I hadn’t been expecting that. “I really just stopped by to say hi,” I said. “If you’ve got other plans.”
“Oh my God, no,” he said. “You do not just come by after ten years and stay for ten minutes. Besides, I am starving. Only so many carrot sticks you can eat in the greenroom, right?”
“What, Cindy Smithson’s mom doesn’t bring brownies anymore?” I joked. Rumor had it that Cindy had gotten the lead in every show because her mother made these incredible brownies with a secret recipe she wouldn’t even give Cindy. For all we knew, the white powder she dusted them with was pure cocaine, but they were so insanely delicious even McGruff the Crime Dog would have taken one taste and said, Eh, it’s worth it.
Jeremy made an exaggerated orgasm face and let out a dreamy sigh. “Don’t tease me with memories of postshow chocolate,” he said. “I would kill—literally, murder my director and his whole family—for one of those brownies. I swear to God I still dream about them.”
If the waiting fangirls overheard his plot, it didn’t deter them from continuing to push pens and “Ermahgerd, you’re sooo great!” in his direction. I beamed as I watched him sign autographs and pose for pictures with his radioactive smile.
“Are you his girlfriend?” one plump girl in a short, sequined tulle skirt and a souvenir T-shirt asked.
“Just an old friend,” I replied. “We used to do musicals in high school together.”
“You are so lucky,” she said. “I wish some of the boys in my school had talent like his. He is totes amazing.”
A sharp whistle blast ricocheted off the brick alley walls and the girls all shuffled toward their chaperones, some beaming as they posted their photos for all to see, others glum that they’d been ushered away before they could brush up against Jeremy’s fame, as though it might rub off on them as they headed for their own college auditions.
“Do you want my autograph too?” he said to me when the last one had turned the corner out of the alley.
“I have an original cast recording, Bright Lights, Little City, from before you were a star,” I said. “Maybe I’ll put it on eBay, let all your fangirls clamor for it.”
His eyes got wide. “Ohmigod, you are so cute,” he said. “I can’t believe you still have that. Didn’t I put ‘Spice Up Your Life’ on there?”
“‘2 Become 1,’ but close,” I said.
“A few years ago, I was in London doing Guys and Dolls—I was Benny Southstreet—and Geri Halliwell brought Bluebell to see the show. When she got backstage and told me how much she loved me singing ‘Guys and Dolls,’ I just. About. Died. So, dinner? I have to get changed first, but come on, come backstage, I’ll make some introductions.” He pulled out his phone and hit a number. I could hear ringing. “You really have to come see the show sometime,” he said while he waited for the other line to pick up.
“Hi, Jim, look, I’m going to be back late, you won’t believe who I ran into—Jett!” He smiled at me. “No, you remember, she was a girl I did theater with in high school. Oh stop, you’ve seen pictures of her. No, that was Cindy, Jett was Lily. Anyways, she’s in NYC and we’re going out to dinner, you want me to bring you something? Okay, then I’ll see you at home. No, I won’t be too late. Love you. Bye.”
I asked a question I already knew the answer to, just to be polite. “Who was that?”
“My fiancé, Jim,” he said. “He’s the best. Too often you date these theater guys who mince and prance and will stab you in the back the minute you are up for a part they want. Not Jim. I had to drag him to opening night; show tunes are just not his thing and it is such a relief.”
I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I should have been. Not because he was in musical theater, not because he loved the Spice Girls, not because he’d never tried to take off my bra. He hadn’t set off a gaydar or flailed about like a token character in a cheap sitcom. There’d just been something otherworldly about him that I’d always chalked up to having a big personality in a too-small town. Now it all made sense, and I was happy that he was able to make sense of it himself, to construct his psyche into something beautiful.
Chapter 12
THIS CHARMING MAN
Jeremy and I got dinner at TGI Fridays, for old times’ sake, making dinner out of appetizers and ordering our daiquiris virgin.
“Jim would never let me get away with this,” he said, catching stray mozzarella-stick cheese on his index finger before popping it into his mouth. “Ugh, last year he went through a vegan phase; we almost had to break up. Even now if I order bacon at breakfast, it’s like I’m cheating on him.” He took out his phone and held it up, pulling me in close. “Let’s taunt him with our love affair,” he said, picking up a potato skin and passing it to me.
We both made ironic duck faces and I held the potato skin up to his mouth, tilting it so Jim could see all the bacon piled on top. The flash went off and he quickly texted it. A few minutes later the phone buzzed with a photo of Jim, spooning a piece of cake into his gaping maw. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and clever eyes, a striped polo shirt and a leather cuff bracelet. “He went out and got an Entenmann’s lemon cake,” Jeremy explained. “He knows I love them, and now he’s threatening to eat the whole thing before I get home. What a jerk!” A second message rang in and he smiled. “Jim says you’re very pretty,” he read. “He can’t wait to meet you.”
My own phone buzzed with a message from Sid, his picture flashing up on the screen. “Who’s that?” Jeremy said, snatching my phone out of my hand. “He’s cute. Jett, please tell me he’s your boyfriend.”
“Just a friend,” I said, surprised at how sour the words tasted on my tongue. I took a bite of brownie sundae to wash out the taste. “Wants to know if we’re still on for TV Tuesday night.” I texted him back a yes as I talked. “We’ve been doing these cop-show marathons.” I still hadn’t come up with an apology, but if he was trying to set up dinner plans, maybe that was his way of letting it all go. Chalk it up to a lack of sleep and pretend it never happened.
“That is too darling,” he said. “Jim is addicted to Cold Case—the two of them could talk about that while we sing show tunes on the Wii in the den.”
I laughed. “That sounds like the best double date imaginable.”
“Then let’s make it happen. I’m going on tour with Jesus Christ Superstar—I’m playing Herod, obviously, duh—in two weeks, but when I get back, we’ll make a plan.”
He paid the check and held my hand as we walked to the subway. “I’m so sorry I didn’t keep in better touch,” he lamented. “It wasn’t personal; it wasn’t even gotta-get-out-of-this-small-town angst. I’d think about you and plan to look you up and then I’d just . . . forget. You know how it goes.”
“It was just time,” I said in agreement. “I could have looked you up too, but life gets busy.”
There was a warm glow of pride in my heart. He had made it. Where everyone else in our small-town class—including me—seemed so doomed for dead ends and middle management, he’d clawed his way to the top of his dream. If it had been anyone else, I might have been envious, but I loved Jeremy with the soft, sweet kind of love that stays long after you’ve set a man free to fulfill his destiny. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
He took both my hands and kissed me on the cheek. “It’s really great to see you,” he said. “Of all the girls I tried to date, you were always my favorite.”
I drifted all the way home on that compliment. The idiot rom-com part of my brain wanted to be a little sad, to feel cheated that the two of us would never be together even though he was so perfect. I saved his number in my phone. His CD didn’t go back in the Boyfriend Box. Instead, I put it on the shelf with the rest of my musicals. It deserved no less of an honor.
There was a postcard from my grandmother in my mailbox. Greetings from Paris, love from her and Royale. I fed Baldrick and added Jeremy on Facebook. I sent a friend request to his fiancé too.
Okay, so maybe I couldn’t date Je
remy—but I was starting to feel confident that I could reclaim my past, make right the wrongs that had taken love from me in the first place.
Chapter 13
NOT ABOUT LOVE
Even after work on Tuesday, Sid was carrying a fresh cup of coffee. It had only been a few days since I’d seen him, but he looked exhausted and jittery, like a junkie informant on prime time. He hadn’t shaved since brunch and his wrinkled blue dress shirt only made his eyes look more bloodshot. “Rough couple of nights?” I asked.
I wasn’t expecting him to smile and I sure as hell wasn’t expecting him to reply, “Best nights of my life.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Care to share?”
Instead of answering, he produced a corkscrew from his jacket pocket and wrestled with a bottle of pinot noir while I lit the candles. “One of these days I’ll buy you a damn corkscrew,” he teased.
“But then you won’t have an excuse to come over anymore.”
“I’m sure I could find one,” he said, handing me a glass of wine. “After all, we haven’t even started on Magnum, PI.”
Normally Sid and I just ate frozen stuff from my Trader Joe’s pilgrimages. My kitchen was a joke; while all my peers were starting food blogs and writing recipes for making gluten-free vegan lasagna in the microwave, a real fancy night for me might involve putting bacon, eggs, and toast all on the same plate. But tonight I’d planned ahead and bought a chuck roast to braise in my grandmother’s Crock-Pot. My mother had e-mailed me her secret barbecue sauce recipe, given to her by a North Carolina cousin who swore all three of her husbands had proposed after the first bite. I’d burned myself browning it and almost dropped it on the floor, but all that was forgotten as the whole apartment filled with the smell of late summer.
I wasn’t expecting Sid to propose, but I felt bad about the last few times we’d gotten together—KitKat’s memorial, the incident at Egg School, all my snark about his stripper love interest—and if there was any way to a man’s heart, my mother’s cousin told me, it was through meat.
“Everything smells delicious,” he said. “You couldn’t buy this scent at Whole Foods or Fairway.”
“I slaved over the Crock-Pot all day,” I joked, holding up my glass for a toast. “Cheers, Sid.”
“Cheers, Jett.”
I took a drink and mmm’d in approval. I’d gone through a brief wine snob phase—like everyone did—when Sideways came out; Catch, Reese, and I would go for tastings because it was the cheapest way to get a drink, buy ten-dollar cabs and pinots and imagine we could taste notes of grass and strawberries. But now, thankfully, I just drank it like a normal person.
Sid put on Duran Duran’s Rio while I plated our meals. “What’s this?” he asked, picking up KitKat’s tape from where I’d left it sitting on the end of the table, next to mail for my grandmother. “A mix tape?” He examined it like Indiana Jones. “Wow, I can’t even remember the last time I held one of these.”
Panic. I hadn’t meant to leave it out, but I’d been caught, and if I was going to fess up to anyone, it would be Sid. After all, he was the only one who knew I’d found her body. “It was for KitKat,” I said, putting down our plates and taking my seat. “It ended up in my mailbox by mistake. . . . When I took it downstairs . . .” I took a long drink of wine, as though that could wash my memory clean.
He squeezed my hand under the table. “Who made it for her?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” I said after swallowing. “Call me crazy, but I cannot get over this weird feeling that something on that tape is linked to her murder.”
“What, you mean like a full confession?” he asked. “How convenient would that be, Joe Friday?”
“I don’t think it’s that,” I said. “It’s just this feeling I’ve got. Call it a hunch if you want to get technical.”
“The best detectives listen to their guts,” he said. “What do you have so far?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a set of initials—GPL, a mystery in itself. Her sister gave me a box of tapes and there were three others from the same person, but no picture, no one with those initials on her Facebook or Twitter, nothing to say who he—or she—is. The secrecy alone is enough to make me suspect.”
“So you think maybe she had something going on the side,” he said, finishing my thought. “That doesn’t make Bronco look too good.”
“I know, and that’s why I want to figure this all out,” I said. “Bronco’s my friend too; I saw him the morning she was killed. I don’t want to believe that he could do this, but if he did, I want to be able to hand over the most damning piece of evidence.” I took a bite and chewed for a minute before continuing. “My friend Marty suggested I call Josie; heard she had a tape player. Maybe once I know what’s on it, I’ll get a better sense of its connection. Unless there isn’t one, of course. Then it’s back to one—or worse, zero.”
Sid leaned back in his chair and grinned. “I’m impressed,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t have put those pieces together.”
“What else could I do?” I asked. “She was my friend, and with Bronco on the ropes for her murder, I don’t see any other choice.”
He wiped barbecue sauce off the corner of his mouth and stood up. “And that, Miss Bennett, is why you’re Sherlock. I’ll be your Watson, if you’ll have me.”
I loved when he called me Miss Bennett. Coming from anyone without a southern accent, it might have sounded corny, but the lilt in his voice sent shivers down my spine. I held out my hand and he escorted me to standing. “I welcome your assistance, Mr. McNeill.”
“Guess this means our weekly viewings have turned into training,” he said. “Maybe we should be taking notes.”
“Sid, it’s bad enough no one invites me to record parties anymore, not after I derided Mumford and Sons as being ‘like Flogging Molly if all the punk rhythms and talent was removed,’” I said. “Can you please let me just watch TV for the sake of watching TV?”
“Fair enough,” he said. He picked up the tape again and held it between two fingers. “I can’t even remember the last time someone made me a mix CD, let alone a tape. But when you hear that first song and your heart soars and you know . . .” He sighed. “It’s the best feeling in the whole fucking world.”
Chapter 14
THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET
It was two days later when Josie called me back. “Sorry, I was doing a wedding out on Shelter Island,” she said. “Huge affair, but they let me use their kitchen. It was bigger than my apartment, I swear. But I’m free this evening and I have a ton of leftovers.”
“Can I bring anything?” I asked.
“Just a bottle of wine,” she said. “White, dry, don’t pay more than fifteen bucks. Call when you get here and I’ll buzz you up.”
I put Sid’s copy of Go West on the turntable and spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to put together an outfit that conveyed casual carelessness with deliberate intent. I settled on a silkscreened squirrel shirt I got at the last Irony Auction, a gray dad cardigan, and leggings with ankle boots. The only thing separating my ensemble from straight-up pajamas was the red pashmina I’d picked up on St. Mark’s. But a pashmina, I realized as I walked out the door, is really just a security blanket adults can wear.
At Bouquet Liquors I picked out an eleven-dollar Riesling with a funky label. That was how Catch and I had always picked out wine. I hadn’t had a Riesling since we’d broken up, and it seemed so long ago, I couldn’t remember if it was a deliberate act of casting him off or just changing taste. It left me with two bucks cash and less than a hundred in my checking with student loan payment due soon. I was going to have to get work—real, full days of work, not just three-hour washerwoman duties—soon.
Josie lived in a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights above one of those boutiques that carries only four items, none of which are in your size. She’d painted each wall a different color: green around the kitchenette, blue behind the futon—which had striped sheet
s on it—bright red behind the record cabinet and bookshelves, and purple in the bathroom.
“I like your scarf,” she said after hugging me at the door. Today, hers was blue, worn over an untucked black blouse so sheer it looked like it was made of spiderwebs and dreams.
She already had our two plates waiting on the table, plated effortlessly with frilly-toothpick meatballs, caprese salad, and tiny egg rolls. “These were just the prewedding appetizers,” she said, pouring the wine into Pokémon juice glasses. I got Meowth; she had Togepi. “I must have made twenty different tapas plates, and bridezilla had the nerve to bitch that my quiche cups didn’t look exactly like the ones on her Pinterest board. By the end, I wanted to dump a tray of chicken satay on her head. But eat up, there’s plenty more. I know I’m supposed to get rid of it after the event, but that just seems so wasteful for such good food.”
“I won’t sue if I get food poisoning,” I joked. I hadn’t eaten since the scrambled eggs and toast I made for breakfast, and I was so hungry it was taking everything I had not to just dump the entire plate into my face, frilly toothpicks and all.
She held up her glass for a toast. “To KitKat,” she said.
“To KitKat,” I repeated, clinking my cup against hers. I tasted Catch in the first sip. His hands, his eyes, his laugh all washed over my palate. Memory linked this bottle with the last one we’d shared, watching Pacific Heights on VHS while the entire city was shut down with snow, his arms around me, wine-fragrant breath warm on my cheek. But now I wanted to spit him out, wash him away with Listerine, bleach him out of my brain and blood and heart forever. Instead, I crammed a meatball into my mouth and tried not to cry.
“So let’s get to this tape,” Josie said, taking a sip of her own drink. “I’m excited—when was the last time you got a real physical mix someone actually made?”
The Big Rewind Page 6