Reluctantly, LaCroix moved home to Fairfax City to live with her parents in early 2009. She took a job doing customer service for a government contractor but was largely friendless and bored. So she began popping into the Auld Shabeen, a bar near her childhood home, and quickly became acquainted with the other regulars.
Among them was Mace, a bearded, gravelly voiced man who grew up in the Netherlands, worked at Starbucks and seemed to know everything about everything. One night LaCroix showed up with a historical fiction book about Medieval Wales and Mace began expounding on the events of the period.She felt as if she were listening to a nutty professor. “He was like a stocking on Christmas morning,” she says. “Like, ‘There’s all sorts of weird stuff down here — let’s see what we got.’ ”
He told her that he grew up with Asperger’s syndrome, which led to difficulty reading social nuances, that he’d had a major depressive episode during high school and that, until recently, he’d spent a lot of time feeling bitter about things that had gone wrong. Now he was trying to focus on what could still go right.
When he found out it was LaCroix’s birthday, he suggested they meet at the bar. By the end of the night, they were making out in the parking lot of her old elementary school. The next weekend he asked her on a date to Summers, a soccer bar in Arlington. She didn’t go home for two days. “There was just all sorts of driving and philosophizing and killing of the time,” she says. “And it just flew by.”
“I immediately understood that she didn’t have as high an opinion of herself as she deserved to have,” he recalls. “I was very taken aback by her intellect, by her social instinct.”
LaCroix loved to listen to Mace and found him greatly calming, but she resisted the idea of a relationship. In the past, men had fallen for her free spirit but then tried to change it. For much of the next year they floated along nebulously, spending most of their time together but refusing the labels “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.”
But in May 2010, Mace grew frustrated with his work at Starbucks. They began to talk about marriage. If they were married, they realized, she could add him to her health-care plan and he could quit his job. “We were like, ‘This really makes a lot of sense,” she says. “Of all the people I’ve ever known, this is the person who I would love to be 70 years old with, sitting on a Barcalounger hearing history unfold around us.”
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