Voncile Vass Facebook ad: “I Paid a Stranger to Show Me Someone Else”

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1230260142632328

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My refund request said: "I already have this one. I paid you for a different one." I sent it from my lunch counter in Janesville on a Monday morning, after seven years with Dennis, two houses and zero rings, because the soulmate sketch I ordered to find somebody new came back with Dennis's face on it. Four days later he proposed at our booth at Culver's. We got married in October. Terry, who has cooked at my counter for eleven years, says I tell this story like I'm reading a ticket back to the kitchen: fast, loud, and out of order. So this time I'm going slow, and I'm starting with the bouquet. I'm Marsha. I'm 60. For twenty-two years I've run a lunch counter in downtown Janesville, Wisconsin: eleven stools, four booths, soup that changes on Tuesdays and a grilled cheese that doesn't change, ever, because people would riot. I know what three hundred people in this town want for lunch. You learn that in this business: people will tell you exactly what they want, as long as it's on a menu. Put it anywhere else and they go quiet. For seven years, I did not know what one man wanted for the rest of his life. That man is Dennis. Dennis is 62, a retired bricklayer, and he's built half the chimneys on the east side and none of the rest of our lives. We met at my counter, of course. He ordered the grilled cheese, no pickle, and he's ordered it every weekday since, at 11:30, on the third stool. We've been together seven years. We have two houses, his and mine, eight blocks apart. Two lawnmowers. Two sets of Christmas decorations. And zero rings. Every Friday for seven years he's picked me up at the counter at closing and we've gone to Culver's, the same booth by the window, butter burgers, and then I get a scoop of the Flavor of the Day and he gets vanilla, because Dennis believes flavors are a slippery slope, and you can't argue with a bricklayer about slopes. I have done the math on that booth: 364 Friday nights. Before Dennis there was Rusty, my ex-husband, who left after nine years and took the Buick. I'd like to say he left me for another woman, but it was mostly for the Buick. After the divorce I kept the house, and I've always thought I got the better deal. Then there were six years alone: $60 to a psychic who read my palm in her garage and promised me a man whose name started with K (I'm still waiting on K), $29.95 a month for a dating site membership that matched me, twice, with Rusty's cousin, and one very embarrassing weekend in Madison, a $215 ticket to a "Love After Fifty" retreat plus the hotel, where everybody wore their favorite hotdish on a sticker instead of their name, and I spent two days being called Tater Tot by a retired insurance adjuster named, and I'm not making this up for you, Bud. That's the weekend I decided I'd rather be alone than be Tater Tot to a Bud. Then Dennis sat down on the third stool, and I thought I was done looking. Three weeks before any of this, at 1:15 on a Saturday afternoon, at my niece's wedding at the Knights of Columbus hall, the bride turned around and threw her bouquet, and it hit me square in the chest. I didn't even put my hands up. I was holding Dennis's beer. The whole hall turned to look at Dennis. And Dennis, who had seen the bouquet coming the whole way, turned very slowly and looked at the cheese tray. I laughed. Everybody laughed. And then I went out to the parking lot and stood next to Dennis's truck with a bouquet in one hand and a Miller Lite in the other, and I was so furious I couldn't see straight. Not sad. Furious. Seven years of Fridays, and the man picked the cheese tray. The whole room was doing math about me, and I'll tell you, I could hear the numbers. That's where my head was, and I'm not proud of it. I wasn't looking for love. I was looking for leverage. I'll be honest with you about that, because otherwise this story makes me look sweeter than I am. Now, you have to understand what kind of Friday this was. Culver's, the booth, butter burgers, vanilla for him, and then he dropped me at my house and drove eight blocks to his, like always. I sat down in my kitchen with a Spotted Cow, which is a beer, for those of you not from Wisconsin, and a food group for those of us who are. And my phone, which I'm convinced listens, showed me a psychic artist who sketches your soulmate in pencil and says in writing where you'll meet him, and when. And I thought: fine. Let's see who it's supposed to be. If there's somebody else out there, some man who picks up a bouquet instead of a cheese cube, I want to see his face. So at 9:52 on a Friday night, alone in my kitchen with a Spotted Cow, I paid for a soulmate sketch with my own card. Nobody knew. Nobody would have believed me if I'd told them. And the next morning, at the counter, before Terry got in, I took two twenty-dollar bills out of my own tip jar and put them in my wallet, so that I'd paid for it twice: once with the bank's money and once with my own. That's how you know a woman is serious. She pays herself back out of the tip jar. You'd think a woman who counts other people's change all day would know better than to buy a psychic drawing with a beer in her hand. You'd be wrong. The drawing came Saturday afternoon, and you can guess where I opened it: at the counter during the slow part, after the lunch rush, with a dish towel over my shoulder. It was Dennis. I want to be clear with you, because people ask. It wasn't "a man a little like Dennis." It was Dennis, the whole face in one look, the way I'd know my own stool at my own counter. The square jaw. The lines on his forehead that go up in the middle like he's always about to say "well, now." The patient mouth. The only thing different was the top: she drew him before his hair went. He looked about forty-five in that drawing. He is 62 and mostly forehead. It was him anyway. I dropped the dish towel. You'd have dropped it too. And I was furious. I was more furious than at the wedding. Because I had paid a stranger, specifically, to show me somebody who wasn't Dennis, and she'd shown me Dennis. It felt like a cheap trick, like ordering the special and getting the grilled cheese. My first thought was that it was a scam. Somebody had pulled his face off my Facebook and run it through a computer to make him younger. Then I remembered Dennis isn't on Facebook. Dennis thinks Facebook is run by the government. There isn't a single picture of Dennis on the internet, because Dennis has never once let anybody take one without a fight. So that theory died in about four seconds, and I was left with the other one, which was worse. I zoomed in to look for anything fake, anything a machine would do, and I found the eraser instead. She'd drawn the bridge of his nose, erased it, and drawn it again with a small dent in it: the dent his safety glasses left after forty years of cutting brick. You could still see where the first line had been. I stared at that little correction until the soup boiled over. Then I did the pettiest, dumbest thing I've done in my adult life. Monday morning I printed it, and I taped it to the wall next to my cash register, where everybody could see it, and under it, in marker, I wrote: "I PAID FOR THIS." Terry laughed so hard she had to sit down on the milk crates, and you have never seen Terry sit down. Then I wrote the refund request, standing at the register, and I'll give it to you exactly: "I already have this one. I paid you for a different one." And then, for good measure, I added one more line calling the whole thing a ridiculous scam. The answer came within the hour. She told me to go ahead and take the refund through the payment processor; nobody would stop me. Then she said this, and I've since had it framed, which Terry thinks is funny: "I'm not your typical love psychic. I don't sugarcoat things." That was all. You'd expect a psychic to explain herself. She didn't. She didn't apologize for drawing Dennis. She just stood there, in writing, like a woman at a counter who knows what you ordered even when you don't. At 11:30, Dennis came in, sat on the third stool, and ordered the grilled cheese, no pickle. And then he saw the drawing on the wall. He stood there with his coffee cup halfway up and didn't drink it. Terry stopped flipping things. I stopped breathing. He said, "Who's that?" And I said, "Apparently, that's you." He didn't say one more word. He ate his grilled cheese. If you've never watched a man eat a grilled cheese in total silence while his own face hangs on the wall behind you, I don't recommend it. And then he left a tip bigger than the grilled cheese, which he has never once done in seven years, and walked out. Tuesday he came in and didn't mention it. Wednesday, nothing. Thursday he came in, ate, looked at the drawing for a while, and said, "That was a lot of hair." That's it. You can imagine what that did to me. I was going out of my mind, standing at my own register like a fool, waiting for a man to say something about a piece of paper. By Thursday night I was ashamed of myself, and I don't use that word lightly. I'll tell you why. I had to admit what I'd really been doing that Friday night at the kitchen table. I'd been shopping for a replacement. After seven years, I'd paid a stranger to show me the next man, like a woman reading real-estate listings in the house she already owns. And the stranger had very politely handed me back the man I already had. Friday. Culver's. Our booth. Butter burgers. He got vanilla, if you have to ask. I got the Flavor of the Day, which was butter pecan, and I will remember that until I die. And while I was taking the first bite, Dennis reached into his jacket and set a little velvet box on the table next to my scoop. I said, "Dennis." He said, "If a stranger could see it from three states away, I figured I was the last one to know." And then he said he'd bought the ring four years ago. Four years. It had been sitting in his garage, in a box of drywall screws, while he waited for, and I quote, "a sign I could point to." He said he couldn't do it at the wedding because everybody was watching, and he's a man who can lay a straight wall in front of anybody but can't talk in front of more than two people. And then his sign showed up taped to my cash register with "I PAID FOR THIS" written under it in marker. I said yes with a mouthful of butter pecan. The girl at the next booth started clapping, and then the whole place did, and Dennis went the color of a brick, and I texted Terry under the table: "HE DID IT." She wrote back: "WHAT." Then: "AT CULVER'S??" Then: "OF COURSE AT CULVER'S." We got married in October, at the Knights of Columbus hall where the bouquet hit me. I threw mine straight at Terry. Here's the part I only read after the wedding, because I'd been too busy being insulted to read the rest of what came with the drawing. Underneath the drawing was a written reading. It gave me a week. It gave me a place I'd already been three hundred times. And it gave me one line I didn't understand until I read it with a ring on my finger: he has been waiting for a sign he can point to. She wrote that before Dennis had ever laid eyes on the drawing. Dennis had a ring in a box of drywall screws for four years and a sketch on my wall for four days, and the sketch is what did it. I looked her up, finally, after the wedding. The woman is Tina Aldea. She has drawn soulmates for over 3,000 women across 30 years, and by her records 89% of them meet their match within 30 days of seeing the sketch. I'd already met mine. I'd met him seven years earlier on the third stool, no pickle, and it took a woman with a pencil, three states away, to make me look at him again. If you're about to order one hoping for a stranger, like I did, I get it. I understand the kind of tired that makes you want to see a new face. But here's the line she uses in her own ads, and she was right about everything else: sometimes it's someone already in your life. Sometimes he's sitting on the third stool. Sometimes he's in the booth across from you, eating vanilla, with a ring in his garage. So I'll say it to you the way she would: she doesn't sugarcoat it, and neither will I. If you're only ordering one to be shown a stranger, be ready for it not to be a stranger. And if you'd rather not find out the answer's been across the table all along, close this and finish your ice cream. Some of us needed it taped to the wall. Dennis still eats vanilla. You couldn't pay him to try the Flavor of the Day. He still won't be on Facebook. The drawing is still on the wall by my cash register, and the marker under it still says "I PAID FOR THIS." I've never been happier to have paid for anything. Once you see the face, you can't unsee it. Even when it's the one you've been looking at for seven years.

Where the ad sends people

officialtinaaldea.com

I Paid a Stranger to Show Me Someone Else

Hand-drawn for $37 and delivered in 24 hours — his face, plus when and where you'll meet him.