Page 22 of The Ex-Best Thing
“No, not today. Thanks, honey.”
“Are you—” I keep my gaze straight ahead. Grandma won’t like me asking about her wellbeing, but I have no choice. I try to keep my tone light. “You feeling okay?”
“I’ll let you go.” I take this to mean she won’t give me an answer. At least I’ll be able to get in her house when I have her toilet paper. “Love you, Benny.”
“Love you, too.”
Bree reaches for the phone and hangs up for me. “She’s delightful.”
“I think you’d like each other, which is why you’ll never meet.”
“Unfair.”
A Jaida song comes on the radio, and Bree reaches forward to turn it off.
“Not a fan?” I ask, but I know the answer already. She and Jaida have very public beef with each other, though no one really knows why. It’s not why I turned down that collaboration, obviously, but it didn’t help Jaida’s case either.
“Not really,” is all she says.
Jaida once walked out of the auditorium when Bree won album of the year, and Bree is known to move to the other side of the room when she spots Jaida at a party. To say they aren’t friends is an understatement.
We turn off Highway 1 and pull around the parking lot toward the bright blue community center, surrounded by shared garden plots. Smoke rises from the grills on the side of the building, protected against the worst of the wind, and I can smell the grill from here. Peter is standing beside his dad, flipping burgers, so I steer Bree toward the open doors.
“Benny,” she says, slightly panicked. “What do I do? What if my makeup isn’t enough? What if my voice is too easy to recognize? What if?—”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I soothe.
Rose spots us, homing in like a missile detector. I can tell she’s coming to talk to me, so I grab Bree’s hand and tug her around the corner. We’re still out in the open, but now we’re not in the direct view of the gathering group. “Take them off,” I suggest, nodding to her sunglasses. “I’ll tell you what I think.”
Bree removes the huge, black sunglasses and squints against the sunlight.
It’s her. Unmistakably her. When her face was half-covered in weird makeup the other night, she was a lot more disguised than this. The freckles help, and the eyeliner is a distraction, but I could still pick her out of a crowd in a heartbeat.
But…is that just me? Will this be enough to keep strangers from guessing who she is? The blonde wig and her lighter brows could really throw someone off.
Her round, brown eyes blink up at me in concern and I want to wipe her stress away. Even with the disguises, she’s beautiful. One wrong move, and everyone in that room will have her swarmed in minutes.
I haven’t told her this yet, but we’ve got a few Bree Belacourt superfans in our midst.
“Yeah, it’s no good. Keep the shades on.” I reach for her sunglasses and slide them over her eyes, my fingers brushing the soft skin on her cheekbones. I brainstorm. “What if you recently had eye surgery?”
“Okay. A medical excuse.” She nods as if she’s warming to the idea. “But that one won’t work. I still took my sunglasses off indoors pretty soon after my LASIK. How about…a concussion?”
“How did you get it?”
“Ben Rhodes!” Rose calls, coming around the corner. “Why are you running away from me? Come, give Auntie a hug.”
“Not my aunt,” I whisper quickly, then turn toward the vibrant Mexican woman in all orange. Yes, orange floral shirt, orange capris, and orange strappy sandals. There’s even orange in the scarf tied around her curly gray hair. “But pretty much the closest thing I have to one.”
“You got that right.” She pops a hand on her narrow hip. “Introduce me to your friend.”
“Anne,” I say, gesturing to Bree, “this is Rose, my grandma’s best friend and partner in crime.”
Bree smiles. “There’s a lot of crime talk going around today. I’d ask where you hid the bodies if you didn’t look so sweet.”
“Sweet?” Rose laughs heartily, a rich, deep sound that doesn’t seem like it should come from such a small person. “Come play bunco with us, and you’ll see just how sweet we are.”
Bree screws up her face, which is barely noticeable since her glasses are so large and cover half of it. “Isn’t bunco a game of luck?”
