Clichéd Love: A Satirical Romance

by Lynn Galli

  “My insurance was through an employer. From there we tracked down my sister, who was my emergency contact. My parents and sister showed up the next day with a lot more pressure to remember and pressure to recuperate with them and pressure to get back to work.”

  That didn’t sound like a respite from the ordeal she was going through. “What kind of work?”

  “I was an accountant. My family thought I could go right back to that, but have you ever tried to be an accountant when you can’t remember much of the Internal Revenue Code?”

  My head shook automatically. I wouldn’t try to be an accountant if I could remember all the Internal Revenue Code.

  “All the better, right, honeybun?” Vic encouraged.

  “Right.” Kelly pecked Vic’s full lips this time. “Apparently, I was a rigid type-A personality with few friends and pretty fixated on money.”

  “You were an accountant,” I commented.

  “Yeah.” She laughed as if it just made sense to her that, as an accountant, money would play an important role in her life. “My family took it personally when I couldn’t remember them. According to some of my friends, we hadn’t been on the closest of terms anyway. When the pressure got too much, I just walked away, from my job, from my family, and moved to the ski resort for the one and only true friend I had.”

  Likely it was transference to begin with. Vic had been there for her from the beginning of her new life, and she didn’t care for the people trying to force her into her old life. Obviously, she’d feel great affection for her. As a former type-A personality who no longer felt type-A, she was probably relieved to ditch that persona.

  “She was right handed before the accident, now she’s left,” Vic told me. I wondered if Kelly experienced any other one-eighties. Like perhaps she had a hunky male fiancé before the accident.

  “Lots of things changed if I’m to believe what my sister and mom say about how I used to be.” Kelly gave another unbothered shrug.

  “Do you keep in touch with any of your old friends?”

  “Most were work related. After I quit, we didn’t know what to talk about anymore.”

  I’d had friendships like that. Floating from paper to paper, I made plenty of friends in the office and on assignment. Every time I left, it was difficult to keep in touch without that commonality. It was one of the reasons I liked Iris and Lane so much. They weren’t part of this assignment. We’d built a friendship outside of my work. Same with Helen and Joe and Mariah and Nykos, more reasons I knew this stay in Seattle would be different from my other posts. “Were they more understanding than your family appeared to be?”

  “At first, yeah, then they’d bring up things we did in the past and get upset or embarrassed because I couldn’t remember them. I thought a clean slate with my clean brain was probably the best move I could make.”

  I sat back and finished the notes I was making. Her logic made sense. Although I’d been living a no-ties lifestyle for many years, I still couldn’t imagine what it would be like to wake up with absolutely no idea of who I was. Would I find writing again? Would I want to play tennis every Thursday? Would I forget how important Iris and Lane were to me?

  “You seem distressed.” Kelly scrutinized me.

  “I was just thinking how hard it must have been for you.”

  “I’d have been lost and hopeless without Vic by my side. With her friendship and later love, I felt like I could do anything. Learning more about how I used to be, I was thrilled not to be that way anymore.”

  That was the perfect attitude to make a full life after suffering amnesia. “What do you do now?”

  She let a delightful sounding giggle slip. “I’m a chainsaw carver. Bear statues and the like. I wasn’t artistic at all before. I have the love of my life by my side and we’re happy. I don’t want to go back to being an uptight anal-retentive who does nothing but count numbers so people can make more money. That crash was the second best thing to happen to me.”

  My eyes flicked to the loving gaze Vic was giving her. I didn’t need to ask what the first best thing to happen to her had been. “I’ve got to say this is definitely one of the more unusual stories I’ve heard.”

  “Oh, goodie. We’re going to make the list, then?” Kelly asked.

  “Normally I don’t promise anything, but yeah, your story will definitely make it in.”

  She squealed with glee and grabbed Vic’s face for a loud kiss. I chuckled as I closed my notepad and clicked off the recorder. I thanked them for making the trip up to the bar from their hotel where they’d suspended their tourist activities to tell me their story.

  Iris was talking to Lane when I approached the bar. She tipped her chin at the couple I just left. “Where are they from?”

  “New Hampshire.”

  “Nice,” Lane said. She’d been steadily gaining back her confidence from the police station visit the other day. It couldn’t rival Iris’s yet, but they had a lot more in common than I’d originally thought when that previously unexplained hesitation seeped its way into her demeanor. I liked both versions of Lane, but it made me happy to see her get her feet solidly under her. “Can’t believe people want their stories in a paper so much that they’d take part of their vacation time to go through an interview.”

  “Good story?” Iris asked.

  “Amnesia,” I said and watched their mouths drop. “I know. Major cliché in lesbian romances.”

  “Any romance.” Lane blushed when she realized her tough persona just collapsed with the admission that she reads romances.

  To save her from the sure ribbing Iris would start in on, I asked, “You know what’s more cliché?” They turned their attention to me. “A lesbian PI.”

  Lane and I cracked up at Iris’s expression. Now that I knew Lane also read romances, we could spend some time going over some of our favorite themes. Or more likely, mock them while secretly showing just how much we liked them.

  “Even better, a lesbian PI with amnesia. Now that would make for a great romance,” I suggested and looked at Iris. “Should I knock your head against something?”

  “Then write about it?” Lane offered.

  Iris shook her head and joined our laughter. “You both should be locked in a room and forced to read classic literature for a week.”

  After the week I’d had with the step up in interviews as well as worrying about Lane’s case, I wouldn’t mind being locked in a room to read. My eyes flicked to Iris. Maybe not. I’d miss our tennis match and daily teasing sessions and just being around them.

  33 | Emory & Robin

  As stories went, this one couldn’t be true. In no way could it be true because I swear I just read it in a lesbian romance novel a couple of weeks ago. It was an older book as far as the genre went, ten years at least. Maybe that’s why they thought they could recite it back to me.

  “I thought I’d lost her forever.” Emory leaned over the table to express just how imperative it was that I empathize with her loss of love. Tall and slim, she stretched well into my personal space.

  “But you didn’t?” My mind kept cycling through the various authors, trying to remember where I’d read a story similar to theirs.

  “It’s a miracle.” Her lean brought her attractive tanned face into mine and prevented her from being able to drag her miracle Robin to her side in a show of affection borne by said miracle. She stayed suspended over the table for another second before slamming back into her chair and reaching with both hands to practically haul Robin onto her lap.

  Robin, a short, hair-sprayed vixen in the latest designer clothes, gave a little giggle and happily scrambled the rest of the way onto Emory’s lap. “A miracle,” she agreed in a perfect breathy imitation of Marilyn Monroe.

  I glanced down at my notes to stop the endless ruffling of mental library catalogue cards in search of their story’s author. Reading through each point, I felt I had to confirm their story. Give them a chance to back down on some of the more outrageous aspects.


  “You,” I started with Emory, “returned home for your father’s funeral.”

  “Didn’t want to,” Emory inserted for the—let me count it up in my notes—sixth time in the story.

  Because he’d kicked her out of the house when he couldn’t force her to change her lesbian ways. That sucked, I’d give her that. Still, if she really didn’t want to go back for the funeral, she wouldn’t have.

  “To a horse ranch in Oklahoma where your family needed your help securing capital to cover the mortgage they didn’t know your father had taken out on the farm?”

  “I’m in high finance. Of course, I could help them,” she proclaimed proudly.

  Did anyone use the term high finance anymore? I was pretty sure most people just referred to them as financial pricks or the asshats who caused the world economy to meltdown for no other reason than their obsessive greed.

  “And you went?”

  Her brow furrowed. “I couldn’t let my mom lose the ranch. It’s been in our family for generations.”

  I glanced down at my notes. Her father’s family, but financed by her mother’s money because her father was land rich and married his wife for an influx of money. I’d heard that one before, too. Where had—No. No. I was not listening to Downton Abbey: On the Ranch. No, I refused to make that connection.

  “You returned and ran into Robin—”

  “The lovely and demure Robin,” she interrupted and planted a loud kiss on said Robin.

  Nothing about that Robin was demure. “Your first love.” From high school when love was more of an infatuation than an actual feeling.

  “We were going to run off together.” Robin’s breathy voice was hard to hear over the increasing noise level at the bar, but it didn’t prompt her to drop the fake breathiness and speak like a normal person. “Emory was going to Princeton. I was going to go with her to style hair.”

  Without meaning to, my eyes ran up to the sheer volume of hair on her head. They now lived in New York. Big hair might play in some places in Jersey and on a horse ranch in Oklahoma, but must be out of place as the spouse of a high financier. “Sounds like a nice plan.”

  “But my dick of a dad put a stop to it,” Emory spat in a menacing tone.

  Her dick of a dad who was now dead. I wasn’t a big believer in turning the dead into saints, but I also didn’t think calling the dead “dicks” was appropriate either.

  “By?” I prompted to get her to tell me this scrumptious plot point again.

  “He threatened my squishy cupcake. Scared her to death.”

  The squishy cupcake turned her head and buried it in Emory’s neck. A soft whimper sounded from the small crevice she allowed between their conjoined bodies. My notes hadn’t included the scared to death comment, and the threat had come in the form of a payoff. “He paid you how much?”

  Pink suffused Robin’s cheeks, battling with the addiction to her orange spray tan. “Ten thousand.” The breathiness was a barely audible whisper this time.

  He’d paid her ten grand to leave his daughter alone, and she’d taken it. The squishy cupcake currently glued to the front of the daughter whose father bribed her. Bribed her, and she’d taken it. It would be one thing if she’d accepted the bribe, then screwed him over by leaving with the daughter as planned, but she hadn’t. She’d let him pay her off to leave the supposed love of her life alone. That bears repeating: she took the money and left the daughter alone. Until his funeral, that is.

  “I was in despair,” Emory took up the narrative again. “I didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t meet me in the hayloft like she usually did. I thought something might’ve happened to her. So I snuck out that night and went to her window.”

  Her window? Now we’re quoting songs not just books?

  “She told me she couldn’t see me anymore. She didn’t want to go to Princeton with me. Despair!” Emory was leaning again, only she couldn’t finish the lean because her squishy cupcake was taking up the space between her and the tabletop.

  “Yes, I can see how that would cause despair.” If we lived in the 1800s and suffered from the vapors whenever something difficult in our lives came up.

  “When Daddy figured out I wasn’t going to get in line and become the perfect girl who would marry the rancher’s son next door, he told me to get out and never come back.”

  But she did, when he died. And Daddy? Come on. A New York investment banker that still called a father who’d disowned her “Daddy” was too unbelievable. They had to be putting me on. I couldn’t wait to verify this story. Maybe one of the brothers, who probably didn’t like that she’d come back to save the ranch when their beloved father couldn’t, would have a different version of this thing.

  “Yet, you returned for the funeral?”

  “After she’d made it in the Big Apple,” Robin said, pride and something else jumbled her expression from cowering in fear over the supposed threat that was actually a bribe to genuine delight.

  “That’s right, squishy. I showed my dad, didn’t I?”

  “You did. He had no idea what he was throwing out.”

  Wonder how she made it through Princeton or even got to Princeton if her father truly disowned her. Oklahoma’s a long way away. Hitching was unlikely, and even if she had a full-ride scholarship, she’d need money. Mommy probably helped out, which was why she must have felt compelled to return for the funeral of her homophobic father. It surely wasn’t a sudden need to forgive in order to move on with her life that compelled her to return for the funeral.

  “Take me through the getting together part again?” I tried not to cross my fingers in the hopes that they were actually telling the truth. That they’d be able to get all the points out in the same order and with similar language. I should ask them to tell it to me backwards. That always trumped liars.

  Emory’s eyes narrowed. She, being of the high finance set, could recognize when a deal was going bad. She wasn’t sure if I was questioning her genuineness or if I was simply stupid and needed things repeated. “I invited Robin to the funeral. Kind of an ‘F-you’ to Daddy, you know?”

  Daddy, who paid off her girlfriend, who in turn took the money and shattered her deeply fragile first love heart. Yeah, he was the only one who deserved the F-you.

  “I was nervous.” Robin trembled to make it obvious.

  Nervous that she wouldn’t bag the high financier while she was back for a brief visit, more like. How else could she be kept in designer clothes and orange spray tan for the rest of her life?

  “Some of the family sure didn’t like it.” Sly delight danced across Emory’s face. “Too much time under Daddy’s thumb, you get me?”

  Oh, I got her. A family funeral was the perfect place to try to make a point. Every guide to proper conduct said so.

  “She must have kissed me a hundred times.” Robin went back to giggling. With the breathiness, it sounded more like wheezing.

  “Whenever one of them looked our way.” Emory smooched Robin as if to prove she knew how to perform the act of kissing. Perhaps I should take notes on this. Robin looked pretty satisfied with the kisses, even if I wanted to cringe with every overtly public display. That could be what I was doing wrong. All of my kisses should take place in public from now on. It might solicit suggestions from onlookers to improve my failing technique.

  “We wanted them to know that he couldn’t stop our love,” Robin whisper-talked and smooched at the same time.

  Except for all the years after he bought her off.

  “We all went back to the ranch,” Emory said, her eyes glazing a bit. “God, it was run down. I couldn’t believe my dad and brothers let it get like that.”

  “It’s beautiful now,” Robin told me as if that was something I should admire.

  “It is,” Emory confirmed, giving Robin the admiration she’d been looking for. “Only after I secured the financing, calling in every favor I had, mind you. We hired the right people to fix it up. Then I got Mom to fire my oldest brother and
hire a real ranch manager.”

  “Oh, boy, did Ernie get mad at that,” Robin bragged, the giggle back in breathy effect.

  “Back to the part about you getting together,” I encouraged.

  “Right, yeah, so there we are at the ranch house, surrounded by family and Daddy’s friends. People were shooting us glares and whispering. I just couldn’t take it. I hauled Robin upstairs with me to my old room.”

  And this was where the story got really good.

  “We made love.” Robin’s breathy giggle showed absolutely no remorse.

  They’d had sex. At a funeral. In Emory’s childhood home. On her childhood bed. With all of her family and father’s friends milling about only one floor below. She had way too much faith in the sound dampening quality of a door and floorboards. She also had zero respect for her mother. Forget her father, the guy whose funeral they were attending. She didn’t have to have respect for him. He was a homophobe who rejected her. But still, it was a FUNERAL. Who sneaks upstairs to have sex during the wake? It takes someone with pretty much no soul to think that would be an appropriate thing to do. Wait to get back to the hotel, at least. Don’t make everyone attending a funeral listen to sex sounds from one floor away.

  “I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I’d just found her again. Found out she still loved me. How could I not?” Emory’s expression was one of expectation. Expectation that I’d do the exact same thing in her place.

  I could bring up the fact that the love of her life didn’t love her enough to tell her father to go to hell when he thought he could buy her off. Which he did. I could bring up the fact that if she truly hated her father, no amount of begging on her mother’s part would have made her attend the funeral of someone she hated. She wasn’t the type to go to a funeral for a sense of closure. She’d gone to show her family up. I also could have brought up the fact that had she not come back clearly wealthy—as evidenced by the thirty thousand dollar watch, the four thousand dollar suit, the five hundred dollar haircut, and the twelve thousand dollar earrings—the love of her life might not have acknowledged her when she returned. But I didn’t. I simply jotted another note: VERIFY. In all caps, because if anything deserved all caps, it was this. Then I rose from the table to shake their hands.