Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (22 page)

“That’s good, right? Taney’s not taking away all your business.”

“I’ve got business,” I said, but my defenses were low. “It’s not even about that, though.”

“What, you’re jealous of the happy brides?”

“No!” I thought for a fraction of a second. “I mean, yes.
Yes
. Of
course!
Who isn’t jealous of people stupidly, blindly, blissfully in love? Everything looks like sunshine to them. Ughhh. It makes me ill, but I want it.”

He nodded ruefully. “I want it too.”

I was surprised. “You do?”

“Everyone does, dummy. Who’s going to sincerely say,
No thanks, no happiness for me
?”

“Yup. I see your point.”

“Question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“Short Stops, obviously.” I flashed him A Look. “That’s where the best prospects seemed to be.”

“Okay, okay, and short of Short Stops? Are you seriously regretting not being married to Burke?”

“I’m regretting not being happily married to Burke, yes. Absolutely.”

“Right, and I’m regretting not being the Queen of England. Or Warren Buffett. Or a bunch of other things I’m not. Are you sorry you’re not married to Burke
for better or worse
?”

He was asking, of course, about
worse
. And the answer to that alone was easy. It was the rest of it that wasn’t so clear.

“Okay, got it,” I said. “No, I don’t think I made the wrong decision back then.”
I just hope he’s different now
, my mind pressed on.
I hope he regrets losing me forever and would do anything to try to win me back.
“But you’ve got to see where the temptation to get him in bed is … considerable.”

“No! That’s
not
what I meant by a one-night stand! And you know it! The whole point of raising the idea was to break you open, not to embed you more fully, like a dragonfly in amber. Would it give you any sense of closure?”

No. No, it probably wouldn’t. It would probably raise more questions than it answered and leave me wanting more desperately. One more kiss. One more touch.

One more night.

Then
one more night
quickly became
and more and more and more
. I was very well familiar with the sense of longing this man gave me, the feeling of infinity that mingled with fear that I could never really have
it
.

Despite the years that had passed, I fell so easily back into the habit of wanting him, of feeling like I was crazy in love with him. Whatever strength I’d built the day I’d left him, and maintained in all the time that lay between, had been lost in my attraction to him.

This was what he’d
always
been able to do to me.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to have closure,” I told him, saying out loud the thing I really hadn’t wanted to admit in any solid way. Because it wasn’t just Burke, it was also Frank. And all the reminders around town of both of them, but it was, elementally, Burke and Frank. It had always been Burke and Frank.

Or rather Burke versus Frank.

A thousand years ago I’d started something with Frank that we both later just agreed to call a
mistake
, but when I allowed myself even a moment to think about it, the rest of the family wasn’t in my head until I put them there. Frank was his own man and he held his own lure.

It was my head that told me it was crazy to take that seriously.

“Never,” I reiterated. No closure for me. I give up.

Glenn sighed. “Not with that attitude, you’re not.”

“I
want
it.”

“I’m not even sure I believe that.”

He was right. And I didn’t have it in me to defend myself against his truths right now. This conversation could only result in me looking too closely at things in myself that I didn’t want to see.

Time
, I told myself. All I needed was a little bit of time to regain my distance and detachment. This, what I was feeling, was an illusion. A temporary psychological trick.

“I’ve got to run,” I said, “but come on by after work tomorrow. We can talk then if you want.”

“Or I could just go on in there and try and shake some sense into you.”

“Either-or.” I groaned. “I hate this.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Make it go away.”

“I’ll try. But I can’t. Only you can.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m trying. Come by if you can. I have a feeling I’m going to be pretty desperate to get out of my head.”

“Will do. Hang on, kiddo. This is a process. It feels like you’ve turned around and found yourself in the middle of something sticky again, but actually you’re approaching the other side.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked, with a certain skeptical hope.

“Don’t ask.”

My hope deflated.

If only he
could
shake some sense into me. If only
anyone
could. I’d welcome it at this point.

Chapter 16

“Our wedding is in New York on June fifth,” the bride, Sigma, told me, while her always-silent partner, Chris, stood by like a bodyguard.

I had never heard Chris speak.

Though this was only the third time they’d been in, and the first two times had probably totaled seven minutes or so, so it wasn’t surprising that we hadn’t had a very deep conversation. Even tonight, Sigma—whip-thin and pixie-like, with her short cropped hair and wide Audrey Hepburn eyes—had slipped all but silently through the door and waited wordlessly while I wrote up a sales slip on six garters for a Vegas wedding, then opened with her wedding date, as if answering a question I’d just asked.

Although Sigma herself always seemed sweet and soft-spoken, I knew I had to be careful not to push her buttons, because usually when one of the affianced doesn’t say much it’s because they’re afraid to say the wrong thing.

Thank God for my job
, I thought.
Thank God I’m forced to interact with people and think about something else
. I’d been in this business for so long that the customer service habit was deeply ingrained. That was always a blessing but never more so than it was right now.

“That’s plenty of time for the dress to be ready,” I said to her. There was barely any work to be done on it at this point. “Don’t give it a second thought.”

She gave a soft laugh. “That’s the problem, Chris keeps giving it a second thought. Dress or suit? White or blue? I’ll tell you, I’m just ready to have this over with so we don’t spend the rest of our lives talking about whether or not it was right.” She looked affectionately at Chris, who stood ramrod-straight and—with tawny skin, cropped hair, and narrow eyes that could only be described as
beige
—all but blended into the walls.

My gaze was more expectant.

Neither of us was rewarded with a word.

Sigma didn’t seem surprised. She casually brushed a wisp of pale blond hair out of her eyes and said, “Anyway, I absolutely
love
the dress I commissioned and I’m
definitely
not changing my mind, so … onward and upward, right?”

“Right.”

“Hellooo!” Glenn called, hurrying in the door with an apologetic grimace. “Hate to interrupt, but do you have an Internet connection?”

“I— I
guess
so. Why?”

“My stupid connection is out
again
. My fault. Left the router by the window and left the window open in the rain. Fried.” He went behind my counter and started punching the keys on my computer, then paused, looked at Sigma and Chris, and said, “God, I’m rude. Hi. Sorry to interrupt, I was just in the middle of something”—he shifted his focus to the screen but kept talking—“and everything went out and just…” He raised his hands and shook his head for a moment, then returned to the keyboard. “I hate that. Don’t you?”

“I hate that,” Sigma agreed.

“I don’t feel strongly about that,” I said.

Glenn glanced at me, a little impatient. “You would if you were me. Oh, here we go. Here … we … go…”
Click click click
. We were all suddenly silent, everyone’s attention fixed on him as if there were suddenly a fire in the middle of the room. “Carry on, sorry to interrupt, just do whatever you were doing.”

I looked back at Sigma. “So the dress should be ready by the end of next week, beginning of the next at the latest. We only have one more fitting before I sew on the lace, and that’ll be it.”

“Oh, wonderful.” She sighed and looked dreamy. “You are going to make this my dream wedding, Quinn, you really are. You and Chris, that is. It may not be what everyone expected, but I don’t care, I’m the happiest girl in the world.”

I could see why people didn’t expect that. Frankly, Chris was kind of glum and personality-free, to my eye, but, whatever, it wasn’t my wedding. Sometimes people had unexpected depths and I had to believe—or at least assume—that might be the case here.

The truth was, seeing Sigma’s enthusiasm was inspiring. It wasn’t fair for me to make a judgment on their personal relationship. I didn’t really know anything about it, and it felt like bad juju for me to be guessing at the odds of their marriage working out, so it was better for me not to think about it at all. Just to do my job.

“All right, then how about you come back Monday afternoon and we’ll fit the corset, and then your part is done?” I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring manner. “Well, your part of getting the dress. Obviously you’re still going to have to do the wedding.”

“Can’t wait!” Sigma squealed.

She really was so sweet. Maybe I just wasn’t used to unidimensional people. Maybe there wasn’t a dark side at all.

Then again, there was always a dark side, wasn’t there? To just about everyone.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Glenn murmured to himself a few feet away.

“Do you have family in New York?” I asked, looking from Sigma to Chris and back.

She shook her head. “Nope. Just, you know, that was
the place
to do it.”

Ooooh, yes. I’d heard this one before. Probably yet another
Sex and the City
knockoff wedding at the public library, I surmised. Sigma had a distinct Charlotte vibe to her. And yes, I know it was Carrie who planned the wedding at the library, but I figured if she
was
a fan, the idea probably appealed no matter which character appealed to her.

And why not? It was a lovely idea.

“I’m sure it will be wonderful, Sigma,” I said to her.

Sigma took Chris’s hand, and, to be fair, I did notice she was rewarded with a little squeeze. Acknowledgment. “It will be,” she said dreamily.

“Got it!” Glenn cried, startling all of us. He put his hand to his heart and patted his chest. “That was
way
too close for comfort.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Tell us. What are you
talking
about?” I asked, a little embarrassed that he’d come in and acted so weird in front of clients.

He met my eyes and I could tell he immediately realized what he’d been doing. “I am so sorry.” He looked at Sigma and Chris. “Truly, I am so sorry to interrupt your moment like this. It’s just that I was in the middle of a final countdown on eBay when,
poof
, my connection disappeared. And the timing of sniping is just so…” He snapped his fingers.

“Precise,” Chris offered with a surprisingly commiserative nod.

Leave it to Glenn to draw just about anyone out of their shell.

“
Exactly
,” Glenn said, pointing like the first word in his game of charades had been guessed correctly. “It’s
so
precise. GrammysLoveBug nearly got it out from under me. So close.
So
close. Man.”

“What did you get?” Sigma asked with interest.

Glenn’s face lit up like he was about to admit he’d gotten a treasure map that led directly to an early retirement in Bora Bora. “A Barry Manilow lunch box! Vintage, of course, from the late eighties.”

My jaw dropped. “They
made
Barry Manilow lunch boxes?”

He nodded happily. “You bet!”

This was incomprehensible. I pictured a metal lunch box with Barry—suited up somewhere between Liberace, Elvis, and Wayne Newton—holding a long phallic microphone, singing about making it through the rain.

“But—why?
Who
on earth would want one? Surely there couldn’t have been a sufficient market to manufacture them in bulk! I mean,” I sputtered, “especially back then, lunch boxes were mostly a kid thing, and what weirdo kid would want a
Barry Manilow
lunch box?” I tried to picture that thing sitting on the big pull-down lunch tables at my elementary school, next to the
Star Wars
ones shaped like R2-D2 and the Barbie lunch and thermos set that I’d had.

He looked hurt. “
I
had one.”

I gasped. I couldn’t help it. “You did?” I looked at Sigma and Chris, probably for some bewildered expressions that showed they thought it was as weird as I did, but they just looked at Glenn and blinked. I think Chris even looked sympathetic, albeit in the smallest, most infinitesimal way imaginable.

“I love that song ‘Could It Be Magic,’” Sigma said. “And ‘I Made It Through the Rain.’” Of course. Of course she did. “When I came out, that was a very inspiring song for me. For
us
.” She smiled at Chris. “Barry’s great.”

Wow. I just wasn’t going to win this one at all. And, really, I didn’t need to be the jerk who tried. “Well, way to go, then, Glenn. I had no idea. But you really need to get your router fixed. Don’t want it going out when you’re in the middle of a hot bidding war for a
Torkelsons
tea set or something.”

For one split second, his eyes lit up. “If only.”

If I had the time and inclination to search things out and resell them on eBay, I could have made so much money off Glenn.

“Should I make an appointment for Monday?” Sigma asked, me. “Or is it okay just to come midafternoon sometime?”

I returned my attention to her. “That should be fine,” I said. “If you want to call and confirm on your way in, that might be better still, just to make sure you don’t have to wait.”