“… He’s just not always answering my texts,” she said, looking to Becca with a tiny glimmer of what I recognized as tenuous hope in her eyes.
“He’s probably busy getting ready for the wedding too,” Becca soothed. “It’s only a week and a half away.”
“Yes…” Linda looked doubtful. “But … and I don’t want to make him sound like a bad guy … but he’s also not returning my calls. He says things like, ‘It didn’t sound like you needed an answer’ or whatever, but, seriously, if I call at all, that means I want to talk to him, isn’t that clear?”
From my vantage point, leaning on the door frame to the storeroom, I definitely saw the irritation cross Becca’s face.
But her voice was measured and calm. “You’d think so and I’d think so, but maybe there’s a good reason for him to seem so … short … with you. It might be a really good idea to talk to him so that you can go forward on your special day without a care in the world.”
“Do you really think there could be a good reason for this?” Linda asked, the uncertainty ringing clear in her voice.
“Absolutely. You never know what’s going on with other people, even the ones you’re closest to, unless you ask.”
I felt my grip tighten on the champagne flute I was holding. “That’s for sure,” I heard my own voice chirp. Somewhere along the way, my brain decided to take a break. “For example, he could be cheating on you, and if you don’t specifically ask him he might not think it’s something you’d, you know, want to know.”
Chapter 23
Both sets of eyes turned to me, both alarmed, both for different reasons.
“You think he’s cheating?” Linda asked, and I actually saw the blood draining from her face. “Have you heard something?”
“Oh, she’s kidding,” Becca soothed, shooting me a look that told me to shut the fuck up.
I took a couple of steps forward and set my glass down on the counter. “No, I’m not. It happened to me. It’s happened to millions of women. Just watch daytime television. You think you’re in love, you think you can trust him, you think your life is going to be wonderful, and then—boom!—you find out you’ve been living a lie.”
“Am I living a lie?” Linda asked Becca.
“No!” Becca looked back at me, and I clearly remember the sharp question in her eyes. “Quinn’s not … herself right now.”
I gave a short laugh. “No kidding. I haven’t been myself for years. He took that away from me.” I pointed a finger at Linda. “I’m just saying be careful, don’t let that happen to you.”
“Weren’t you sorting invoices?” Becca asked in a hard voice. “For the IRS? You ought to go back and finish that.”
I looked at my empty glass. “Yes, I’ll go back to my sorting.” I picked it up. “But I’m just saying, Linda, be careful. Ask every question you can think of and listen to your gut.” I gestured at her with my glass. “There’s nothing worse than finding out when it’s too late.” I went back into the storeroom, possibly with a misstep or two along the way, and closed the door most of the way.
As I repoured my glass, I am ashamed to say I thought I heard some sniffling and the distinct sound of tissues being pulled out of the box, one after the other, among the soothing murmurs of Becca’s voice.
Was it really so wrong to try to help another woman avoid the heartache I had suffered?
Maybe that was my true calling in life. Maybe I had gone through what I went through in order to help others.
That would kind of help make sense of it for me. I had been chosen for a purpose greater than doing Burke for the rest of my life!
I paused, thinking of how great it would be to do Burke for the rest of my life, and then sighed at the memory of his kiss.
But—I pulled myself back onto my high horse—he had cheated. It was indefensible. That was the bottom line. And the top line, and every line in between.
I had to find a way to get my message out to women.
Write blog!!!! I added to my to-do list. Then added—and later scratched through with extra vehemence—Add to shops website!!!! Brilliant!!! Like insrance comp. that promises to shw u if u shld go w/ someone else!!!!
As near as I can guess, that was around noon.
I’m guessing that because Deliah Carter’s appointment was in the afternoon and I do remember her coming in. Deliah was big and proud. As in, very big, and very proud. And normally I’d have to hand it to her for that, because she didn’t have the same vain insecurities many women have about body image and so on. She wore a size that, more often than not, must be specially ordered, and when she came into my shop that was the case.
And I’m not saying she wore a fourteen and I only sold up to a ten, because that bullshit drove me crazy. Fourteen is not “XXL,” it’s “average American woman,” and I carried well into plus sizes.
But Deliah was a bit beyond that and when she first came in to order a dress I made the mistake of assuming she wanted to create a slimmer illusion. I’m not being sarcastic, by the way, it was definitely a wrongheaded assumption and I learned from it.
“Are you saying I should be ashamed of my curves?” she demanded, in a deep Mississippi accent.
For me, curves called to mind Nigella Lawson, who is one of the most gorgeous women on earth.
Deliah was no Nigella Lawson.
Still, I took her point. “Tell me what you want and we’ll make it happen.”
The smug look on her face was unmistakable, and utterly without humility. She liked those words. Make it happen. Deliah was proof that if you expected something of someone, they would rise to the occasion no matter how unlikely the odds.
So we’d worked together on her dress and it was coming together nicely. I had six months before her wedding—to a surprisingly hot guy, by the way, just FYI—so there was no hurry.
The problem was that she came in on Day Drunk Day to discuss the fact that she thought her bridesmaid dresses were too hot.
Well, she called them “slutty,” but they weren’t slutty. They weren’t even particularly hot. I wasn’t really sure what her problem with them was, all I was sure of was that it was the wrong time for me to discuss it.
“Lesley’s dress, for instance,” Deliah drawled to me. “It’s, like, so tight around the waist that she can’t hardly breathe.”
This is probably a good place to mention that Becca was out on a reluctant and very late lunch break.
“Does Lesley have a problem with it?” I asked, trying very consciously to arrange my expression into that of serious concern.
Deliah narrowed her dark eyes at me and my impertinence. “I have a problem with it.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It looks too good on her.”
I was so surprised by this bluntness that I laughed.
That pissed her off. “Um, excuse me, but do you think that’s funny?” she demanded.
“Yes!” Now I couldn’t stop laughing. “Of course that’s funny! No one ever admits that!”
A normal person would have been disarmed by that and seen the honest humor in it. But then again, a normal person wouldn’t have complained out loud about the bridesmaid looking hot. She would have just chosen a hideous design and ghastly color in the first place, like most of them do.
Not Deliah.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said, completely straight-faced. “I think you’re being a jackass.”
That made me laugh even harder. Jackass! It was perfect, or seemed so at the time. Not bitch, that was so easy. No threats to take her business elsewhere, this woman had the unexpected insult down to an art!
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it sounded even more insincere than it was. But how could it not? “I’m just … it’s a day.”
“Are you drunk?”
I could have denied it, but what was the point? “Completely!” I waited for her condemnation. A haughty turn on her heels and a brisk lumbering out the door.
Instead, she was st
ill for a moment, then held up her hand. “High five, girlfriend, what are we drinking?”
I went to high-five her and only caught half her hand, thanks to my double vision. “Champagne!”
“Bring it on!”
Thirty minutes later, we’d agreed that instead of altering her bridesmaids’ dresses to make them all look like buffoons during the wedding, she could just have the pictures Photoshopped however she wished by the wedding photographer later. She needed, I pointed out in a moment of surprising lucidity, for her entire bridal party to look as good as possible because she didn’t want all of her guests, for whom she was paying a huge price per head, to think she had no taste.
Therefore, I was neatly off the hook and she was more pleased with me than ever.
And having a woman as forceful as Deliah recommending you to her friends and acquaintances was like having Tony Soprano recommending a particular brand of quick-drying concrete—it was worth its weight in gold.
So up to then I had a mixed performance. Kind of okay, kind of horrible. Maybe I came out even, though, to be honest, I guess I still ended up on the lower end of that scale.
Still, my talk with Deliah had been so liberating that it was worth it. Or it felt like it was worth it at the time.
In fact, it felt so worth it that I poured myself a toast.
The subsequent events are a bit of a blur to me, I will admit.
I vaguely recall opening the door and shouting into the street, and to a few passersby, “I hate Burke Morrison!”
Then, not long after, “Burke Morrison is a fucking liar and cheater! Also, never get married!” which I’m sure was great for business.
At least for Taney’s business across the street.
The showroom experienced a bit of a makeover, with the bride mannequin in a compromising position with the groom mannequin in the corner (but, hey, it could have been the clichéd bridesmaid mannequin, so I want credit for at least keeping it wholesome!), and I kind of remember thinking it was hilarious to turn the chairs upside down to see if anyone would notice.
As if anyone who would be in the store that day, or week, or month, would be capable of not noticing the chairs were upside down. Except me, of course. Because, tired from the effort of turning the chairs upside down, I actually tried to sit down. True story.
Sometimes we do, indeed, get what we deserve.
That was about the time when Becca returned and, rather forcefully I thought, put me in the storeroom with nothing but a Brita carafe full of water and a paper cup. She didn’t even let me have my phone charger and I was down to one feeble bar.
I called Glenn. “This was a great idea!”
“What? I can’t hear you, you’re breaking up.”
I moved two inches to the left. “Can you hear me now?”
“Yeah, that’s better. What did you say?”
“I said this drinking thing was a great idea!” Of course, the words probably didn’t sound as clear to him as they look in writing, but that was the gist of what I was telling him. I can’t remember for sure, but it’s not impossible that Fabio was mentioned somewhere in there as well, however. “Thank you so much!”
“How much did you drink?” he asked sharply. Suddenly he sounded like Felix Unger. And I wasn’t even Oscar Madison, I was the bum who slept on the street outside their building but was never acknowledged on the show.
“I had company,” I explained defensively.
“Oh. Okay. So this was a bad idea.”
I sat down heavily on what looked like it would be a big soft pile of fabric but which crushed to nothing beneath my weight and sent the air from my lungs in an unattractive—and apparently alarming—rush.
“Quinn?” Glenn asked quickly. “Are you okay? Are you choking? Bang the phone if you’re choking.”
I started to laugh again, which probably sounded like phone-banging, so I forced out the words, “I’m … okay.…”
“Stop drinking,” he said, like he was telling a dog to stay. “Do you understand me?”
“Obviously.”
“What?”
That was the exact point at which I realized I’d had too much, but there was still a lot more, unprocessed, swishing around in my stomach. I made an effort to be clear. “Obviously.”
I heard him groan. “This was a mistake.”
“Obviously.”
“Stay put, I’m bringing food over.”
I smiled. “Obviously.”
“Oh, my god, you are so incapable of working right now.”
“Obviously!” By now I was laughing so hard it was silent, though he heard the sounds of my desperately hysterical gasps.
“Quinn,” he said, so seriously it almost made me wet my pants. “Trust me on this. Everything you think is hilarious right now will not seem funny to you at all tomorrow or for the rest of your life. Please, please, please, just sit tight and let me bring some food over and try and rectify this hideous mistake I’ve made.”
“Obvi—”
“No! No more. If you fuck up your business or personal life because of this, I will feel guilty for the rest of my life. Abort this mission! Stop now! The assignment is over, you passed with flying colors, give it a rest, stay where you are.”
In short, Anything to shut you the fuck up.
“Okay,” I said simply, swallowing a hiccup with some water.
“So you understand me,” he clarified, as if speaking to an alien whom he couldn’t be sure was truly comprehending the meaning of his strange earth language. “You know you have to sit very still in the storeroom and wait for me. You know there’s nothing to worry about because Becca’s out front taking care of business and you just have to rest and, sort of, sleep this off so you can be yourself again. You understand what I’m saying, right? How important it is for you to stay in the back?”
I hesitated, then said, “Obviously.”
Three hours later he was still there and my buzz was not. It had been replaced by a horrendous headache and more shame than I could have imagined I could feel, even on the heels of the week I’d just experienced. So I had that to say for his big breakout plan: It certainly did make room for me to change.
I guess the problem was, he hadn’t bet on me to change in any sort of dramatic ways.
Not that it was really dramatic, of course. I realized that by the thundering light of day the next morning. It had only been a temporary venting of emotion. Maybe healthy. Arguably healthy. But also maybe super-bad for business. That had yet to be seen.
Becca assured me, with eyes that kept sliding left and right instead of looking directly at me, that it hadn’t been that bad. That she thought that, apart from a few people who’d been directly in the line of my fire, word hadn’t gotten out to too many people that I was a psycho, incapable of running my own business, much less helping others create magical moments for the most special day of their lives.
And when it came down to it, maybe the fact of venting what had to be some long-pent-up feelings, ugly as they were, was worth the minimal risk of yelling crazy stuff into the street on a weekday when no one was really around and my reputation probably wouldn’t suffer too much. Honestly, 70 percent of the people who might have been on the sidewalk on any given weekday would have been people who knew my history and understood exactly what I was saying about Burke (right or wrong); another 20 percent would have been commuters stopping through for coffee on their way to or from somewhere else; and the other 10 percent was divided among my customers and people who would never hear or care a damn about what I had to say about anything.
Not that I wanted to conduct business that way. I’m not saying it was a good idea, or desirable. It was definitely not a good PR trick. I’m just saying I did it, it was done, and I really hoped that, in the process of getting better emotionally on a personal level, I hadn’t screwed myself over completely for the rest of my life.
So. With all that said, I really wish that was my primary concern. But the sad truth is that, during the epi
sode and afterward, the main thing in my mind was Burke. Always Burke.
How did he feel?
What did he want?
Did he think about me as much as I thought about him?
Questions so old and repetitive that they almost bored me to death … yet they held a certain irresistible allure. Back when we were a couple, if I was feeling down or meh and I began to think of Burke and what it was like to be with him, every bit of my physiology turned on and I was right there, alive and present.
And that was what I’d been searching for ever since.
Now, if that’s a cosmic connection of some sort, or body chemistry, or even just a willingness to be open to people, I don’t know. All I know is that I was not interested in people, by and large, and there was definitely chemistry between Burke and myself. But that’s not generally thought of as one of the more lasting things. So it had to be something more.
It had to be.
This was confirmed when Glenn called me later that night.
“I think you need to talk to Burke again,” Glenn said.
“What?” I was still feeling woozy. “No, thanks!”
“You told Linda her fiancé was cheating on her and Deliah her bridesmaids were prettier than her but that it would make her look better than the opposite.” He took a breath but only, I knew, so I could take a moment to reflect on what he’d said.
“I—” But he interrupted me right away, because it turned out he wasn’t done. And I was glad, because I didn’t have that much to say.
“No. There is no response. There is nothing you can say that’s going to make me think, oh, you’re right, you should be so concerned with Burke Morrison that you’re yelling what a jerk he is out the door of your shop. There’s just nothing.”
“You heard about that?”
“I didn’t hear about it, I heard it. Everyone must have heard it.” There was clearly a smile in his voice. “It was drunken idiocy at its best. I thought you’d reflect on your past and your present and make resolutions about a strong new future. I had no idea you’d curl up like a potato bug into your own self-pity.”
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger Page 24