In the Unlikely Event... (20 page)

Lacey turned crimson.

Chase had forgotten how fun it was to poke the snake. Perhaps she’d call her mother later. They’d both been so busy—Stella with chasing errant husbands, and Chase with writing and perfecting her alter ego, Shelby McCall.

“I do not find that amusing. This is serious business. I want you to do something for me.”

“Let me guess—organize a festival for the glorification of the clitoris,” Chase said. This felt good.

Lacey’s eyes lit up. “No, but that’s a fabulous idea and you,” she pointed at the manicurist, “can set up a booth and give manicures and maybe even do a seminar on good hand care.”

Chase tried to envision an Asian woman with broken English teaching a seminar on “hands as penises.” However, she did glance down at her own hands. Both Lacey and the manicurist caught her, and then, like Bruce Lee, the woman had Chase in a chair and her hand stuck in the odd-smelling liquid.

“I make hand pretty,” she said.

Lacey was at the dry erase board, which was as large as a grade school classroom chalkboard. Marker poised, she said, “I envision something along the lines of a medieval May Day. We’d exchange the traditional pole for a giant clitoris.”

Chase looked at the Asian woman, who aptly expressed both their opinions. “Wow, that big, very big.”

“And frightening,” Chase said, hoping she wouldn’t have a nightmare about an army of  Brobdingnagian clitorises—or was the correct spelling clitori?—chasing her down and demanding her attention.

Lacey was studying the empty board.

“I think we should have a brainstorming board meeting about this,” Chase said, thinking that with a group discussion Lacey could be pared down to having a brief but informative seminar.

“You hate board meetings and refused to attend them and now you’re suggesting one?” Lacey said.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“What’s desperate?”

“A six-foot-tall clitoris,” Chase said.

The Asian woman smiled and pushed back Chase’s cuticles.

Chase was Photoshopping Bud’s pictures from the dance. Unfortunately, the photos of the “tiny dancers” as she referred to them in homage to Elton John had been taken by Collins and as a consequence no one had feet.

“See, I told you,” Chase had said to Gitana. “No feet. I knew this would happen.”

“Perhaps you should give photo taking lessons for six-year-olds so they will photo document their lives better,” Gitana said.

“No, I should’ve been a chaperone. I should have been
allowed
to be a chaperone,” Chase said. She glowered at both Gitana and Bud, who avoided her gaze by studiously buttering their toast.

Having not gotten their attention, Chase continued, “And then this feet-chopping debacle would
not
have occurred. It’s not like I can glue feet on.”

At present, this was what she was attempting to do. She’d taken other pictures of Bud and her friends, and now she was doing a cut-and-paste and trying to insert feet. Not usually tech-saavy, Chase had managed to learn Photoshop. She’d taken over the family photo documentation from Gitana, who wasn’t home enough to capture all the crucial Bud photo ops. Chase worried she’d miss a never-to-be-repeated moment of Bud’s childhood. She didn’t think she had so far, but eternal vigilance was required.

There was a tap at the door and Donna came in, carrying her enormous Day-Timer and looking different. Granted it was a different kind of day—the seasons had changed from a lingering fall of sunny-but-crisp days to an ominous Jane-Eyre-and-Rochester-on-the-moors kind of day with the hint of a snowstorm.

Donna had a definite Rochester vibe. Not feeling like Jane Eyre and yet having a great regard for Charlotte Brontë, Chase inquired, “Is something wrong?”

Uncharacteristically, Donna lied and Chase knew it. “No, nothing is wrong.”

It was the pregnant kind of “nothing”—the one full of so much “something” that it could fill an Olympic-size swimming pool.

Chase bit her lip and contemplated the situation. She wasn’t good at this stuff. Should she approach Donna from the Dr. Robicheck point of view—sitting back and allowing Donna to explain the problem in her own time? Or should she do it her own way—which was to ignore the problem altogether? Or she could approach it like the neurotic Tigger from The Hundred Acre Wood and just pounce.

Donna poured coffee, sat on the couch and then buried her face in her hands. Chase ruminated. She opted for the Dr. Robicheck approach.

“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

Donna nodded.

The problem with nodding and gestural non-sequiturs was the ambiguity. Chase moved on to the Tigger method—at least that involved action. She leapt at Donna, pushed her on her back and sat on her chest.

Donna was startled, to say the least.

“Don’t make me do the Chinese Water Torture,” Chase said.

Donna blinked rapidly as if only just taking in the odd situation. “What’s that?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“If I tell you what’s wrong, will you get off me?”

“Yes.” Chase removed herself and sat on the couch next to Donna.

Donna glanced at her and then looked away.

Chase raised her eyebrows. She still couldn’t do the one arch eyebrow thing that Gitana and Bud were so adept at, but she had mastered doing both eyebrows and moving her eyes to one side in an expression of “really.” Chase gave Donna an extended version and when this produced nothing, she said, “Did you kill someone?”

“Well, no.”

“Maim, dismember, rob?”

“No.”

“Despoil?”

“No.”

Donna seemed to reconsider. This alarmed Chase.

“I may have broken a heart, maimed a soul and despoiled a destiny.”

“Wow,” Chase looked at the wall clock. “All that and it’s only one thirty. Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.”

“You mean before I destroy the planet by cocktail hour?”

Chase laughed and Donna smiled at least. Chase took her hand. “What happened?”

Chase imagined it was some plan or event that Donna thought she had failed at because it didn’t come out perfectly—a few platitudes and all would be put right. “I’m sure whatever it is we can fix it.” She patted Donna’s hand.

Donna still looked bleak. “I don’t think it can be fixed. It’s not a can-be-fixed kind of thing.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, it’s not like an undo kind of thing. It’s a what’s-done-is-done kind of thing.”

“Did you run something over? Accidents do happen,” Chase said, trying to sound consoling.

“Oh, no, I didn’t do that.”

“Good. So it seems to me death is the only thing that can’t be undone or rectified,” Chase said.

“Except in those cases where people come back from the dead,” Donna said.

“True, but this thing you’ve done…” Chase said, looking at her beseechingly. Is this what she put Dr. Robicheck through? It was awful.

“There’s another thing that can’t be undone, and that’s the thing I did.” Donna was the epitome of the trying-to-gather-enough-courage-to-enter-the-confessional-booth sinner.

“Maybe you could tell me what the undone-done-fixed-not-fixable thing is that you did, and then we can evaluate the situation. It can’t be that bad, can it?”

Donna bit her thumbnail and her eyes widened as she stared at Chase, and then she said it really fast, running all the words together, “IsleptwithIsabel.”

Chase didn’t catch it. It sounded all slurred. “You did what?”

“I knew you wouldn’t approve. I knew it was wrong. It was unprofessional, and I swear to you I have never ever done it before. I’m not certain how it happened. It just did, and now I don’t know what to do about it. I have feelings. I am willing to recognize I have feelings.”

Chase grabbed Donna by the shoulders and peered into her face. “I didn’t understand you.”

“I know. I don’t understand it myself.”

“No, not that. I didn’t understand what you said. You said it too fast.”

“Oh, my God, I have to say it again?” She looked pleadingly at Chase. “Can I write it down instead?”

“Sure.”

Donna opened her Day-Timer and pulled out a packet of orange Post-it notes. She hesitated and then wrote quickly, ripped it off, folded it and handed the orange paper to Chase.

Chase opened it up and read. “Holy shit, really?”

Donna wrote on another Post-it and handed it to Chase. “Really.”

On another Post-it, she wrote “Yes,” and then buried her head in her hands.

“How did it happen?” Chase said.

Donna sighed and wrote out another note. Chase hoped they might talk about it, but if the only way she could get Donna to tell her story was on Post-its she’d have to go with it. She handed the note over. “I don’t know.”

Chase was about to say something when Donna handed her another note. “We were having dinner at Isabel’s and talking.”

“Do you go to dinner a lot, like you’re dating?”

Donna handed her another note. “Well…”

“Did you know you were dating?”

Donna scribbled. “Not exactly. I thought maybe…” She ripped off the note and started another. “I was in denial.”

Chase had known Donna for seven years and in all that time Donna had never dated. She’d never mentioned an old girlfriend, not even in passing. “Donna, when was the last time you had a girlfriend?”

“It’s been a while,” Donna wrote. Her face was the epitome of evasion.

“How long?”

“Well…” she stopped and handed Chase that note.

“Think hard.”

Donna furrowed her brow. She wrote, “1984.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Donna shook her head. She began to write again, but Chase snatched the Post-its. “Can we talk?”

“It was a really bad breakup and I needed time to heal.”

Chase did the math. “Twenty-seven years.”

“Has it been that long? Time flies.”

“Uh, yeah. Don’t you think it’s time to move on?” Chase asked, trying to keep her voice even. Her mind went reeling into what-the-fuck land—twenty-seven years to get over a breakup. It was absurd.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“So evidently you didn’t seduce Isabel then.” Chase got up and poured them both coffee while she ruminated on this fact. She’d seen Isabel and Donna together a lot, but then Donna was also involved in organizing seminars, as was Isabel—it was easy to see how they would end up working together. Chase attempted to recall Isabel’s romantic past. She appeared not to have one. She set the mismatched coffee mugs down on the table and they each doctored their own—Donna with milk and sugar and Chase with half milk, half coffee. She rued the day she’d have to give up coffee because her stomach lining couldn’t take it anymore. For now café au lait—the drink of French children—would have to do.

Chase sipped her coffee and waited like Dr. Robicheck would under the circumstances, until her patient was ready to talk and then she waited some more. At this rate, she’d be collecting Social Security by the time Donna got around to it. She needed prodding. “Why don’t you tell me what happened from the beginning and we’ll go from there?” Damn that was good, she thought—very Dr. Robicheckian.

Donna stared at her, obviously mortified.

“I don’t want the details.” Chase put air quotes around “details.”

“Oh, good.”

“I thought if you talked about it and subsequently processed it like I do with Dr. Robicheck, you’d feel better—that’s all.”

“Oh, good.”

“You’ve said that twice.”

“I know.”

“Talk! Please talk.”

“All right…well…” She looked uncertain.