Out to Lunch (7 page)

“Yeah. You’re probably right.”

We finish our burgers, and Wayne heads for the bathroom. I wave for the check when a voice at my elbow startles me. “Well, hello there.”

I look up. Lawyer Brian of the Chin. Looking casual in dark jeans and a Chicago Bears logo thermal shirt under a worn brown leather jacket. Five-o’clock shadow on his chiseled mug. Yowza.

“Hi, Brian, how are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m well, I was having a quick bite with a buddy, but his kid has the flu, so he just left, and I saw you here.”

“Small world. I’m having dinner with Wayne.”

“How is that for you?” A smile plays around the corner of his mouth.

“Awkward. But okay.”

Brian winks at me. Or he has something in his eye. Hard to tell. “Well, good,” he says, still smiling.

“And how are you?” This man sort of makes me generically stupid.

“I’m pretty good. Things at work are cranking along. Everyone gearing up for the impending holiday season.”

“I would think that your business would be slower around the holidays?”

“It is, but as a result these last weeks before the holidays are a little insane. But you must love this time of year!”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I assume that for years you’d have spent all this time doing everyone else’s holiday parties and making their holidays special and important, and now you can just focus on your own.”

This is very astute, and thoughtful, and makes me feel a little warm. “True enough.” Most people forget that when you are a caterer and event planner, the holidays are awful. Office parties, Christmas fetes, New Year’s galas. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, and Aimee and I always laughed about the fact that we always showed up to Thanksgivings and Christmases exhausted and brain-dead and never actually hosted our own.

“BRIAN!!! Dude? What are you doing here?” Wayne has returned. He claps Brian on the back with such force that the beer Brian is holding showers me from head to toe.

“Ooops. Sorry Jenny!” Wayne leans forward, but Brian stops him, takes a napkin from the table, and gently wipes my face.

“Sorry about that, we lawyers are notoriously unbalanced, the slightest wind will knock us over.” He looks in my eyes in a way that says that he has some opinions of Wayne that aren’t dissimilar to mine.

“Good lord,” Wayne says. “I’m a disaster, and that isn’t even the first time tonight.” Nor probably the last, I think. “Hey, Jenny made some amazing dessert back at her place, it’s not far, you should come have some with us!”

Yeah. And perhaps I should book a ticket on the
SS Titanic
. Luckily for me, Brian is way too professional to accept that invite.

“Sounds great, if you have enough . . .” Brian says. Crapalicious.

“There’s ALWAYS enough when Jenny’s cooking.” Wayne is effusive. I hate that it makes me sound like I make huge amounts of food, since Brian knows I live alone and can certainly see the current magnitude of my ass.

“Well, if you’re sure.” Brian looks over at me.

What can I do? At least he’ll be a good Wayne buffer. “Of course. The more the merrier.”

“Great! Let’s go!” Wayne shepherds us out of the bar and into the brisk evening air.

6

T
he snoring is different. Volnay is often a little bit snuffly when she sleeps, which, I admit spinsterly, is on the second pillow on my king-sized bed, but it sounds weird, somehow harmonic. I roll over to give her a nudge and my arm stops midway.

That is not Volnay.

That is Handsome Lawyer Brian. Rattling with his mouth open and an arm thrown over his head. Volnay, to her credit, is keeping time tunefully, nestled in the crook of that same arm.

The night floods back so fast, my head spins. Brian coming back to my house with Wayne and me, breaking out a bottle of port, decimating the tarts, making meaningful eye contact every time Wayne said something stupid or geeky. Wayne leaving and Brian refilling our glasses. My liquor-loosened tongue giving voice to every Half-Brain Wayne story I can remember, to keep Brian laughing. Thinking that I had never heard him laugh, and wanted to listen to it on endless loop and make it my ringtone.

And then the kissing and the hands in my hair and the dizzying rush of blood to tingly girl parts long unattended. The brazen way I took his hand and took him to bed, relieved that there were still condoms in the nightstand; dusty, but not expired. It would have been, by anyone else’s standards, perfectly acceptable sex. Nothing overly acrobatic, no particularly special skills on his part. He has a nice body, not amazing; well-cut suits hide the fact that while his shoulders are broad and hips slim, long hours behind a desk have made him somewhat doughy and undefined. Absolutely average in the package department, nothing weird, nothing notable. A very good kisser, which is always nice.

But you know the old saying, hunger is the best sauce; and I was a very hungry girl. So while back in the day when I actually had sex on a reasonably regular basis it would have been considered a good start but not fireworks, last night it rocked my world. Twice.

I look up at the time, which my bedside clock conveniently projects on the ceiling in a pale blue light. 5:47. I peek over at Handsome Lawyer Brian. He is out for the count.

“Nice work! That’s the ho I know and love. And good for you. Mazel tov!”

Great. Aimee approves. I notice she didn’t pipe in when I was Wayne bashing for the better part of an hour as part of my seduction.

I slowly begin to slide sideways away from Brian, slipping through sheets and blankets that are tangled and akimbo. I get a leg out, flailing it a little in the brisk air before letting its weight pull me down and I slide out of the bed, landing in a soft lump on the rug. I hold my breath and listen. Brian’s snoring is steady. Whew.

I thank God for my architect, who conveniently put the bathroom across the hall from the bedroom instead of directly connected, and gave it, at my request, a fairly soundproof door. I crab-walk naked out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, shutting the door with a barely audible click. I turn on the light and see the hot mess that is me.

My hair is matted on one side of my head, turning me into a startled cockatoo, and it reeks of old beer. I have whiskerburn on my chin, making me look like I dipped the bottom half of my face in cherry Kool-Aid. My mascara has migrated southerly, effectively rendering me half raccoon, and my eyes are pink with lack of sleep and contacts left in, and a little too much booze. There are sheet wrinkle marks on my cheek and chest. My breath, based on how my tongue feels, must be somewhere between dead warthog and sweat sock dipped in blue cheese. I brush my teeth, even using the stupid tongue scraper Jack insisted I buy “for my oral health.” I grab one of my MAC makeup remover cloths and get my face clean. A little bit of tinted moisturizer tames some of the violent pink on my chin, and a brush returns my hair to mostly normal; some dry shampoo spray tempers the beer scent. Well, now it is like beer and citrus, but it is all I can do. My cheek still looks like a topographical map of Indonesia, but I’m forty-two; my skin is just not as elastic as it used to be, there isn’t much to be done. I pee for about seven minutes, sure that Brian is waking up in the other room, gathering clothes, and sneaking out, and I’m not so sure that isn’t a hope and not a worry on my part. Would it be so awful if he just skedaddled? I turn the light back out, and open the door slowly. I listen. Still snoring. Thank goodness.

I tiptoe back into the bedroom, and Volnay raises her head. I shrug, and I swear she raises one eyebrow at me before letting her head return to its place nestled in the crook of Brian’s arm.

“Stop staring at me and come back to bed,” Brian says without opening his eyes. Busted.

“Don’t give yourself that much credit, I was looking at the dog.”

“She smells sort of like graham crackers, did you know that?”

“I’m aware.” I climb back into the bed, and Brian, eyes still closed, throws his other arm open for me to snuggle into. Boy, I wish he had just snuck out. I’m not good at this part. I don’t want the closeness; I don’t want to be held. I needed sex, not tenderness, and usually guys are just phoning in this part anyway. But it is a dance as old as time, and at least I know my part. I lay down with my head on Brian’s chest, and feel his arm settle around me, hand resting on my hip. He leans down and kisses the top of my head.

“I may have to pass you on to a colleague for your future legal issues,” he murmurs into my hair.

“Why is that?”

“It is going to be ethically ambiguous for me to keep you as a client.”

“Just because we slept together?” Oh lord.

“No,” he says, reaching around and putting a finger under my chin, lifting my head to meet his eyes in the early morning blue light. “Because I intend for us to keep sleeping together. And doing other things together.” He leans down and kisses me, and while my head is giving me a million reasons that I should not start actually dating anyone, especially Brian, the rest of me buzzes so loud that I can barely hear my own objections.

* * *

Y
ou slept with The Chin?!” Andrea says, handing me her plate.

When I finally woke up after Brian left, I needed to dish. In the past this would have meant calling Aimee. And this morning, in my postcoital haze, I blindly reached for the phone and pressed number one on my speed dial, and the message hit me like a punch in the stomach.

“Hello, darling, whoever you are. This is Aimee from beyond the grave. If you are a loved one, know that I adore you and miss you. If you didn’t know I had passed on, I’m sorry for the shock. If you have a business matter, please call my attorney Brian Casswood at 312-555-1755. And if you are a telemarketer, know that in my time here in heaven I have not met ONE person who was a telemarketer in life; so get out before you doom yourself to the fires below for eternity. Cheers!”

It took me five minutes to stop giggling, and then ten to stop sobbing, all the time Volnay stomping around my head on the pillow trying to lick my tears and make me okay. And when I finally got my emotions in check, I picked up the phone again and pressed number two on the speed dial and told Andrea to come over for breakfast on her way to the Library.

“Yep,” I say, cutting a large slice of the Dutch Baby pancake and sliding it onto her plate along with two pieces of thick-sliced bacon. Then I serve myself, the fluffy pancake, doused in butter and lemon and confectioners’ sugar, the bacon perfectly crispy and salty.

“What happened? ’Cause that is some full-service lawyering; I’m clearly with the wrong firm. Damn this thing is delicious,” she says in a rush, forking a large piece of pancake into her mouth and rolling her eyes.

“I know, right?” I take a small bite, letting the flavors mingle, the light pancake, the tart lemon, the sweet sugar. Perfection. “So you know last night Wayne was coming over for dinner.”

“Yeah, how was that?”

“He broke a wineglass all over my mise.”

“Not really.”

“Really.”

“You were doing the cider pork chops?”

“Yup.”

“Tragic. So then you had to go out?”

“Orbit Room for the burger king.”

She takes a large bite of bacon. “Wayne and his food bullshit.”

“Exactly. So we eat, and all of a sudden Brian was there, and Wayne invited him back here for dessert . . .”

“And he thought he’d have you, you little pastry, you.”

“Sort of! I’m an insane person. Right? I’ve lost the plot. Only an insane person would have random sex with their attorney. It’s a problem, isn’t it? Are you going to have to commit me for my ridiculous insanity?”

“Um, you wanna put some of that pancake in your face so that noise stops coming out of it? First of all, the day ANY single woman DOESN’T have sex with a single man THAT good-looking the moment he asks her, I don’t care if he is her lawyer or her freaking PRIEST, that is the day the world stops turning. You are a grown-ass woman, and you are single, and he is single, and there is not a damn thing wrong with it. Unless it was bad. Was it bad? It was bad, wasn’t it? Please tell me it wasn’t bad. Is he really small? Teeny weenie? Cocktail frank? Hooks to the left?”

I nearly spit my coffee at her I’m laughing so hard. “Relax. He was fine. Perfectly adequate in every way. And while he wasn’t a frankwurst, he was a solid five to the pound.” Andrea always uses Vienna Beef hot dog designations to stand in for penises. Aimee and I adopted it immediately. Thank god they have every size in their arsenal, from the cocktail frank up to the full-pound Homewrecker.

“That is enough real estate for anyone.” Andrea nods. “So what? Why are you all crazy pants? Give me more of that pancake.” She waves her plate at me.

“Okay, here’s the thing. He’s my LAWYER. If I’d met him randomly, one-night stand, hookup after a party, whatever. I’m a big girl. But he works for me. I pay him. A LOT. And he knows all my personal financial business and stuff, and it’s sort of like, why now? You know? I mean, look at him, he could have ANYONE. And he has never once in five years ever expressed the least bit of interest. So it just seems weird, like, does he think I’m vulnerable now because Aimee is gone and he can just . . . what?”

“I’m sorry, have you seen my friend Jenna, because I’m pretty sure she was around here somewhere.” She slips Volnay a small piece of bacon under the table, despite my raised eyebrow. “First of all, who the hell cares what HIS motives are. YOU are smart and not exactly a pushover. Does it matter if somehow he thinks he can make you his girlfriend and you’ll buy him shiny objects with all your millions? It only matters if you are suddenly feeling like you want to put him in your will or hand him the keys to his new birthday Bentley. I mean, are you really in the market for a boyfriend right now, or are you just getting a little TLC at a tough time?”

“No, I’m probably not really thinking about any sort of long-term relationship.”

“Then go on with your badass self! Hit it again! Sleep with that man until he bores you or it gets strange or he annoys you and then stop sleeping with him. If he gets weird, fire him and get a new lawyer; they are easy to come by in this town, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Seriously. Just . . .”

“Just don’t even think about it.”

“Wow. That never even occurred to me.”

“That’s why you have me.”

“And that’s why you get the last piece of bacon.”

“You know I’m eating that.”

“I know.”

“Jenna, in all seriousness, unless you don’t like him or didn’t like the sex or whatever, don’t freak about this. I think it’s a good thing.”

“You do?”

“I do. It’s not just that it’s been a few weeks since Aimee died, it’s been three years of stress and sadness and two years since Jack, and I know there hasn’t been anyone since him, and I just think it is time for your life to be about your life, because the last three years of your life have been about Aimee’s death.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No, honey, it really isn’t. But it’s true. Ever since the diagnosis it was about preventing Aimee’s death. And then the ultimate gift you gave her to try and make that happen lost you a fiancé. Granted, better to know he was that guy before you married him, but still a not insignificant loss, and one you didn’t have time to deal with because it was about Aimee’s recovery. And then her not recovery. And then the inevitable end. This is the first thing I have seen you do just for yourself in over three years, and I want you to revel in it and not question it and just have some damn fun.”

“Not that you’ve thought about it at all.”

“Nope. I love you, you know.”

“I know.”

“And Jen?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for calling me. You know you can do that anytime day or night, right?”

“I do.”

I walk her to the door and head back to the kitchen to clean up. And to eat the last piece of bacon that I held back in the oven for myself. Because a good hostess will always let her guest have the last piece of bacon on the platter.

But a smart hostess will make sure that there is another last piece that somehow doesn’t make it on the platter.

“You learned that from me.”

You bet your ass I did.