On the Rocks (33 page)

Bobby popped a beer and collapsed on the couch in the same place where Lara had been sitting before she ran out of there like Grace and I were chairwomen of the “Destroy the First Wives” Club.

“So what did we miss?”

Chapter 21

Holy Rollers Sit to the Right

I
WOKE UP
the next morning and knew that even though I wasn’t scheduled to work, I needed to talk to Lara. I hesitated as I entered the store. Lara was behind the register, flipping through receipts. The argument had gotten so heated so quickly the day before that I wasn’t even sure what happened, and I had no idea what to expect when I showed up at the store unannounced. I didn’t know if we were still friends, or even if I still had a job. I couldn’t blame her for being angry at Grace, or at her husband, or at life in general, but being mad at me seemed like a bit of a stretch. I mean, I considered it a victory if I talked to a guy in a bar. It was a very long leap from that to adultery.

“How’s it going?” I asked as I faced her across the counter, tracing a groove in the counter surface with my finger. There were boxes of cheese plates and ceramic lobster pitchers stacked on the floor next to her. I picked up one of the boxes and began to remove the contents, figuring that if I could be productive she’d be less likely to fire me for being friends with the enemy.

“I’ve been better,” she said flatly, still staring at the receipts, though not seeming to read them. She was apparently deep in thought. Most likely bad ones.

“Sorry, Lara. I didn’t know anything about what happened to you, and it’s none of my business. I don’t want to pry, but if you want to talk about anything, I’m here to listen.”

“It’s stupid,” she said, finally peeling her gaze from the small stack of paper in front of her and taking a sip from a bottle of iced tea.

“I doubt that. Getting divorced isn’t a small thing. Getting divorced for these reasons has got to be awful.”

She stared down at her hand as she drummed her fingers on the counter, and I realized that her left hand was naked. She rubbed her ring finger, now twisting an invisible band, an act I’m sure she had done millions of times over the last few years, and you know what they say about bad habits dying hard. Like Bobby and his smoking, or Grace and Johnny, or me and too many things to list at the moment. She noticed me looking at her hand. She said, “After yesterday’s meltdown, I finally decided it was time to take them off. I put them in a drawer. Poetic, don’t you think? Those rings were supposed to symbolize the most important commitment I’d ever make in my life, and now they’re in a drawer next to my underwear.”

“I know how hard it was to remove my engagement ring, so I get it, at least a little bit. But I think it’s a big step. It’s not your fault that this happened, and for what it’s worth, I think you’re being really brave about moving on. A lot of women would have stuck around because they were too afraid to be alone and start over. You should feel good about that. I admire you.”

“He didn’t really leave me much choice. I should’ve taken my rings off the day I found out he was cheating on me.”

I thought back to when Ben had told me that he thought I’d be happy to know the reason for him leaving had nothing to do with another woman. I remembered thinking at the time that it somehow made things worse, that it hurt more knowing I was being left for no real reason at all. Now I realized it didn’t make a difference. Being left behind sucks no matter the reason, although I’d bet knowing it was for your husband’s secretary packs a pretty bitter punch.

“I had no idea your husband cheated on you. If I’d known, I would’ve done something differently. I don’t know what, but something. I’m sorry that whole argument happened.”

“I’m sorry too. I know I went a little crazy. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”

“It’s okay, I think you’ve earned the right to yell a little bit. How’d you find out? Did he tell you?”

“Oh, hell no. He would have continued cheating on me forever if he could. I found a picture she sent him on his phone. She was wearing a leopard bra and nothing else. Not exactly what I thought I’d find when I went to download photos from his birthday party.”

“Then it’s better you found out when you did.”

“He actually blamed
me.
He said I wasn’t fun anymore, that I never wanted to do anything, that I wasn’t as
social
as I used to be. Well, forgive me! Living in a strange city with a husband who travels all the time tends to mess with one’s social calendar. I should’ve seen it coming the second he started wearing cologne.”

“I’m sorry, Lara. I really am.”

“What did you do with your engagement ring?” she asked. “Is yours in your underwear drawer too?” Maybe she was wondering if there was some kind of protocol we jilted girls were supposed to follow regarding rings that had been rendered useless.

“I weaponized it.” That was probably not the answer she was expecting.

“What?” she asked, cracking an almost imperceptible smile.

“I threw it at him. Last I saw it, it was on the floor under a table. I shouldn’t have done that, in retrospect. I should have sold it for the cash.”

“I’m not even strong enough to do that,” she said with a shrug. “It feels strange not wearing them, like I just went back in time or something. I’m officially not taken.”

“You’ve been officially not taken since the day you found pictures of another girl in a leopard bra in his phone. The rings are just stupid metal and stones. They don’t mean anything.”

“Yeah, stupid, beautiful, D color, high-quality diamonds set in platinum that I will never wear again. I just can’t believe this is how it ended. When he proposed, I thought he worshiped me. Everything was perfect. I thought things would stay that way forever.”

“Funny, my first clue that something wasn’t right was the way Ben proposed.”

“What do you mean? How did he screw up your proposal?” she asked.

“Well, it’s not that he screwed it up so much as he didn’t do it in a way that I would’ve really expected. It was so . . . not me. I mean, come on, how much thought goes into hiding a ring in a soufflé at a fancy restaurant? It just wasn’t me.”

“That’s awkward, especially if you don’t really like attention.”

“I don’t! Even worse, I detest soufflés.”

Lara laughed so hard that tea came out her nose. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh.”

“Nah, it’s okay. So I should’ve known something was off. But you choose to ignore a multitude of sins when someone’s about to slip a ring on your finger. Even if you do have to brush chocolate sludge off it before you can actually put it on.”

“Makes one hell of a story, though.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a lot of stories, that’s for sure. You know what I think is crazy?”

“Trusting that my husband was actually working late with his twenty-two-year-old assistant while I was home ironing his shirts?”

“Okay, maybe in retrospect you could have used that iron to burn every shirt he owned to cinders, but no, that’s not what I was going to say.”

“What then?” she asked, turning her glassy, dazed eyes to look at me.

“That you can know the entire pedigree of a ring you wear, and yet know nothing about the guy giving it to you. If you ask me, guys should come with authenticity papers, like diamonds.”

“Interesting idea,” Lara said. “If my husband was as high-quality as my ring, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Think of all the stress you could’ve saved yourself if you’d known that. VS1: very screwed up. VVS1, very very screwed up. If the guy gets a grade of A to C, you know he’s a guy you want. D to F is acceptable, but not without concerns, and anything below F is run for your life before he rips you apart like the sales rack at Saks. I think this is genius.”

“You’re funny. Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff? You know a lot for someone with limited dating experience.”

“Trying to understand the inner workings of my brain is an exercise in futility. That said, I’ve always been mature for my age. Maybe that’s the problem. It would explain why I hit spinsterhood at the ripe old age of thirty-one.”

She chuckled, just a little. I was proud. I felt like if I managed to make her laugh for even just one second while she was going through this mess, that was something. I realized that while my own near-marriage collapse wasn’t exactly pleasant, it was nowhere near as bad as this.

“Well, I think you’re great. You don’t have any baggage, you’re funny, you’re a nice person, and even you can’t find a guy to be normal to you. I mean, your last date lit your check on fire. Maybe there aren’t any normal ones out there.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if my social experiment was any indication, then no, there definitely weren’t.

“Yes, there are. You’ll meet someone, I’m sure of it.”

“I’ve been listening to you tell me about your dating stories, and I’m worse off than you are. I haven’t dated in over fifteen years. I don’t even know how to do it at this point. Things have changed a lot. Like what the hell is speed dating? I heard some southern belles talking about it in Atlanta, and I thought it sounded awful. Have you ever tried that?”

“If you count talking to a guy for three minutes before I decided that he was a complete and utter loser as a speed date, then yeah, thousands of them.”

“I’m serious Abby,” she said as she grabbed my hand from across the counter. “I don’t know the first thing about anything. I’m not ready for all of this.”

“Lara, you only removed your wedding rings a few hours ago. I don’t think you need to be ready for speed dating, online dating, or dating of any kind. But you aren’t out of the game entirely. When the time is right for you to reenter the murky, diseased waters of the dating pool, you’ll know. Though I strongly advise against speed dating or giving anyone your phone number who compares your looks to that of a celebrity. Trust me on that one.”

I squeezed her hand quickly when the bell over the door rang, and a customer entered the store. I recognized him instantly, even though he was now wearing board shorts and a backward baseball cap, but it was definitely Tom Marsh, holding a plastic bag from the convenience store across the street.

“Hey, Abby!” Tom said as he kissed me on the cheek hello. “I was hoping I’d find you here.”

He was still so very cute, but I was a little unsure as to why he was looking for me. I had just given him my phone number. He knew how to get ahold of me. Unless, of course, he had programmed me in his phone under a memory device and couldn’t remember which one I was. If there was one thing I’d learned it was that sometimes Bobby actually knew what he was talking about.

“Hey. How was the rest of your weekend?” I caught Lara looking at us out of the corner of her eye while pretending to be busy behind the register.

“It was good, but it got a little crazy, and I lost my phone.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I went through a phase where I lost three phones in as many months. There’s nothing worse.”

“Well, it’s not so much lost as destroyed. My buddies and I were on a boat yesterday, and I ended up getting thrown overboard with it still in my pocket. It’s toast.”

“Boating hazard, I guess.”

“Which is exactly why I was never big into fishing.”

“Though the sign you bought would suggest otherwise.”

He laughed and glanced at an I’
D RATHER BE FISHING
sign on display, a mate to the sign he had bought when he was trying, and failing, to work up the nerve to talk to me. “Exactly. Anyway, I obviously don’t have your number anymore, and the end of summer can get a little crazy, so I wanted to come by and see if I could convince you to give it to me again. I’ve decided no more water sports for the rest of this summer, so I should be able to hold on to it.”

I was just about to give him my number for the second time in three days when I had a thought. “You know what? Why don’t you give me yours?
I’ll
call
you.
” It was time I took some of the power back. I didn’t have to sit around and wait for people to reach out to me. If I wanted to talk to someone, I could just as easily call them.

“Okay, sure. I’d like that,” he said, seemingly intrigued by my suggestion.

I pulled out my phone and stored his number under his real name. I may have understood the male of the species a little better by the end of the summer in Newport, but that didn’t mean I wanted to play their games.

“Great. So, I’ll call you,” I said. “And thanks for coming by to tell me you lost your phone. I’m glad you did.”

“Me too. I’ll let you get back to work, but hopefully we can catch up soon.”

I waved good-bye as he left, and I felt so empowered I had to resist the urge to jump on the counter and start singing “I Am Woman.”

“He’s cute!” Lara said after he had passed the store window and was out of sight. “Like super-cute!”

“He is, yeah. And now I have his number, so whether or not I see him is entirely up to me.”

“Well, they say things happen when you least expect it, and I sincerely doubt you were expecting that!”

The truth was, with the craziness of the last two days, I had forgotten about meeting Tom, so no, I definitely wasn’t expecting that. But I was definitely happy it happened.

“Not at all, so we’ll see what happens. Anyway, are you going to be okay?” I asked, getting back to the conversation that had been interrupted when Tom came in.

“I think so, yeah. I owe Grace an apology, though. I’m so embarrassed at how I acted.”

“It was awkward for both of you. I’m sure she’ll understand.” Although I had no idea if Grace would understand. Grace could be brutally stubborn sometimes, especially where Johnny was concerned, but Lara didn’t need to know that right now. “We’re going to be at the beach later for happy hour. Why don’t you come meet us after you close the store? We’ll be there until 7:00 at least. It’s nice to be down there for the sunset.”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’d say, and I don’t really feel like being social.”