Piece of My Heart

by Layce Gardner

  Taylor came back inside the house, holding a three-foot tall tower of pizza boxes. “Somebody give me a hand, here? It’s the leaning tower of pizza!”

  Brooklyn took half the pizza boxes and handed them out to Jenna and her group. “These smell delicious,” Brooklyn said. “I’m so happy you all came.”

  “Me too,” Jenna said, feeling her cheeks heat up again.

  “Follow me,” Brooklyn said. She led the way into the kitchen. She had them set the pizza boxes down on the kitchen counter. “I’ll put these on platters so they’ll fit on the tables. You would not believe the amount of food out there,” she said, pointing to the backyard.

  “I’m nervous,” Cindy said reaching for a bowl of oranges.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Jenna said, snatching the bowl away.

  “She can have an orange,” Brooklyn said. “That’s what they’re there for. One of my friends is a fruit distributor. Believe me, there’s lots more fruit out on the tables.”

  “She doesn’t want to eat them. She wants to juggle them,” Jenna said.

  “Oh. Yeah, we have a strict rule in this house. No fruit juggling,” Brooklyn said, sounding like a kindergarten teacher.

  “Sorry,” Cindy said, looking ashamed. She left for the backyard along with the rest of the group.

  Brooklyn opened a cupboard and handed Jenna a platter. It had a picture of the Little Mermaid on it.

  Jenna was delighted. “Are you a Disney fan?”

  “We’re running low on dishware,” Brooklyn said. “It was my niece’s.”

  “How cute. So your family lives in town?” Jenna asked, as she stacked pizza slices on the platter.

  “Afraid so. All twelve million of them,” Brooklyn said.

  Jenna chuckled. “That big?”

  “No one in my family ever leaves Merrell. We’re what you’d call close-knit.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Dale rushed back in. “Jenna, I need help out here,” she said, her voice raising an octave or two.

  Jenna handed Brooklyn the platter of pizza and said, “Duty calls. Maybe we can continue this conversation later?”

  “I’d like that,” Brooklyn said.

  Jenna followed Dale out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. “What’s going on? Is it Naomi?”

  “Not yet. She’s got a gathering, but so far nothing outrageous. This time it’s Cindy. She’s talking to a doctor.”

  “Why, is she sick?”

  “No, but I’m afraid the doctor might be. Try to act casual. Let’s casually saunter to within listening distance.”

  They casually sauntered until they were only five feet away from Cindy and the doctor. They struck poses of nonchalance and Jenna stole a quick look at the doctor. She looked… what was the word?...horrified. Jenna listened closely.

  “Wait, I have another one,” Cindy said. “Doctor, doctor, my leg hurts. What can I do? Limp, says the doctor.” Cindy laughed. “Did you think that one was funny?”

  “No,” the doctor said.

  “Okay, here’s another: The patient says, ‘Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Cindy raised her arm and mock-winced. “Then the doctor says, ‘Don’t do that.’”

  Cindy laughed at her own joke. The doctor didn’t.

  “What the hell? Are those Henny Youngman jokes?” Jenna asked Dale. “My grandpa loved him.”

  “I think so,” Dale said.

  Cindy continued, “My doctor grabbed my wallet and said, cough.”

  “What in the world is she doing?” Jenna hissed.

  “I think she got it from the Dating 1.0 handout. Remember the part that said ‘Be fun?’ She’s taking it literally.”

  “It said be fun not be funny.”

  “The doctor said, ‘You’ll live to be sixty. The patient said, But I am sixty,’” Cindy continued. The woman tried to walk away, but Cindy grabbed her arm, saying, “Wait, I have more.”

  “Let’s get her out of there,” Jenna said, “before that woman coldcocks her for being an idiot.”

  Dale approached Cindy and the doctor. She took Cindy by the arm and said, “There you are. I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  The doctor flashed one last dirty look at Cindy before stalking off. As soon as she was out of hearing distance, Dale said, “What on earth were you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That was worse than juggling,” Jenna said, joining them.

  “What’d I do?” Cindy said. “I’m supposed to be fun, right?”

  “Okay, don’t worry. Doctors can be a prickly bunch. It’s all that malpractice insurance they have to deal with,” Jenna said. “But I think you should lay off the jokes. They can be dangerous around lesbians. They have a lot of sore points and you don’t want to aggravate them.”

  Cindy nodded and eyed the fruit table.

  “Why don’t you and I go mingle?” Dale said. “I’ll help you.”

  “Okay,” Cindy said. She glanced over Dale’s shoulder at the doctor who stared at her and then looked away. “And she seemed so nice.”

  “It’s okay. We’ll find someone else to talk to.”

  “Maybe someone with a sense of humor this time,” Cindy whined.

  Jenna watched Melody talking to a woman by the fruit table. Brooklyn came over. “What’s up?”

  “Do you know that woman over there talking to Melody?”

  Brooklyn nodded. “I know everyone here.”

  “No, I don’t mean just know her. I mean know her, know her. Intimately.”

  Brooklyn raised an eyebrow. Jenna realized her mistake. “Not that kind of ‘intimately.’ Or it could be that you know her that way, but that’s not what I was asking.”

  “I know what you mean, but just for the record, I haven’t slept with…” Brooklyn stopped then opted for honesty. “Most of the women here. And definitely not Allie.”

  “Why not?” Jenna asked. She watched as Melody gestured wildly with her hands. It didn’t look like it was going so well.

  “Allie just got out of a relationship and I stay away from rebounds,” Brooklyn said.

  Jenna wondered if she qualified as a rebound case. What was the moratorium on that? Three days? Four weeks? Ten months?

  Brooklyn must’ve sensed her thoughts. “Allie broke up with her girlfriend two months ago and it’s all she talks about. It’s kind of a turnoff and a red flag that she’s nowhere near ready to date again.”

  Jenna wondered if she still did that. “Did you talk about your ex a lot in the beginning?”

  Brooklyn shrugged. “Not really. I discovered a much better way to handle it. I write letters of complaint to my ex but I don’t send them. I keep them in my file cabinet. I figure in ten years, I’ll get them out and have a good laugh.”

  “That is a brilliant idea.” Jenna looked up at Brooklyn and took a deep breath. “Can we go on a date, you know, like a date-date where it’s just us and not them?” she cocked her head in the general direction of her clients.

  “But they’re so much fun,” Brooklyn mock-whined.

  But Jenna didn’t get a response to her date question because at that moment Melody got a bowl of mixed fruit dumped on her head. Allie dusted off her hands and stomped away, leaving Melody with fruit juice dripping down the sides of her face.

  Jenna rushed to her rescue. She took the bowl off Melody’s head and plucked a pineapple wedge out of her ear. “You okay?”

  Melody’s bottom lip pooched out like she was going to cry at any second. Jenna didn’t blame her. Everyone at the party was staring and pointing at her. Brooklyn stood back a few yards, unsure of what to do or say.

  Jenna tried for a lighter note, “Hey, it’s okay. Look at it this way: You can always do a Carmen Miranda impersonation.”

  Brooklyn joined them and asked, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Melody said. “I was only trying to share interests with her. She owns a fruit company.”

  Cindy rushed over with several paper nap
kins and blotted the juice off Melody’s ruined white polo shirt.

  “How exactly did you try to share interests?” Jenna inquired.

  Melody said, “All I did was say she had nice melons and that I couldn’t wait to taste her mango. I thought she would appreciate a good fruit metaphor.” Her sudden tears mixed with the fruit juice and both ran down her cheeks, leaving sticky trails.

  Jenna and Brooklyn exchanged looks then had to stifle their laughter.

  “Oh, honey, stop crying. You’re sticky enough,” Cindy said. “Come inside and I’ll help you clean up.” Cindy put her arm around Melody’s waist and they walked toward the house.

  Jenna and Brooklyn stared after them. “Well, that makes two strikeouts,” Jenna said.

  “I don’t know,” Brooklyn said, pointing at Melody and Cindy. They were now holding hands. “Looks to me like they’re both back in the game.”

  ***

  “Code Pink! We have a Code Pink!” Dale shouted through cupped hands.

  Jenna shouted back from the other side of the yard, “What’s a Code Pink?”

  Dale ran across the lawn and up to Jenna. “It means…” she panted, “lesbian down.” She took a deep breath and added, “We have a lesbian down.”

  That’s when Jenna looked around. She’d been so busy talking to Brooklyn (okay, let’s be honest…she was lost in Brooklyn’s piercing blue eyes and oblivious to everything around her) that she hadn’t noticed the entire party had moved to the very back of the yard.

  “Is it Naomi?” Jenna asked.

  Dale nodded. “We have to do something.”

  Jenna and Brooklyn headed toward the throng of women who were whooping and shouting. Jenna pushed her way through the crowd. She thought she was prepared for anything. But she certainly didn’t expect to see this.

  Brooklyn joined her and they both stared at the scene in front of them.

  Finally, Jenna said, “I didn’t know you had a mud wrestling pit in your backyard.”

  “I didn’t know either,” Brooklyn said.

  “So, where’d all this mud come from?”

  “I’m wagering it came from next door. Our neighbor is a landscaper. He’s got heaps of dirt. I just hope they didn’t accidentally use his compost pile,” Brooklyn said.

  Standing in the middle of the mud was Naomi. She sludged through the muck, completely naked, her hands held over her head in a victory pose. “Who’s next? Who wants to wrestle me next?” she shouted.

  A limp, muddy body crawled out of the mud pit behind Naomi. The defeated woman looked like the picture of the first woman climbing out of the primordial soup onto land.

  Naomi bent over and grabbed two fistfuls of mud. She threw it into the crowd, splattering innocent bystanders. They booed and hissed at Naomi like she was a professional wrestler.

  “I’m so sorry about this,” Jenna said. But, to her surprise, Brooklyn didn’t seem alarmed. She wasn’t mad. She didn’t even appear to be a little peeved. In fact, she was smiling. She was watching Naomi and enjoying herself as much as the rest of the partygoers.

  “Isn’t this fun?” Brooklyn said.

  Jenna nodded. She didn’t want to be labeled as a stick in the mud.

  That’s when she saw it. Or rather, that’s when she saw them. “Oh no!” she yelled. But everyone was too busy hooting and hollering at Naomi’s strutting antics to see what Jenna was pointing at.

  Melody, now wearing a rainbow hoodie and mostly cleaned of sticky fruit juice, and Cindy (wearing a matching hoodie) sneaked up behind the humorless doctor. They pushed the doctor, who lost her footing and slid into the mud pit. Naomi pounced! She straddled the doctor’s prone body and forcefully rubbed the doctor’s face between her well-shaped, muddy, breasts. It was impossible to tell if the doctor liked it or not. The crowd roared its approval.

  Melody and Cindy ran off, hand in hand, giggling.

  Jenna couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You think that’s funny?” Brooklyn said with a grin.

  Jenna couldn’t stop laughing. She nodded and managed to say in spurts, “Yes. Is. Funny. Very.”

  “Then you’ll think this is really funny,” Brooklyn said as she scooped Jenna into her strong arms and waded out into the mud pit.

  “Put me down! What’re you doing?” Jenna yelped.

  “Oh, you want me to put you down?” Brooklyn asked. “Okay…” She dumped Jenna to the ground, splattering mud everywhere.

  Jenna quickly reached out and grabbed Brooklyn’s leg and pulled. Brooklyn slipped and fell to her butt beside Jenna.

  And that’s all the party needed. Everyone waded into the mud and began to wrestle and throw mud at each other, laughing and cheering.

  It was one big mud party.

  Half an hour later, Jenna crawled out of the pit. She was completely covered in mud. She knew she must look like Al Jolson when he did his famous “My Mammy” song.

  Brooklyn crawled up next to Jenna and sat beside her. They sat shoulder to shoulder and watched the mud wrestling party.

  “Why is it that every time we get together it involves decontamination and a hazmat team?” Jenna asked.

  “Must be our chemistry.”

  “You know…” Jenna said, using her index finger to draw a question mark in the mud on Brooklyn’s leg, “you never answered my question about the date-date.”

  “I would love to go on a date-date with you. But only on the condition that nothing slippery occurs,” Brooklyn said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t guarantee that.”

  “Good,” Brooklyn said. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “I’m still finding mud in places where mud should not be,” Dale said over the phone.

  “That’s something I never thought I’d hear you say,” Jenna said. She sipped coffee and stared out her balcony doors at the heat waves drifting up from the asphalt parking lot. She wore her usual Sunday attire of boxers, a tank top, and zombie slippers. The slippers had been a gift from Taylor last Christmas. Taylor had been astounded that Jenna did not like The Walking Dead series. Jenna had hated the slippers at first until she found them comfortable. They saved on laundering socks because she didn’t have to wear any in the house. Once she’d gotten past having bloodshot eyeballs glaring up at her from the toes of her feet, she liked the slippers just fine.

  “Did you know that Naomi went home with the I-hate-Henny-Youngman-jokes doctor woman?” Dale asked.

  “Uh, no, I did not. God, I hope she doesn’t sue us.”

  “I don’t think Naomi is the suing kind,” Dale said.

  “I didn’t mean Naomi. I meant the doctor.”

  “Don’t worry, I made the clients sign a waiver.”

  When they had started the business, Dale had drawn up the contracts, and evidently a waiver, and had had Taylor’s lawyer check them over.

  “So what does the waiver say exactly?” Jenna asked.

  “That we cannot be responsible for any dismemberments, back injuries, contracting of STDs, broken hearts, mental instabilities as a result of a broken heart, and lots of other things, including deaths that are caused by our clients. Trust me we’re covered. Naomi’s on her own with this one.”

  “That’s good to know, but what about the doctor? She was prickly about health care issues, how’s she going to feel about multiple personalities?”

  “Not our circus,” Dale said. “Hold on a sec.” She pulled away from the phone, but Jenna heard her say, “I have no sympathy for you.”

  Jenna heard Taylor moan.

  “What happened?” Jenna asked.

  Dale came back on the line. “She’s got a mud mat in her hair. Can’t get it out.”

  “What’s that?” Jenna asked, envisioning a welcome mat or a placemat attached to Taylor’s head.

  “She’s got mud caked into a bunch of hair in the back of her head and it’s so knotted up she can’t get it out. I’m probably going to have to cut it out but she doesn’t know that yet.”


  “Better get her to sign a waiver,” Jenna said.

  Dale chuckled. “Okay, enough mud. I want the dirt on Brooklyn. You see what I did there? Mud, dirt...get it?”

  “Corny.”

  “I couldn’t help myself. So, spill the dirt.”

  “What dirt are you speaking of?” Jenna flung herself down on the couch and had a fleeting vision of flinging Brooklyn down on the couch in a moment of unbridled passion. Jenna never did understand that phrase. She didn’t see passion as a horse with bridles.

  “You, Brooklyn, and something about a date,” Dale said.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “I thought my best friend would tell me that, but I heard it from a little birdie and before you ask, I will not name my source.”

  “I was going to tell you. I’m still processing it myself.”

  “I want you to know I’m really proud of you,” Dale said.

  Jenna heard Taylor say in the background, “It’s about time you got back on the horse.”

  “We don’t need any help from the peanut gallery,” Dale replied.

  “Taylor’s right, though. It is time I got back on the horse. I think I’m going to donate my entire Melissa Etheridge CD collection to the Lesbians for Life and Liberty Community Center.”

  Jenna looked at her wall cabinet full of CDs. Every song of Melissa’s seemed to hold special memories of Lee and their six years together. And after Lee left, she had found even more songs that resonated with her. In fact, it seemed that love songs could be divided into two categories: “Love songs” and “Love lost songs.”

  It occurred to Jenna that she had wrapped herself (and her broken heart) up in sad songs for the past ten months. Like a child who wraps herself up in a blanket so the monster under the bed can’t get her.

  “Good. I’m glad you’re going to donate them. Because if you didn’t, I was going to do it for you,” Dale said.

  “What were you going to do? Hire a burglar to break in and haul them away?”Jenna asked.

  “Taylor could find one. She knows a lot of people.”

  “Burglars? Really?”

  “One can never tell with her. She might know a ring of love thieves who go into people’s houses. They take all the lost-love mementos so lesbians can move on and find a new and improved lover.”