“The girl you’re trying to fix Chaz up with. Is that her?” I point to a pretty girl who has joined Chaz and Valencia over by the beer cooler they’re both sitting beside.
“Yeah,” Shari says, looking annoyed. “See how cute they look together? They’d be a perfect couple—if he hadn’t brought that ice bitch with him. And what’s Tiffany doing over there with them? She’s totally monopolizing the conversation, it looks like.”
I take an enormous bite of my ice cream. “I don’t know,” I say, my mouth too full to say more. Fortunately.
I don’t mention that Tiffany, in the car service her fiancé, Raoul, insisted we share on the way over, had sworn to me that she was going to keep Chaz from making a love connection with “that ho from Shari’s office, because he’s totally right for you. And, furthermore, I am going to split him and that orange-name lady up too.”
I didn’t bother reminding her for the millionth time that it doesn’t matter to me who Chaz dates because I’m actually engaged to someone else, because she’d just have brought up, as she usually does, that I’m “on a break,” and people who are happily engaged don’t tend to ask for one of those.
“Hey, so what’s up with Ave Geck?” Shari asks, distracting me from my gloomy thoughts. “Is she still mad at you for outing her to the press?”
I wince. The fallout from the Ava situation turned out to be worse than even I could have imagined. The Henris had not been too happy to see the front of their shop in photos plastered all over the press the morning after it was announced Ava Geck’s high-profile royal wedding had been canceled. I’d tried to convince them there was no such thing as bad press, but they hadn’t really gone for it. They couldn’t understand what Ava was doing spending the night in my apartment in the first place. Like Luke, they didn’t think an employee inviting a client to stay with her was particularly professional.
In retrospect, maybe they were right. But then, Ava had pretty much invited herself.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s not speaking to me. Which I can understand.”
“Well, she’s the only person I know who doesn’t want to be a member of Lizzie Nichols’s entourage these days.” Shari points at the small cluster of people gathered around Chaz’s pies—he’d brought both a strawberry rhubarb and a blueberry—running their fingers around the empty tins and then licking them, and then running them around the rims again. Tiffany’s fiancé, Raoul, and Monique and her fiancé, Latrell, have already handed out the bottles of champagne and boxes of sparklers they brought along with them, to contribute to the festive party mood. And to make up for the fact that they hadn’t exactly been invited.
“Okay,” I say sheepishly. “I realize four people is a lot. But they all really wanted to come.” I don’t mention that Shari’s fantastic view of the fireworks—and the fact that the Fourth of July happened to fall on a Wednesday this year, making it hard to go out of town—had something to do with it.
“I’m not complaining,” Shari says. “It’s just that if you get any more popular, I may have to move to someplace bigger in order to accommodate all your fans every time I have you over.”
“I’m not popular,” I say, abashed. “I’m just… ”
“Admit it,” Shari says with a smile. “They’re the misfit toys, and you’re the island. How are things going with Luke, anyway?”
I shrug. “Fine,” I say, speaking around the red plastic spoon hanging from my mouth. “I mean, as well as can be expected, seeing as how he’s in Paris and I’m here and we’re on a break.”
Shari points at the ring finger of my left hand. “You’re still wearing it.”
“Well,” I say, neurotically shoveling more ice cream into my face, “we’re still engaged. He’s acting like everything is fine.”
“Ooooh!” shrieks Tiffany suddenly, jumping to her four-inch stilettos and pointing into the twilit sky. “They’re starting!”
We hear a muffled boom, and the next thing I know, a huge carnation of light is exploding in the sky.
“Zee One Hundred,” Shari screams. “Switch it to Zee One Hundred! We’re missing the musical accompaniment!” She dives for the radio while two dozen people look at her as if she’s lost her mind.
A second later, Tiffany sidles up to me and says, “Okay, so here’s the L.D.”
I screw up my face at her in confusion. “The what?”
“The L.D.,” she says. “The lowdown?” When I nod, she goes on, “Don’t look at me. Look at the fireworks. Pretend we’re talking about the fireworks. Her name is Mae Lin, and she’s got some kinda like master’s degree in like social work or something. She lives in Alphabet City and she loves the Buckeyes—that’s a basketball team—and collects vintage Fiesta Dinnerware. You are so fucking dead.”
I look at Tiffany. “Tiff,” I say as the fireworks boom along the skyline behind me, “I told you. I don’t care. I don’t like Chaz that way.”
“Yeah, right,” Tiffany says with a hoarse laugh and takes a swig of her champagne. “Whatever! If he were the marrying kind, you would so have screwed him already. Just admit it.”
Z100 is blasting “Born to Run.” Shari’s girlfriend, Pat, is saying, “No. Just… no. Are you kidding me with this?” While Shari says, “Honey, it’s the Boss. What are you gonna do?”
“Here’s what you do,” Tiffany says, taking my empty ice cream bowl from me and setting it on a nearby picnic table. “Go over there—both Mae Lin and Valencia are gone now, it’s okay, they went downstairs to dry off. I ‘accidentally’ spilled my bottle of champagne on them—and tell him his pies were good.”
“Tiff.” She’s pushing me toward Chaz. I lock my knees, refusing to budge. “No. I’m engaged. And he doesn’t… what you just said. About marriage. Remember?”
“God!” Tiffany gives me another shove. “Why are you being so fucking stubborn? You can change him! I know all your other girlfriends are always telling you men can’t change, and in general it’s true. But not in this case. With you. And him. Believe me. I know. Come on, Lizzie. You’re always helping other people. Why won’t you let us help you for once?”
“Because you aren’t helping me,” I say from between gritted teeth. I have to raise my voice a little, because the boom of the fireworks—and the swell of Z100, playing from so many rooftops—is so loud. I notice two leather-braceleted men looking over at us in amusement.
I turn my back to them. “I told you, Tiffany, I love Luke. Luke, not Chaz.”
I almost completely believe this as I say it too. To the point that I even manage to convince myself that I have not spent the whole of the party trying not to look over to where Chaz is sitting and wondering how he’s managed to get such a dark tan so early in the summer, or why he insists on wearing khaki shorts. They’re so undignified for the urban male.
Although with muscular legs like his, he can, of course, get away with it…
“I don’t think you do,” Tiffany insists. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t think Luke loves you, either. He wouldn’t have gone to France—or agreed to your stupid fucking break idea—if he did. I think you two are both just afraid to admit it’s been over between you for a long time already. You had a summer fling that’s gone on way, way too long. Believe me, Lizzie, I know what real love is, and I see it standing over there by that fuckin’ beer cooler in a baseball cap. Now go… over… there… ”
Tiffany shoves me with a strength surprising in so thin a person—well, she does work out—and I find myself stumbling in my lace-up platform espadrilles… only to end up stumbling practically into the beer cooler. I’d have fallen inside it if Chaz hadn’t reached out and grabbed my arm.
“Hey,” he says, looking concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, turning beet red. “I’m fine. Tiffany wants me to tell you that, um. She liked your pies.”
Chaz stares down at me, his dark eyebrows raised.
“Oh,” he says. “Well, that’s nice.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to regain my composure. “I did too. Good… pie. Both of them.”
Am I? I ask myself. Am I really the stupidest human being on the face of the planet? Or does it just feel that way sometimes?