it right here. We spliced the DNA from two different bacteria and created this one.”

“If this thing escapes, couldn’t it cause a worldwide epidemic, like in that movie?”

“No.” Steve laughed. “It’s strictly beneficial. And this one won’t reproduce. Not yet anyway. When we perfect the sequencing, it will. This is just a prototype, but we’re working toward designing one that will eat cancer cells and leave healthy cells alone. When there are no more cancer cells, they would stop reproducing and die off.”

Dempsey pulled away from the eyepiece of the microscope and grinned at Steve.

“Sounds kind of like high-tech leech therapy.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

They sat on Dempsey’s patio that evening and Steve grilled hamburgers. Not any old hamburgers. Hamburgers with bleu cheese crumbles mixed in with the meat, topped with fresh spinach leaves.

“Come to the hospital with me this Saturday. I want you to meet some of the kids your work will help.”

“I’m not sure our work will be ready in time to help any of your patients.”

“Come anyway. Maybe they’ll inspire you to work faster.”“I’m not really that good with children.”

“Think of them as amoebas.”

***

Marissa, at fifteen, was by far the oldest. She wore a Diamondbacks baseball cap which didn’t really hide her hair loss. In fact, she wore it sideways and cocked at an angle. It was her fashion statement, not a cover-up.

“He’s kinda cute,” Marissa whispered to Dempsey. “Nice butt too.”

“Do not be looking at my boyfriend’s butt,” Dempsey scolded her with a grin. She’d just called Steve ‘my boyfriend’ for the first time. “And yeah, he does have a nice little tushie, doesn’t he?”

Marissa stayed at Dempsey’s side, as she always did. She helped Dempsey with all the younger ones, keeping them happy, making sure they had water or juice, refereeing the occasional fuss over who was playing with what toy first. Marissa never acted like a patient, but like a full-time, live-in nurse’s aide.

Raymundo wanted to play ball with Steve. Five years old but no bigger than a two-year-old, he pulled Steve by the hand over to the side of the children’s play room and tossed the plastic wiffle ball to him. Steve caught it and tossed it back, underhanded, gingerly. The ball bounced off Raymundo’s thick, swollen fingers and rolled away. The little boy reached down for it and fell over.

Marissa was right there to dust him off and stand him back up. Raymundo just grinned and tossed the ball back to Steve. Steve handed the ball to Marissa.

“Can you play with him for just a minute? I’ll be right back.”

Dempsey watched as Steve maneuvered his way through the throng of kids vying for his attention until he stood at her side.

“I have to go.”“Why? We just got here. Raymundo loves to play ball. Just go play with him for a bit. It makes him happy.”

“But he fell down. I don’t want to hurt him.”

Dempsey laughed. “You can’t hurt that kid. He’s tough as nails.”

Steve and Dempsey both watched as Marissa threw the ball to Raymundo, who ran after it and fell again before he clambered to his feet and tossed it back to her. Dempsey waved at Marissa, who fired a fastball straight to Steve. Raymundo giggled and held his hands up, ready to catch a throw from Steve.

“Okay, just a little bit more,” Steve said to Dempsey. “But really, I can’t stay long.”

Steve and Raymundo tossed the ball back and forth for forty-five minutes, until it was time to feed the kids their lunches and give them a rest. Marissa assisted in passing out lunch trays and getting each kid settled into a chair at the table. Steve made sure each child had something to drink.

Dempsey hugged Marissa goodbye and Steve gave a small wave to the room. Raymundo bolted from his seat and latched onto Steve’s leg with a powerful squeeze and a, “Thanks for the ballgame, bro,” before he ran back to his seat to finish his lunch.

“Cute little amoeba, isn’t he?” Steve said.

***

Another month went by. Seven a.m. phone calls to say good morning. Lunch break phone calls to see how their days were going. Steve prepared gourmet meals on occasion. Dempsey cooked home-style comfort foods from recipes she’d learned from her mother. Sometimes they just ordered pizza or Thai take-out or warmed up gourmet leftovers.

***

“There’s something I have to ask you,” Steve said. He fidgeted in his seat and swirled his spoon in the chicken and sausage gumbo Dempsey had made from scratch.

“Sure, anything. You need some Tabasco?”

“No, no this is plenty spicy for me.”

“So what did you want to ask me?” It dawned on Dempsey that he might be ready to pop the question. His nervousness. Hesitation. Announcing that he had a question to ask rather than just asking it in normal conversation. No, this would not be an ordinary question. Maybe, just maybe …

“Do you believe in evolution? Or are you one of those who believes God spoke the entire universe into existence in six days?”

Okay, it wasn’t the proposal Dempsey had anticipated. But it was a topic they’d rarely discussed. He’d accepted the fact that she was a believer and he didn’t ridicule her for it; she accepted the fact that he didn’t believe, and she didn’t condemn him for that.

“I believe evolution has occurred, and still occurs,” Dempsey said. “But I don’t believe in it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re not listening. I believe two plus two is four. I believe math. I don’t believe in math.”

“So you do believe the universe came into existence through evolution, not some intelligent design or creation theory, right?”

Dempsey took another bite of her gumbo, then added a bit more Tabasco before she answered.

“I believe evolution is the process by which the universe was created, yes. But evolution does not preclude the existence of a Creator who initiated, planned, and controlled the process. Evolution does not disprove God. Evolution is the ‘how.’ Evolution does not answer the ‘why.’ In fact, evolution is such a miraculous concept, such an extraordinarily complex set of interrelated events over billions of years, it might be more evidence there must have been a Creator, don’t you think?”

Dempsey tore off a piece of French bread and dipped it in her gumbo.

“I suppose,” Steve finally said, “if one believes in God, anything can be used as evidence of his existence.”

“You’re not one of those science-nuts who believes the study of the physical universe disproves the reality of the spiritual realm, are you?”

Steve finally gave in.

“Okay, pass me the Tabasco. But I’m only going to try a few drops.”

***

“Dempsey, we’ve got a pretty exciting new development down here. As soon as you get off work, come straight to the lab. I want you to see this firsthand.”She listened to the voice mail at least five times. She’d never heard Steve so excited about anything. As soon as her shift ended, she drove straight to the university. She didn’t even bother to change out of her scrubs.

***

“Sure, I’ll look, but I won’t know what I’m looking at.” Dempsey squinted and peered into the eyepieces to the huge microscope. Lots of little translucent gray squiggles.

“Oh, you’ve got them reproducing? Is that it?”

“Wait. I’ll explain. We’ve found an enzyme these little critters love to eat. They congregate to it. I’ve put some of that enzyme on the slide in a specific pattern, and I’ll activate it with heat. So keep watching and see what happens when I turn on the light.”

Dempsey looked into the chaotic mass of gray squiggles again. With a click of a switch, the slide glowed violet.

The squiggles began to move quicker, still chaotic, random, bumping into each other, all headed in different directions. But as she watched, the squiggles clumped together in places, emptying out some spaces on the slide in front of her. Soon, the clumps thinned into lines. Straight lines. Straight lines moving in precise formations, like a marching band. Order out of random chaos.

The lines shifted and stretched and moved this way or that. Lines connected to each other to form shapes. Geometric shapes. Right angles. Forty-five-degree angles.

Some shorter lines swirled around, twisted, apart from the other lines at first, then moved closer and curved in on themselves to form semicircles, no longer content with straight lines and angles.

The bacteria marched around and across the slide, connecting to each other in places, separating in places, until the movement finally settled into a clearly intelligent design. The bacteria under the microscope had formed words.

MARRY

ME

Dempsey pulled away, then leaned in again for another look. Then she turned to Steve.

“You couldn’t just hire a skywriting plane or propose on the Jumbotron at a baseball game like any normal guy?” She laughed as she wiped a tear from each eye.

A rare awkward silence fell over them.

“Well?” Steve had waited for her answer, but she hadn’t given it yet.

“You know this is a major life decision. And you know what I do before any major life decision, right?”

“Yeah, I know. You pray about it until God gives you a sign. Well, pray then. C’mon.”

“I will, okay, just be quiet and give me a minute.”

Dempsey closed her eyes and bowed her head as she sat on the tall stool at the counter in front of the microscope. She clasped her hands together tightly in her lap. She prayed silently but fervently, looking for guidance beyond the limits of science.She opened her eyes and raised her head and took a deep breath.

“Well?” Steve asked again.

Dempsey didn’t answer him, but she bent over and looked into the microscope again, still amazed at the bacteria formation. She pulled away and waved Steve over.

“This is interesting. Take a look.”

Steve leaned across in front of her and glanced into the microscope.

“How, how did...” Steve sputtered and stammered then looked into the scope once more. The bacteria answered in unison:

YES!

“Wow, that’s really random, don’t you think?” Dempsey said.

“No,” Steve said. “I think it’s a sign.”

Robb Grindstaff’s career as a journalist and media executive took him from Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington DC, five years in Asia, and nine years in Wisconsin. He has four novels and a short story collection published with a small press (Evolved Publishing). He has edited fiction for more than fifteen years, including clients who are agented, traditionally published, and bestselling independent authors. Robb has also taught writing courses for Romance Writers of America (even though he’s not a romance writer) and Romance Writers of Australia (even though he’s not Australian). Robb’s writing is best classified as contemporary southern lit, although he experiments a bit to keep things interesting. Robb currently lives in the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri with his wife and his neurotic dog.

"Evolution of Love" was previously published in the collection June Bug Gothic: Tales from the South, by Robb Grindstaff [Evolved Publishing, May 2022]