The Icing on the Cake Read Online Free PDF

pastel colors sitting around one of the wooden tables inside. I immediately recognized the group. It was the Jazzercisers.
    The six women, ranging from age thirty-nine to sixty-five, meet three times a week to do Jazzercise in the gymnasium inside the church building in Monterey. Afterwards, they reward themselves with smoothies at various cafés and smoothie shops in the area. I knew this group because one of its members, today dressed in a lavender warm-up suit and bright white sneakers, was my mother. And I also knew that if I showed up in the café with Isaac by my side pandemonium could quite possibly ensue. So I had to act quickly.
    “Isaac, it looks pretty crowded in there,” I said. “I don’t, uh, really have a lot of time for lunch today. So maybe we should try somewhere else.” I took a few steps away from the door of the café.
    “There isn’t even a line inside,” Isaac said, opening the door for me.
    I stood in place and tried again. “But I think I’d like someplace more quiet.”
    Isaac let the door close and stepped to the side. “It’s up to you.”
    I nodded and looked around for an alternative lunch location. And just when I had spotted a restaurant that didn’t have the best food, but was attractive due to its lack of pastel-sweat-suit-clad women, I saw six hands waving wildly at me from inside the café. For a second I thought about ignoring the hands and dashing toward the other restaurant, but Isaac interrupted that thought.
    “Do you know those people?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I responded with a sigh. “And you’re about to.”
    As we walked into the café, I heard the sound of blenders and coffee grinders behind the counter and the buzz of six women greeting me and Isaac. I approached the Jazzercisers’ table, and bent down to hug Mom. Her shoulder length curls brushed against my face.
    She looked from me to Isaac and then fixed her eyes—which are nearly the exact shade of maple-syrup brown as mine—on me. “What happened to you?” she asked.
    I ignored the question and introduced Isaac to Mom. I told her he was the photographer assigned to a new article I was working on. Mom and Isaac shook hands. Then I went around the table introducing the rest of the women: “Loraine, Lynn, Suzanne, Maria, and Janet.”
    “Why don’t you two sit down,” Mom suggested immediately. Lynn and Maria borrowed two chairs from a nearby table for us to sit in. I tried to gauge Isaac’s reaction to everything, and thought he was handling the estrogen overload quite well.
    “So, Isaac, where are you from?” Mom asked the second Isaac and I were seated.
    Isaac set his camera case beneath his chair. “Originally I am from a little town in the San Joaquin Valley called Los Banos, which is where I met your daughter.” Isaac smiled at me. “But I live in Monterey now.”
    “Oh, and what brought you to Monterey?” Mom asked.
    Isaac paused for a moment before answering. “My younger brother was in an accident. My parents moved out here to live closer to my uncle, who is a doctor. I decided to move out here too.”
    I looked at Isaac, and was tempted to ask for more details about what happened to his brother, but I knew it wasn’t the right time or setting to ask.
    With the where-are-you-from stuff taken care of, Mom and her friends dove in on Isaac like vultures. They asked him about his family, his education, his job, and even—I’m telling you these women are shameless—his dating status.
    I listened in.
    He had twin sisters who were in high school, and Ethan was his only brother. He double majored in business and photography at San Jose State. He worked for a newspaper in Los Angeles and then moved to Monterey, where he does mostly freelance. And as for his dating status: single. I listened carefully to that part.
    As Mom and her friends interrogated Isaac, I watched him carefully, waiting for a get-the-questions-to-stop signal, but he never sent me one. He was the picture of