About two hours later, a red-haired, attractive woman of about 30 knocks on Don’s door. She tells him that Gene sent her; believing she is a wife candidate, Don immediately asks her out to dinner. She sarcastically names an expensive restaurant, thinking that he’s kidding. Don misses the sarcasm and hacks into the restaurant’s computer to make a last-minute reservation for 8:00 pm that night. Realizing that he never got the woman’s name, he calls Gene, who laughs and says her name is Rosie.

Arriving at the restaurant just before 8:00 pm, Don argues with the maître d’ over the restaurant’s jacket requirement; Don arrives wearing a high-tech raincoat. Because it’s unsanitary, he refuses to wear a jacket provided by the restaurant and continues trying to convince the maître d’ to let him in. When security personnel attempt to remove him from the restaurant, Don incapacitates them with his aikido training. Rosie arrives during this chaos, and it is clear she knows the maître d’ and the security men. She defuses the situation, and they are allowed to leave. Rosie reveals that she used to work at the restaurant and implies that it was not an enjoyable experience. She asks about Don’s self-defense skills, and he says he began training when he was a kid to defend himself against bullies.

As they continue to walk, Rosie says she is hungry and talks Don into making dinner for her at his place. Don is unenthusiastic as he has already dismissed Rosie as a potential wife.

At his apartment, Rosie is awed by his tidiness and fastidiousness regarding his home décor (of which there is none). Don experiences some residual anxiety because of how disrupted his plans for the evening have become; this is exacerbated by Rosie’s close examining of his entire apartment. She plugs her phone into the sound system and begins playing music without asking, and then she goes out onto his balcony and begins rearranging furniture. He is horrified when, partway through his preparation of a lobster dish, Rosie says she is “basically vegetarian” (53). This reminds him of an incident six years prior, when he prepared a multicourse meal made entirely of meat, only to discover that his date was a vegetarian. However, Rosie says seafood is acceptable, and he begins to relax.

Don explains that each day has a preassigned meal, allowing for efficiency because he knows the dishes by heart and can accurately schedule his time around making them. When he notes that he will have to recalculate the completion times for each stage of preparation, Rosie changes the clock on his oven so it displays what would be the normal time for him. Rather than upsetting Don, he appreciates her gesture because it saves him the trouble of recalculating. He says that Rosie has made a new time zone, “Rosie time” (57). They agree that, in Rosie’s new time zone, any of his previous rules do not apply, including the rule that he does not drink wine on Tuesdays.

Don finishes cooking and discovers that Rosie set up a makeshift dining table out on the balcony, in lieu of eating in the living room. As they eat, Don asks Rosie to tell him about herself, remembering this is an expected aspect of dating. He finds her stories amusing and plans to utilize some of her storytelling techniques in future romantic interactions. However, the moment is ruined when Rosie reveals that she smokes. This confirms that she is not a suitable candidate, but Don decides to see the evening through. 

Rosie asks Don about genetic predispositions to monogamy, revealing that she is the result of an affair her mother had as a medical student. Because her mother died in a car accident when Rosie was 10 years old, the only information she has about her biological father is that he is a doctor. When Rosie makes air quotation marks around the word father when discussing her stepfather Phil, Don is delighted by this gesture and briefly attempts to replicate it with other punctuation marks. However, his scientific comments about her relationship with Phil—primarily that Phil has no biological need to care about her—have a clearly upsetting effect on Rosie. He goes to get more wine at her request and, noticing it’s 11:40 pm, he calls her a cab. After returning to the balcony, Don tries to suggest ways to find her biological father, which leads to the discovery that her hair is artificially dyed; he decides to add hair dyeing to his questionnaire.

The taxi arrives and Rosie goes home, telling Don that she hopes he has a nice life. Perplexed, he calls Gene’s home and speaks to a disoriented Claudia. Gene is not home; in fact, Claudia had been under the impression that her husband was with Don. Don proceeds to complain about Gene’s decision to set him up with Rosie, but Claudia interrupts him to ask what time he thinks it is. Don realizes that when he looked at the oven clock before calling a taxi, he had forgotten about Rosie time. So, when Rosie left his place, it was nearly 2:30 am. Don gets off the phone with Claudia and cleans up after his date, noticing the night sky view that Rosie had chided him for not appreciating earlier.