The Moment of Everything (20 page)

I checked my phone one more time. I hadn’t heard from Dizzy since our fight. According to Facebook, he’d left yesterday to meet with a development group up in Portland. Silver Needle Holdings wanted to move all the development team up there to reduce expenses. Not many of the ArGoNet coders wanted to go, so Dizzy was in heavy recruitment mode. It was going to take a lot more than the skeleton crew he was left with to put together the vision Avi and her team had in mind. And then there was Avi. She was on board the Silver Needle ship thinking I was in the cocktail lounge, where she would join me later, when in reality I was still on the dock, sitting on a pile of rope and sweating all over my ticket.

I left the car and, flashlight in hand, trod up the path toward the pavilions, the music, and the scent of roasting meat, hoping no mountain lions were hungry. When I passed a woman dressed like the St. Pauli Girl necking with a guy who looked like he belonged on the cover of one of my romances, I knew I had to be close. After asking a few people for directions, I finally found the encampment where Jason and Hugo were staying.

“It’s been quite a day,” Hugo said. “A World War Two reenactment group scheduled the field for the same day, so they all joined in. We had Lancelots and G.I. Joes going at it all afternoon.”

“And a king was chosen this morning,” Nimue reminded him. “That’s important, too.” Nimue described in great detail the heralding poem Jason wrote for the newly crowned king. But there was something in her tone that made me feel like she was more interested in the king than the poem.

“It happens sometimes,” Jason said about the conflict with the field that day. “We try to be careful with scheduling the grounds and all, but organization isn’t our greatest feature. We had a squire in the kingdom once who was also a project manager at Oracle. Tried to get all our
i
’s dotted and
t
’s crossed. Had a spreadsheet posted on Google Docs with everything planned out for everyone to see. But no one ever read it.”

“Sounds dreadful,” I said.

“It turned out to be for him,” he said. “After he got cranky when no one met their deadlines, they put him on a raft in the middle of the night and he woke up in the middle of Loch Lomond.”

Sasha and Dae-Jung were there, too, introducing me to a dress and accessories they’d borrowed from a friend about my size. The two of them walked me over to the park’s restrooms, where they had to explain to me how to put the outfit together. The restroom was full of maids and ladies primping and fluffing and generally tucking in and pushing out. There wasn’t a stall for me, so I sucked it up and stood behind the wooden barrier in front of the door that blocked the casual viewer from getting a look inside.

“Think of it as a dressing screen like in the old movies,” Dae-Jung said from the other side of the barrier after Sasha got called back to fix an issue with a camp stove. “If it weren’t for being in the outdoors and in front of a public restroom, it could be quite elegant.”

I liked Dae-Jung. And I knew he and Dizzy had been seeing a lot of each other. And I knew that he probably knew about me and Dizzy fighting. So as I stepped into my dress, just wearing my underwear, pretty much out in front of God and everyone, I went back and forth as to whether I should ask this nearly perfect stranger about my best friend.

“I don’t think Dizzy and I are seeing each other anymore,” he said, solving my dilemma.

“You okay?” I said after a pause.

“He says he’s moving to Portland. Didn’t even bring up what that means for us. Not that we’ve been together long, but he didn’t even make it sound like he wanted to try to keep things going. That was last week, and I haven’t heard from him since. So I guess that’s that.”

I was dressed enough to come around the barrier and find Dae-Jung in his squire’s garb, learning back against the wall and trying not to care about getting dumped.

“That happened to me not too long ago,” I said. “Only I’d been with the guy a couple of years.”

“What did you do next?” he asked.

“Another guy came along.”

“And you’re with him now?” he asked, pulling away.

“Well, no.”

“You’re not very good at this, are you?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” I said.

Dae-Jung stood and hugged me. “Dizzy’s kind of an ass, isn’t he?”

“There are times,” I said.

He took a step back and looked me over, then helped me with the belt that wrapped around my waist and hung down the side. My dress was a deep green with a scoop neckline, not so very different from the one the heroine wore on the cover of
The Defiant
. I brushed my hair back and pulled the white cotton veil over the crown of my head and fastened it with the silver circlet. And though the train was a little awkward and the circlet had a habit of wandering, I had to admit that I got a kick out of dressing like a Renaissance lady for an evening. There was something about putting on that dress, ornate and splendid, that reminded me how pretty I could feel. As I looked at myself in the murky restroom mirror, an idea came to me. I handed Dae-Jung my phone.

“Take a picture of me,” I said. “I’m going to put it on Facebook and horrify my mother.”

When we got back to the tent, Jason was there waiting for us in full costume and holding a lute, looking every inch the Renaissance troubadour. We all walked together to the ceremony as everyone except Hugo and me sang a saucy drinking song they all knew the lyrics to. The ceremony was everything you’d imagine from a group of people who spend every nonworking hour designing armor and embroidering dresses. The pomp and circumstance made a British royal wedding seem like a small cozy affair. And there Jason was, in front of everyone, bowing before his king, accepting his praise, without saying a word. I did not know exactly what world this was, the one with a silent and respectful Jason, but I knew I liked it.

On the way back to our camp, we stopped at a prancing bonfire to watch a dance filled with swooping bows and some of the most shameless displays of flirtation I’ve ever seen, even including those I’d encountered in my native South. And in the middle of all this was Nimue, dancing with her new king, playing the coy maid. Sasha and I stuck our fingers down our throats in mutual disgust.

Hugo and I found a log to sit on to watch. A friar handed us two tankards of hard pear cider. The air was rich with patchouli oil, henna, and burning oak. Four minstrels started a jig and the dancers dropped their stately poses to jump about and swing one another round and round in gleeful abandon. I threaded my arm through Hugo’s and leaned on his shoulder, letting myself sink into the strangeness and wonder of it all.

“What a bunch of geeks,” I said. “And they buy so many books. God love every one of them.”

“You’re a geek, too, Maggie,” he said.

“Not like this. This is commitment. This is telling the world to go fuck off and leave you alone. It’s great.”

I felt Hugo’s head lean on top of mine and we sat in the silence of things unsaid. The musicians took a break, and more ale appeared. Someone passed around smoked meats and dates. Hugo and I sat up to eat. And after we drained our mugs, I felt his hand on my arm. When I turned, he was looking at the ground, and I could see he was pulling in his thoughts like a net of fish. For a whisper of a moment, I thought he knew all about Avi’s offer. I thought all of my indecision would be over. Hugo would understand. He would either give me his blessing to go or tell me why I should stay. I sat and waited, my heartbeats pushing through the numbness of the ale.

“The Dragonfly is losing its lease,” he said. “I don’t think I can start over again somewhere else. Not at this point in my life.”

It was the first time I’d ever thought of Hugo as old. His eyes crinkled as he looked at me with heartache and grief.

“I thought I could fix it,” he said. “But the building is being sold. They’re putting in a Cheesecake Factory. It’ll be like someone plunked down a Vegas casino in Mayberry.”

My stomach quivered as his words sank into me, and all I could think of was how to take this off his shoulders.

“We should close the store,” I said.

“You and Jason could start over. I’d give you my part of the store.”

“I have a job offer,” I said before I even knew the words were there.

He smiled, his eyes glistening, and held my hands in his. He hadn’t known, but he gave me my answer anyway, and I watched him sink into the relief of someone who had his decisions made for him. My eye caught Jason on the other side of the fire, laughing and looking at Nimue to share the joke, only to find her staring off elsewhere. My thoughts jumped ahead to see a hollowed-out Dragonfly with boxes piled high and dark shapes on the carpet where the shelves had been. I began to feel the full loss of everything. We sat like that for a time, Hugo and I, among so many who loved the Dragonfly, alone and safe in our knowledge of its demise. Our customers would be fine. Years from now, they would still talk about the Dragonfly, and about Hugo, Jason, and maybe even me. But there’s no shortage of places to buy books. They’d all move on. And the Dragonfly would just be one of those places like their favorite bar in college or the long-ago disappeared taqueria that used to serve those great waffles.

“I wanted more for you and Jason,” Hugo said. “I wanted the Dragonfly to be more.”

“We all wanted a great many things,” I said, and leaned against him again, feeling his arm around me.

“Go find your inner geek, Maggie,” he said. “And don’t settle for anyone who doesn’t love you for it.”

My father was not a bad man. There was always food on the table and clothes on my back. I had a great education and paid for none of it myself. I wanted for nothing, except for moments like this.

Hugo and I sat like that for a while until he decided to turn in. I walked to our camp with him, and we spent another few quiet moments swaddled in our decisions. After saying good night, I wandered around the campfires that were still ablaze, fueled by laughter and loud boasts. I wasn’t thinking of the Dragonfly or Apollo or Hugo. I wanted to think of Jason and what a Dragonfly-less life would be for him, but there was just no room left in my brain. My heart hurt and my thoughts were tired. I just wanted to wander until all I could do was sleep.

Then, through the music and all the drunken whooping, I heard it. A laugh. Dizzy’s laugh.

I admit my first instinct was to hide. I had a stabbing awareness of how I was dressed. I’d completely forgotten about my costume until this moment, but I didn’t want Dizzy to see me in it. Things were bad enough between the two of us. I couldn’t imagine the grief that waited ahead of me. Then I remembered that the reason I felt so comfortable was that everyone else was dressed like me. That means Dizzy was dressed like me. Well, not in a dress. Hopefully. Whatever awkwardness I felt was trumped by my curiosity about what Dizzy was wearing.

I followed the sound of his laughter through the camp until I spotted him, sitting in a group around a fire, in WWII olive greens, helmet and rifle in his lap, toasting with a pewter tankard. I can’t imagine what I must have looked like, in my costume, walking out of the darkness and into the light of the campfire, some sort of Shakespearean specter come to haunt him. But when he saw me, he dropped his rifle and fell backward off the log he was sitting on. The two young knights sitting on either side of him laughed and swung their tankards in the air while they pulled him upright on the log with an aplomb that made me think they’d righted many people on logs before.

Sitting upright again, he dropped his head away from me, trying to block his face from my view. I circled around his group and by the time he was prairie-dogging in his seat to look for where I’d gone, I was standing right behind him. In a gesture that had, over the years, become as automatic as brushing my teeth, I swiped the cap off his head and swatted him with it.

Through the wild laughter around us, Dizzy slowly turned his head and looked up at me. I motioned for him to follow me.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

He shrugged. “First time. Dae-Jung thought I might like it. He knew a guy.”

“He’s here, you know,” I said.

He pretended he didn’t hear me.

I motioned to a log and we sat, looking down on the camp. He took out his flask from his back pocket and handed it to me before he took a sip. Dizzy could be a dickwad, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a gentleman. I took it and drank. Thank goodness it was bourbon and not wine.

“You posted on Facebook that you were in Portland,” I said.

He dug the butt of his rifle into the ground near his feet.

“I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing this weekend.”

“The Dragonfly is closing,” I said.

It was like someone plugged him back in. He grinned and came as close as Dizzy could to bouncing.

“You’re coming to Portland. I knew it! You’re going to come to Portland. We are going to be fucking awesome! It’ll be just like it used to be.”

And that’s what made my decision for me. Not wisdom from Hugo or temptations from Avi or even my own decrepit bank account. Dizzy showed me what nothing else could, that I wasn’t the person I’d been at the beginning of the summer. I didn’t want to be fucking awesome. I wanted to matter. I shook my head and watched Dizzy deflate.

“You’re not going to take your dream job?” he asked.

I shook my head again.

“Then what the fuck are you going to do? You have another offer?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll open another bookstore. I’ve got the inventory.”

“I can’t believe you came all the way to California to own a shitty used bookstore,” he said.

“I came all the way to California to be with my best friend.”

I felt him look at me from the side, and that’s when it happened. The heartbeat that separated the time when Dizzy was my best friend from the time when he wasn’t. And it took the two of us dressing up like people we weren’t for me to see it. He would go to Portland and I would stay here. We’d text, we’d video chat, and I would love him forever. But we’d never be as we once were. None of the major events in my friendship with Dizzy had ever been sealed with words. We had never declared our friendship or our affection for each other. It was just there. It still was. Just not the same. This was our parting. We were swimming in different rivers now.