On the Rocks (18 page)

“Who are they from?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in God’s name would send a dozen live lobsters to someone’s beach rental?”

“It says from JF. I don’t know who that is, but I like JF.”

Well, I didn’t see that coming. “We’ll be right there,” I said before hanging up. I turned to Grace. “Your deranged boyfriend sent us a box of lobsters!” I squealed. I don’t really know what I expected him to do to show Grace that he was working toward ending his marriage and legitimizing their relationship, but I wasn’t expecting shellfish. I saw a smile creep onto her face. It’s amazing what makes girls happy.

“Aww, that’s sweet!” Grace said. “Where did Wolf put them?”

“Right now there are a dozen sea cockroaches crawling around our bathtub. That’s one of the most bizarre gestures I’ve ever heard of in my life!”

“It’s nice!” she continued, defending her boyfriend.

“I think it’s fantastic!” Bobby gushed. “I’ll date this dude if he’ll send me lobsters on a regular basis.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I sighed, not wanting to deflate Grace’s happiness. “I give him points for getting creative, that’s for sure. It’s been a long time since a guy bought me presents. Maybe this is what people are doing now. Remind me to pick up a copy of
In Style
later,” I added.

“Again, I’ll remember this. Jewelry is out, lobsters are in. That’s a gift worth giving.” Bobby laughed.

“Umm, Abby,” Grace said as she stood and picked up her towel, “I hate to bring this up, but considering that until recently you were having a freakin’ mental love affair with your ex via laptop, that’s not all that surprising. The only thing you get from that Arizona asshole is an increase in your Wi-Fi bill. First, let’s find you a good guy. The presents will follow.”

“Fair point,” I admitted.

We gathered up our bags, chairs, and the cooler still full of Coronas and reluctantly trudged our way across the scorching hot sand back to the parking lot. I wasn’t happy about leaving the beach ahead of schedule, but I was even less happy to leave Wolf and a dozen lobsters unsupervised in our house. As soon as we hit the parking lot Grace pulled her phone from her bag and began dialing.

“What are you doing?” Bobby asked Grace as we made our way back to the car.

“I’m calling him to say, ‘Thank you’! I want him to know how much I appreciate the gesture.”

“If I were you, I’d wait. Call him later or even tomorrow morning. Don’t chomp at the bit right away,” Bobby suggested.

“I think it’s a little late to start playing hard to get.”

“That makes no sense to me either,” I admitted, though I was curious as to why Bobby seemed to think that calling Johnny was a bad idea.

“I’m just saying that maybe let him sweat it out a little. That’s all. You do what you want, but the last thing you want him to think is that you’re some kind of shellfish slut,” Bobby said.

“A shellfish slut?” I asked.

“Yeah. You don’t want him to think that you’ll give it up for a box of lobsters, Grace. You’ve been waiting a long time for him to do right by you. It’s cool he sent you something, but you don’t want him to think lobsters are an alternative to leaving his wife. Why don’t you try holding the cards for once? That’s all I’m saying.”

“And women are supposed to be the ones who play games?” I asked.

“Maybe I’ve been hanging out with you guys too much. I need Wolf. I’m starting to think like a chick,” he admitted as we trudged through the parking lot.

“No, you’re right! I’m no lobster lush,” Grace replied, forcefully.

“You’re most certainly not. You’re better than that. At least hold out for a box of Omaha steaks or something,” Bobby suggested. I was beginning to see his motivation. He wanted to see what else JF would send us to eat.

“Or the wine of the month club,” I added. It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard.

“Now you’re talking,” Bobby said. “Is there such a thing as the bacon of the month club? Can you register for that?”

I wrapped my arm around Grace’s shoulder as we walked. “I’m really happy for you, Grace, but be careful. I know how hard this has been for you, and I know you’ve been through hell. I just think you need to tell him his time is up. He needs to leave his wife, or you’re going to walk.”

“That will be tricky since I work in the neighboring office.”

“I didn’t say that plan was perfect.”

We drove the five minutes back to the house, brushed sand off our feet at the bottom of the stairs, and walked upstairs to the deck. Wolf was sitting on a lounge chair with his mirrored sunglasses on, sipping a glass of wine and listening to European techno music on the speaker dock.

“So, umm, was there a card?” Grace asked Wolf as she approached him.

“Oh, he could have attached a really cool love note,” Bobby mused. “ ‘Roses are red, live lobsters are blue, come back to Boston, so I can bang you,’ ” he sang.

“That’s touching,” I said, smacking his bare shoulder with my magazine. “Move over, Shakespeare.”

“Not bad for an on-the-spot poem, huh?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah, there was a card. It’s over there,” Wolf said as he gestured to the table. “It said something like, ‘The best is yet to come, love JF.’ Who’s JF?”

“Her boyfriend,” I said, once again feeling funny calling him that when he was someone else’s husband.

“The one with the wife?” Wolf asked, surprised.

“The one with the soon-to-be-ex-wife,” Grace clarified with a smile. “He’s ready to divorce her, I know it.
I can feel it.
”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Bobby said. “This is what I’m talking about, Grace. It’s just a box of fish. It’s not divorce papers.”

“Must you rain on my parade?” Grace asked. “It’s going to happen,” she said.

“I don’t care if he has three other wives, please don’t ever break up with the lobster guy, okay? I like him!” Wolf exclaimed.

“You never met him,” I pointed out.

“I met his lobsters and I like them,” Wolf said. “Here, come see!” Wolf was so excited, you’d have thought someone had just air-dropped forty pounds of schnitzel from the motherland onto our deck and not a few lobsters that had probably been dredged out of the Atlantic a few miles away. Funny what gets guys going.

We followed him into the house and made our way to the hallway bathroom. Bobby pushed in from behind, basically knocking me into the wall as he made his way into the center of the room. You’d think he’d never seen live lobsters before. In a tub. In our house.

“Here they are!” Wolf said proudly as he slid the clear plastic shower curtain over to reveal a dozen ugly blue lobsters crawling all over each other. Thankfully, giant rubber bands were clamping their humungous claws shut. “I named them. See, this one is Snappy, this one is Claw, that’s Fang, and the little one over there I call Travis.” Grace and I stared, trying to process what we were looking at and wondering if any of us could ever bring ourselves to step foot in that shower again. It was like Red Lobster was using our bathroom to store its inventory. I had a flashback to the fish store my mom used to take me to when I was little. I used to look at those disgusting lobsters in the tank—lying all over each other, wiry antennae and claws and tails intertwined as if they were having some sick and twisted lobster orgy in a glass case for all the world to see.

How anyone figured out that these disgusting-looking things actually tasted good I will never understand.

“Why would you name them?” I asked.

“I thought we should try to get to know them before I throw them in boiling water and eat their tails with garlic butter. Back in Germany, we had a farm with chickens. I used to name them when I was little. So, I figured, why not name the lobsters too?”

We shrugged. Trying to explain to Wolf that naming animals you were going to eat a few hours later was creepy seemed as futile as trying to explain what it meant to shoot fish in a barrel.

“I think I’m going to go up to the store right now and get some butter for them and, what do you think, some corn?”

“This is going to be awesome,” Bobby said as he reached into the tub and grabbed a lobster, holding it up to his face as if he wanted to meet it before he ate it.

“I’m so happy, I’m in heaven number seven,” Wolf said as he smiled wide.

“You mean seventh heaven?” Grace asked as she stifled a giggle.

“How does anyone speak your language?” he asked. He shook his head as he shuffled out of the bathroom, grabbed his car keys, and headed into town, leaving us alone to stare at the lobsters crawling around our porcelain tub.

F
OUR HOURS LATER WE SAT
at the table on our deck with bottles of wine, citronella candles, paper plates, rolls of paper towels, bowls of garlic butter, and lobsters with claws the size of Rhode Island splayed out all over the place. For most people, lobsters are a high-priced luxury item: leave it to us to trash them up by not even using napkins or real silverware to eat them.

The boys had thoroughly enjoyed making dinner. Wolf took control of the cooking process, his European sense of refinement clearly making him the most qualified guy for the job. As he dropped lobsters into the enormous pot of boiling water, Bobby stood at his side making the screeching noise from
Psycho
and pretending to stab the crustaceans to death before Wolf closed the lid on them. Bobby then went outside and leaned against the railing, smoking cigarettes and barking orders from the deck. “Turn up the flame, use the other burner, only cook two lobsters at a time.” Grace and I sat outside and listened to music, wanting no part in the great lobster massacre. Now that it was time to eat I stared down at my plate and felt strange for two reasons: one, I hated to somehow benefit from Johnny’s psychological warfare against my best friend; and two, I was pretty sure I was about to eat a lobster named Snappy.

Wolf raised his red Solo cup to toast. “To Gracie, and her awesome boyfriend who sent us these lobsters. I like this guy. I think you should be keeping him.” Apparently, the way to a man’s heart really is through his stomach.

Bobby leaned over to talk to Grace and me at the end of the table. “You know, if you guys ever do get married, you can register for those little lobster forks,” he laughed. “We could use some of those right about now.”

“I promise you, if I ever get to register, I’ll throw some lobster forks on there and give them to you for Christmas,” Grace said.

“Awesome,” he replied as he attacked the tail, squirting lobster juice all over me.

I playfully tossed a wadded-up paper towel at Bobby and said a silent apology to Snappy—before ripping his giant right claw off his body with my bare hands.

Chapter 12

Beware of Guys Who Say You Look Like a Celebrity . . . They’re Either Lying or Have Cataracts

T
HE FOLLOWING
W
EDNESDAY
I went into work and discovered that it was going to be a painfully slow day. Thankfully, late in the afternoon Lara appeared, and I ran down the street to get us iced coffees in the hopes of making the afternoon pass a little faster.

I liked talking to Lara because she was a fantastic listener. I was beginning to find it slightly odd, though, that she never talked about her husband or her own personal life. I considered her a friend, but I really didn’t know the first thing about her, which, when I thought about it, was kind of a strange position to be in. Anyway, I wasn’t letting it bother me. June was quickly approaching its end, and the beginning of July didn’t mean only the height of the summer and an increase in temperature were approaching—it also meant Katie’s wedding was just a month away. I needed to talk to someone about how I was feeling, and I felt like I had exhausted Grace so much over the last few months I couldn’t ask her to listen to me complain about anything else. Lara, on the other hand, was always asking how I was doing, what was new, and what I was up to, so I didn’t feel like I was bugging her by telling her what was on my mind.

The bell over the door rang when I reentered the store, and I found Lara sitting exactly where I had left her, behind the register staring into space. I handed her the iced coffee, tucked my purse away in the closet in the back, and then sat next to her. Lara’s thin blue dress was probably a size 0 but was still too big for her, and she looked tired. Way too tired for someone her age who was living at the beach and got off work every day at 6:00
P.M.

“I’m dreading this wedding,” I admitted as we sat behind the register drinking coffee and waiting for customers. “I feel awful about it, I mean she’s my only sister. I should be thrilled to see her this happy, but the thought of having to go to her wedding makes me want to stick my head in the oven. What kind of person does that make me?”

“It makes you normal. You had a bad breakup, everyone struggles with some irrational emotions after they go through something traumatizing, and a wedding is the complete opposite of that. It’s not strange that you’d be conflicted over it.”

“Maybe it’s normal, I don’t know. I think what kills me is that now that she’s on such bridal autopilot she’s acting like nothing happened to me, like everything is just fine. I don’t think she appreciates how hard it is for me to have had my engagement canceled and then have to jump into being her maid of honor. It’s such a mind-fuck. She doesn’t get it.”

Lara stared at me, stunned, and then tried to busy herself with the previous day’s receipts to make the moment less awkward. I hadn’t meant to tell her, I really hadn’t. It just slipped out. Katie’s wedding made it impossible for me to think about anything else.

“I didn’t realize you were engaged, Abby. I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah,” I said as I tried to pretend it was no big deal. “It was a while ago, and I’m doing much better now, but all this dating stuff is hard. And apparently I suck at it.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. I hated dating and wanted so badly to be off the singles circuit, and I was only in my twenties. I’m sure it’s been frustrating for you to have to get back out there,” Lara said in a tone so laced with sympathy it was hard for me to hear it. She was right, though. Accepting what had happened meant being able to attend other people’s weddings and not want to go cry in a corner somewhere. Life goes on.