The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (47 page)

“Where exactly is this place?” I asked.

“It’s in Mexico,” Risa answered.

“Where in Mexico?”

“In the Yucatan Peninsula,” Risa said. “That’s in the south.”

“So you want to relocate to this place that you’ve never been to and do what?”

Risa shrugged. “I don’t know. Live. Surf a lot.”

“Like on permanent vacation?” I asked.

Risa put down the nightstand she was carrying and said, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Shit all over my dreams,” Risa said.

“I’m not trying to discourage you, I’m just asking you some practical questions.”

“I know you are, and I’m asking you not to do it, okay?” She picked up the nightstand. “Let’s go to the Griddle after this. I always wanted to try their pancakes.”

Risa had been to the Griddle Café several times before, but she had never actually eaten there. This was her new thing these days, wanting to go back to every restaurant she had ever not eaten at, now that her taste buds were coming back after quitting smoking.

I both liked and didn’t like this new version of Risa. On one hand, it was nice to not feel guilty about my own calorie intake when I ate in front of her. But on the other hand, Risa had become more direct, which was messed up, because before the big Tammy reveal I had already thought Risa had a pretty big mouth. Now it looked like she had been biting her tongue about a lot of things, including not really appreciating any of my sensible advice.

I set down the lamp I had been carrying. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now. We have nothing in common. You think I’m too bossy, and I know you don’t think I’m cool. Why are you even friends with me?”

Risa peered at me over her vintage designer sunglasses. “Really, you don’t know?”

I shook my head. “How could I?”

“You,” Risa said, pointing at me, “are just like my mother. Only better.” She frowned. “Though now I guess I should ask why the hell your prude ass wants to be friends with me?”

I was laughing too hard to answer at first.

“What?” Risa asked.

“You’re just like my mom,” I said. “Only better.”

Risa joined me in laughing. “Well, there you go.”

So that took time. And my relationship with Ennis took time. And somehow by the time June 2012 rolled around, I had managed to squeeze in a visit to my sister and baby niece in New York, but I still hadn’t found the time to take the vacation that I had vowed to take last October.

As if reading my mind, the night after I helped Risa move into Mike Barker’s pool house, Ennis said, “Hey, I’ve been thinking. We should take a holiday together.”

We were preparing for bed, Ennis already under the covers, and I was getting under them myself after tying my hair back in a silk wrap.

“A holiday? You mean like a vacation?”

“Aye, I could use some time on a warm beach with you.”

He squeezed me when he said this, rolling the words into my neck.

“Where would we go?” I asked.

“Spain’s nice. I’ve always fancied going there.”

All sorts of practical questions piled up in my head, but then I stopped myself. If Ennis had always wanted to go to Spain, why not just go with him?

“Okay,” I said. “When? I’ll have to get a passport.”

“Well, we’ve a hiatus coming up for the last two weeks of August. You’d have to get your passport expedited.”

His answer surprised me so much that I turned over to face him. “Wait, you would be willing to fly during vacation season? That means we’re going to have to pay premium.”

“I ken what you’re saying, and yes, it did give me a moment of pause. But you know, Sharita, sometimes paying premium is practical. For instance, we only get four hiatuses a year. The next one’s at Christmas and the one after that isn’t until the spring. Christmas prices are even more dear, and besides, I don’t want to wait that long to give you this.”

He reached into his right sweatpants pocket and pulled out a velvet box, opening it to reveal an understated diamond ring. “According to my American friends, big diamonds are the thing over here, but I didn’t want to spend too much, because I could hear ya in the back of ma head saying it’d be better to invest that money in a college fund for our bairns, which is one of the reasons I love you and want you to do me the great honor of becoming ma wife.”

I sat up, speechless. We had only been dating for six months. I hadn’t expected a proposal so soon—to tell the truth, I hadn’t expected a proposal at all. As many times as I had daydreamed about getting married and starting a family, with my dating history it had never even occurred to me to imagine getting proposed to. For a moment I panicked, my mind flashing to the composite of the perfect black husband that I’d had in my head since the age of fourteen.

He would be kind and practical. He would be handsome—but not so handsome that I would have to worry about women offering him their goodies every time he went outdoors. He would have a college degree. He would want children and a family. He would love God.

My dream guy had been fading for quite some time, but right before my eyes he was now starting to dissolve all together, and my heart reached out to him with a mental cry.

But then the Crystal Ball Vision I had been waiting for ever since I met Ennis chose this time to finally appear. I saw myself and Ennis outside a house in Ladera Heights. He was kissing our small son on the forehead and telling him to be a “wee good one” for his Aunt Nicole.

I saw him telling my sister that he would call as soon as the baby came. Then I saw him getting into a Honda minivan, where I was sitting in the passenger seat taking deep breaths with the contractions. “How far apart are we now, sweet girl?”

“Four minutes,” I saw myself saying between gritted teeth.

I saw Ennis grinning at me. “Right then, better get a move on,” he said, putting the minivan in reverse.

The rest of my life. That’s how long this wonderful relationship would last.

And when I looked up from the vision, I found my imaginary black husband gone. And there was Ennis, holding the rest of my life in one velvet ring box.

RISA

S
harita called me at ten that night to tell me that Ennis asked her to marry him. A few thoughts ran through my head. Like who would have thought Sharita would be the first one of us to get married? Seriously, I had thought the gays would be given federal clearance to get married legally anywhere they wanted to in the United States before Sharita’s doormat ass got a ring.

Out loud, though, I said, “You’re going to make me wear a dress, aren’t you?”

“You’d look so cute in a dress. I’m thinking something in a deep maroon,” she said.

“Why, because it’s the most boring color you could think of that would still be appropriate for a summer wedding?”

“Do it for me, Risa,” she said, avoiding the question.

“How about a maroon tux?” I ask. “Or better yet, a sleeveless leather maroon blazer with a kilt? How hot would that be? If I wear that, you’ll be seeing that shit on the runway next fall.”

Being a rock star by nature, every time I came up with a new kind of outfit, I assumed that if anyone else copied that outfit in any sort of way it meant that a designer had seen me and stolen my idea for his or her collection.

I was not surprised when Sharita called me back a few days later to tell me that, on second thought, she and Ennis had decided to do a wedding without any attendants.

“It’s going to be real small, just a little party in the backyard of the house Ennis grew up in. And it’s already going to be such a hassle getting everybody from my side over to Scotland. We figured we’d just keep it short and sweet with just the two of us and a preacher.”

“Fine,” I said. “Be boring. But my bridesmaid look would have rocked the earth, son. I’m talking Scotland’s first earthquake.”

“Okay, I’m going now,” Sharita said.

Whatever. I decided to wear the outfit I proposed to the wedding anyway and wondered how long it would take to find a sleeveless maroon leather blazer in the exact wine color that I was imagining. But then I remembered that I was rich now. I didn’t have to hunt down a blazer. I could technically walk into a leather store and ask them to order me one special, or commission the whole outfit from one of Thursday’s costume designer friends. In fact, if I wanted to mass-produce the look, I could fly to China and secure a factory to make ten thousand maroon leather jackets, tux ties, and kilts for me without going broke. And what?

It kept on hitting me anew, this rich stuff. Tammy’s bank accounts had already been transferred into my name. She signed all the paperwork before she died. Her financial planners sent me a statement for the accounts, and it didn’t come in a thin white envelope like my bank statements either. They arrived in several packages filled with sheaths and sheaths of papers for different accounts. Sharita has promised to help me sort through it all, but I’d already figured out that it all came down to one big “I’m rich, bitch!”

And that was going to take some getting used to because, technically, I could do whatever I wanted from now on. I could still go live in Mexico. Or I could go live in Europe or some magical paradise where lesbians were A-OK with the natives as long as their money was green. I was no longer bound to music as a life calling. Tammy was gone. My record deal was gone. I was finally free.

I thought about that for a while, and then I got on my Harley. I found what I was looking for in the back of my Silver Lake storage unit inside a dusty black case. I opened the case and there was my scratched-up acoustic guitar, exactly as I had left it when I switched to the electric guitar all those years ago. “Alrighty then,” I said, like they used to say in the nineties, when people were still innocent enough to fall in love with catchphrases.

I picked it up, sat down on my old couch and start playing. “Tammy.”

I didn’t know that the song was called “Tammy” when I was playing it, or that the words coming out of my mouth were her eulogy. I wasn’t even fully aware that time was passing, until I looked up and saw a security guard standing in the open entrance.

I stopped playing.

“You’re not supposed to be in here too long. I’m supposed to kick you out if you’re in here over three hours and not moving nothing.”

I stood and started making moves to go, slinging the guitar onto my back like I used to in college, and closing up the case that it came in. I’d have to ask Thursday to come back with me for the case, but I’d risk the motorcycle ride home with the guitar on my back. Now that we’d been reunited, I was never going to let go of this beat-up guitar again.

“What’s the name of that song you were playing?” the guard asked.

“It’s called ‘Tammy,’” I said, realizing the name of the song as it came off my lips.

“I liked it. Can I buy it on iTunes?”

I paused. Because I was supposed to move to Merida after Tammy’s funeral, which would be the next day. Because I was supposed to have taken up surfing again by this time next week. Because I had no plans to be a rock star anymore. Because even if I did, I no longer had a record label to call home.

But mostly I paused because of something I had read in an exhaustive
Vanity Fair
article with the lead singer from an English rock band that was still touring even though its members were all over fifty and, by music industry laws, shouldn’t even be relevant anymore.

“If you want to remain, you’ve got to pay attention to the common people,” the lead singer of this band had said. “Who cares what rock critics think? If I was playing a song in a studio, and the janitor who’s fresh off the boat from Africa comes through and said, ‘Hey mate, I love that song, Where can I buy it? I want to hear it again’—well, that’s how I know I’ve got my next Top 40 hit. People with shite jobs don’t go out of their way to compliment the rich. So pay attention when they do.”

I paused and I tried to memorize this security guard’s face. He was Latino, maybe. Older, with a snub nose, crew cut, and a serious gut. I noted all of this, because I’d want to remember what he looked like when I told the story of how I meant to leave rock and roll, but decided not to because some random security guard complimented me on the first song that I ever wrote for my dead girlfriend.

Then I said, “I’m not sure when my debut album will hit iTunes, but keep on checking under the name Risa Merriweather.”

I say this because I think a few of you need to hear it. Breakups happen, every day, for reasons much less dramatic than what you read in novels or see on TV. If this is the case with you, if it didn’t work out—listen, it wasn’t all your fault. But it wasn’t all his, either. Learn from it and then let it go. Trust me when I tell you that you’re both better off without each other.

—
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
by Davie Farrell