“If I tell you what’s wrong, will you get off me?”
“Yes.” Chase removed herself and sat on the couch next to Donna.
Donna glanced at her and then looked away.
Chase raised her eyebrows. She still couldn’t do the one arch eyebrow thing that Gitana and Bud were so adept at, but she had mastered doing both eyebrows and moving her eyes to one side in an expression of “really.” Chase gave Donna an extended version and when this produced nothing, she said, “Did you kill someone?”
“Well, no.”
“Maim, dismember, rob?”
“No.”
“Despoil?”
“No.”
Donna seemed to reconsider. This alarmed Chase.
“I may have broken a heart, maimed a soul and despoiled a destiny.”
“Wow,” Chase looked at the wall clock. “All that and it’s only one thirty. Maybe you should take the rest of the day off.”
“You mean before I destroy the planet by cocktail hour?”
Chase laughed and Donna smiled at least. Chase took her hand. “What happened?”
Chase imagined it was some plan or event that Donna thought she had failed at because it didn’t come out perfectly—a few platitudes and all would be put right. “I’m sure whatever it is we can fix it.” She patted Donna’s hand.
Donna still looked bleak. “I don’t think it can be fixed. It’s not a can-be-fixed kind of thing.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, it’s not like an undo kind of thing. It’s a what’s-done-is-done kind of thing.”
“Did you run something over? Accidents do happen,” Chase said, trying to sound consoling.
“Oh, no, I didn’t do that.”
“Good. So it seems to me death is the only thing that can’t be undone or rectified,” Chase said.
“Except in those cases where people come back from the dead,” Donna said.
“True, but this thing you’ve done…” Chase said, looking at her beseechingly. Is this what she put Dr. Robicheck through? It was awful.
“There’s another thing that can’t be undone, and that’s the thing I did.” Donna was the epitome of the trying-to-gather-enough-courage-to-enter-the-confessional-booth sinner.
“Maybe you could tell me what the undone-done-fixed-not-fixable thing is that you did, and then we can evaluate the situation. It can’t be that bad, can it?”
Donna bit her thumbnail and her eyes widened as she stared at Chase, and then she said it really fast, running all the words together, “IsleptwithIsabel.”
Chase didn’t catch it. It sounded all slurred. “You did what?”
“I knew you wouldn’t approve. I knew it was wrong. It was unprofessional, and I swear to you I have never ever done it before. I’m not certain how it happened. It just did, and now I don’t know what to do about it. I have feelings. I am willing to recognize I have feelings.”
Chase grabbed Donna by the shoulders and peered into her face. “I didn’t understand you.”
“I know. I don’t understand it myself.”
“No, not that. I didn’t understand what you said. You said it too fast.”
“Oh, my God, I have to say it again?” She looked pleadingly at Chase. “Can I write it down instead?”
“Sure.”
Donna opened her Day-Timer and pulled out a packet of orange Post-it notes. She hesitated and then wrote quickly, ripped it off, folded it and handed the orange paper to Chase.
Chase opened it up and read. “Holy shit, really?”
Donna wrote on another Post-it and handed it to Chase. “Really.”
On another Post-it, she wrote “Yes,” and then buried her head in her hands.
“How did it happen?” Chase said.
Donna sighed and wrote out another note. Chase hoped they might talk about it, but if the only way she could get Donna to tell her story was on Post-its she’d have to go with it. She handed the note over. “I don’t know.”
Chase was about to say something when Donna handed her another note. “We were having dinner at Isabel’s and talking.”
“Do you go to dinner a lot, like you’re dating?”
Donna handed her another note. “Well…”
“Did you know you were dating?”
Donna scribbled. “Not exactly. I thought maybe…” She ripped off the note and started another. “I was in denial.”
Chase had known Donna for seven years and in all that time Donna had never dated. She’d never mentioned an old girlfriend, not even in passing. “Donna, when was the last time you had a girlfriend?”
“It’s been a while,” Donna wrote. Her face was the epitome of evasion.
“How long?”
“Well…” she stopped and handed Chase that note.
“Think hard.”
Donna furrowed her brow. She wrote, “1984.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Donna shook her head. She began to write again, but Chase snatched the Post-its. “Can we talk?”
“It was a really bad breakup and I needed time to heal.”
Chase did the math. “Twenty-seven years.”
“Has it been that long? Time flies.”
“Uh, yeah. Don’t you think it’s time to move on?” Chase asked, trying to keep her voice even. Her mind went reeling into what-the-fuck land—twenty-seven years to get over a breakup. It was absurd.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“So evidently you didn’t seduce Isabel then.” Chase got up and poured them both coffee while she ruminated on this fact. She’d seen Isabel and Donna together a lot, but then Donna was also involved in organizing seminars, as was Isabel—it was easy to see how they would end up working together. Chase attempted to recall Isabel’s romantic past. She appeared not to have one. She set the mismatched coffee mugs down on the table and they each doctored their own—Donna with milk and sugar and Chase with half milk, half coffee. She rued the day she’d have to give up coffee because her stomach lining couldn’t take it anymore. For now café au lait—the drink of French children—would have to do.
Chase sipped her coffee and waited like Dr. Robicheck would under the circumstances, until her patient was ready to talk and then she waited some more. At this rate, she’d be collecting Social Security by the time Donna got around to it. She needed prodding. “Why don’t you tell me what happened from the beginning and we’ll go from there?” Damn that was good, she thought—very Dr. Robicheckian.
Donna stared at her, obviously mortified.
“I don’t want the details.” Chase put air quotes around “details.”
“Oh, good.”
“I thought if you talked about it and subsequently processed it like I do with Dr. Robicheck, you’d feel better—that’s all.”
“Oh, good.”
“You’ve said that twice.”
“I know.”
“Talk! Please talk.”
“All right…well…” She looked uncertain.
Chase patted her hand in a motherly-confessor-counselor kind of way, although she couldn’t recall Dr. Robicheck ever doing so, but Chase figured she was catching flyballs here as best she could here. “Go ahead.”
“Well…”
Chase groaned, and Donna gave her a dirty look. “I know. All right. We finished dinner and I was straightening out the placemats and putting the centerpiece back on the table. It was very tastefully done, a pumpkin filled with fall foliage.”
“Go on.”
“And then Isabel came up behind me, and I did my best to avert a confrontation,” she stopped.
“You didn’t run around the table, did you?”
“Only once.” She blushed.
“Then what happened?”
“Thankfully, I realized how absurd I was being and I stood still. I tried to explain the straight-gay dichotomy and how potentially heart-rending this could be for both of us and…”
“And what?”
“Well…”
/> Chase was starting to hate that word. “Do you realize you’ve used the word ‘well’ about twenty million times in the course of this discussion?”
“No, I’ve only used it six times; however, from an editor’s viewpoint, I suppose I would be asked to improve my word choices.”
“So what happened, and better yet, is it really that bad? What harm can come from it?”
Donna looked aghast. “What harm? Have you lost your mind? The ramifications are mind-boggling.”
Chase’s cell phone rang. She looked at Donna tentatively.
She waved a hand. “I need to collect myself anyway.”
Chase clicked on.
“Ms. Banter?”
“Yes.”
The woman with a Southern drawl and lilt to match informed Chase that she’d been hired and could start work Monday morning from eight a.m. to noon. “I’ll be there,” Chase said.
Donna eyed her narrowly. “What’s going on? Please get me in the loop. You know what it does to me when I’m caught unawares.”
Chase refrained from saying, “Evidently, when you’re caught unawares you sleep with someone.” Instead, she said, “I got a job.”
“A job? You have a job. You’re a writer, and that is not something you mess with. You’re not going to write for magazines? Because that will ruin your creativity, drain your juices and zap your imagination.”
“No, this is something totally different.”
“Like what? And it better be part-time. You are already booked.”
“It is. Relax. Besides it’s seasonal and I’m going to get fired.”
“What?”
“I’ve never had a job.”
“You write for a living,” Donna said emphatically.
“I mean a work-for-the-man job and consequently, I want to experience getting fired. Now, enough about me, let’s get back to you and Isabel.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Chase studied her. “I’ll answer your questions if you answer mine.”
Donna considered this. “Only if you go first. I still need time to collect myself.”
“Okay, that’s fair.” She eyed Donna.
“Don’t worry. I won’t renege. I’m your personal assistant. You have to trust me.”
“Because?”
“I could bring your whole world down.”
Chase anxiously bit her lip.
“Don’t worry. I would never do it.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go first and get it over with?” Chase asked.
“Uh, no. Perhaps what you’re going to say will have bearing on what I’m going to say,” Donna said.
Chase couldn’t tell if Donna was stalling for time or seeking salvation in Chase’s new life choices. She thought back to her epiphany on the road. She went skateboarding every morning before she started writing. One morning, she’d stood at the bottom of the road and stared at the perfect blue sky, seeing it with the wonder of having done something thrilling and survived it without worry, better yet without the threat of worry—this was a state of being foreign to her. She had not manifested fear or risk and she’d had fun—actual unadulterated fun. But how to explain to others her newfound philosophy of wanting to experience the things she was afraid of so that she could overcome them?
“I want to…” she amended. “I need to acknowledge my fears and conquer them.” Chase topped off their coffees to give her wiggle time. Then the dogs scratched at the door. They’d been chasing rabbits and both panted. Their entire beings exuded joy. “See? Look at them—happy and without worry.”
They plunked down. Annie’s black-and-white body next to her sister’s black and tan—they looked like mismatched bookends, only a willful set that refused to sit at the end of the shelves, each preferring the company of the other.
“I like when they pant. They look like they’re smiling,” Donna said.
“Maybe they are,” Chase said. She refilled their water bowls. Annie got up to drink and Jane followed. They drank greedily, slapping their tongues in the water, and Chase watched them, feeling benevolent and at one with the Universe. Sometimes she wished to be reincarnated as a dog cared for by lesbians—could life be any better? But then she recanted. Best not to tempt the reincarnation department with animal incarnations. What if your file got mixed up accidently and got stuck in the icky insect group and you came back as a centipede? She pushed the thought from her mind.
“What you’re saying is that by following their heart’s desire, it makes them pant and subsequently smile.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting take,” Donna said.
They were silent, listening to the panting. Donna cleared her throat. Jane barked, looked at Annie, and both made for the door at full speed.
“I wish I had that kind of joie de vivre,” Donna said, sighing heavily.
“Did you have it once?”
Donna ran her finger around the lip of her coffee mug, her finger stopping at the chipped section. “You should really get new coffee cups.”
She looked out the window at the dogs. Chase followed her gaze. They watched the dogs leaping and chasing each other in a gleeful frolic.
“I like my down-and-out décor—it keeps me humble. Now about the joie.”
“I know. I love my work, you know that.” She looked at Chase for reassurance.
“Of course, you do and you are amazing.” There was a part of Chase that couldn’t believe she was instigating a personal discussion. Normally, she shied away from them as if they were plague-infested rats. Now, as part of her new fearless self, she approached the subject. She’d accomplished two goals in one day—she got a job and had a conversation of a delicate and intimate nature.
“But, as you have figured out, my personal life is non-existent,” Donna said.
“You have us.”
“I mean girlfriend-wise.”
“Oh.” It’s hard to argue an obvious point, Chase conceded.
“So this Isabel thing threw me for a loop.”
“Loop me in,” Chase said, remembering the line from the Dean Koontz novel Odd Thomas that she’d recently finished reading.
“Dinner, dining room table, seduction on the table.”
“Boy, that’s a zero-to-sixty-miles-an-hour on your part, Miss Haven’t-Had-a-Girlfriend-in-Twenty-Seven-Years. I’m impressed.”
“I didn’t seduce her. She seduced me.”
“What!”
“She said that she knew how to do it from reading the sex scenes in all the lesfic books in the library—which makes sense considering she’s a librarian.”
Chase nodded. She adhered to the theory that one could learn anything if one spent sixty days in a well-stocked library. She imagined what Isabel learned in the lesbian library of the Institute. She had every lesbian novel ever written at her disposal. Yikes, Chase thought.
Donna read her mind. “She learned a lot.” She blushed.
“Well, if I can learn to lead a fearless life, I think you should give Isabel a chance.”
Donna didn’t look convinced.
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could get my heart broken and never trust love again.”
“You’ve already done that. Besides it’s too late, you’ve already slept with Isabel. You better make a reservation for a U-Haul.”
Donna put her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that.”
“Okay, here’s the deal, I will suffer the humiliation of getting fired if you date Isabel. You don’t have to get the U-Haul yet.”
“But you want to get fired.”
“And you obviously wanted Isabel or you wouldn’t have let your panties down.”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
“It’s the new me.”
They heard the crunch of gravel and the engine ping as Gitana pulled up in the drive. Donna put a hand to her forehead. “I can’t confess it again.”
“I’ll give her the lowdown. You get back to tow
n and buy a bottle of wine and some flowers.”
“Why?”
“So you can do the romance thing with Isabel.”
Donna did some deep breathing. “I can do this.”
“Yes, you can. Now go.”
Chase walked her out. Donna waved at Gitana. She didn’t say a word as she walked past looking like she had a stick up her ass. She quickly passed out of the gate and then ran to her car.
“What was that about?” Gitana said.
“I’ll tell you later,” Chase said, wrapping her arm around Gitana’s waist. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” Gitana said, winking at Chase, who gave her a nod.
“Did you get the stuff?” She looked around furtively. They were like drug dealers talking covertly to one another.
“I got meat,” Gitana said without moving her lips.
“Yes,” Chase said, examining the grocery bags in the back of the car. Vegetarians be damned tonight. She pulled out the two packets of neatly wrapped filet mignon. “Did you get bacon too?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure we can get the smell out of the kitchen by the time she gets home in the morning,” Gitana said, sniffing the butcher paper that the bacon came in.
“Oh, essence of bacon,” Chase said, sniffing it as well. They looked at each.
“I think we have a monkey on our backs—I dream about bacon,” Gitana said.
“Me too,” Chase said.
“Quick, let’s get this inside,” Gitana said, looking around again.
“You go upstairs and see how her packing is coming along while I sneak the goods in,” Chase said.
By the time Bud came downstairs with her duffel bag, Chase had the meat stuffed under a bag of carrots and a celery stalk. She threw a couple of purple onions on top for good measure.
“I arranged my own transportation,” Bud said, setting her bag down by the door. Both dogs got up off the floor and sniffed the bag.
“Really?” Chase said, putting the rest of the groceries away. At the bottom of the second bag was a package of baby back ribs. She panicked. She swore Gitana said they were having filet mignon, not ribs. They needed to be in fridge. “I thought I was driving you in.”
“It won’t be necessary. Gloria is going into town for her line dancing class. She’ll drop me by Collins’s house.” Bud eyed her, looking for a response.
“Gloria line dances?” Chase tried to envision that.
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