Page 79 of Without a Clue

“Do you remember the first time we met?” Nash continues.

“Sure I do,” I say. “But nothing happened. It was just an ordinary day.”

“It’s funny, isn’t it, how two people can see life in extraordinarily different ways? Mark had asked me to come to lunch with him on the heels of news of his retirement. He wanted me to meet some of his friends. I didn’t want to, but he insisted, and he’d been a mentor to me for some time. Of course I had to say yes.”

I nod, remembering that day quite clearly.

In my memory, I was actually pretty distracted at that lunch. Hugh was two weeks out from his latest release and the publisher had lost their minds, going with a mere thirty thousand copies for the first printing. Consequently, and to no one’s surprise, stores had already sold out of whatever they’d been given, leaving frustrated bookstores with readers who wanted to pay good money, a frustrated publisher working to get a second printing underway as quickly as possible, frustrated readers trying to hunt the book down, and of course a completely oblivious Hugh going about his business and asking the waiter if he could order every single type of olive in the house and five glasses to perform a little test to see which exactly is the best in a dirty martini.

I was on the phone nonstop.

Oh, and it was my birthday.

Michael had promised to come home for it but ultimately decided (hindsight really is 20/20) it wasn’t worth the nine-hour drive and he was messaging me relentlessly, each time with a new reason it would be better to back out. Which was truly worse than just saying the inevitable bluntly, and a thousand times worse than choosing the mature route and apologizing for being a selfish pig and taking responsibility.

But no. Instead, he spent the entire day ruining my day by backing out.

Texting me about the horrible traffic on I-75.

Texting about how he had practice on Monday, and how he hated how painfully short the trip was going to have to be.

Texting about the horrible timing with him starting to feel sick.

Working his way to backing out instead of facing me directly and just saying, “Hey, I know this is a crap move, but I’m not going to come after all and I’m really sorry.”

Essentially pushing the move into my court until it sounded like I was selfish and a demanding girlfriend if I didn’t call it off.

And given I had told my roommates not to throw me a party they had initially insisted on, and had made reservations four months ahead of time to The Palm upon Michael’s insistence that the trendy new restaurant far out of my budget and frankly interest was our “must-do” for my birthday . . . let’s just say, it was a day of many, many distracting calls and texts swirled into the general emotions of angst and disappointment.

I wasn’t exactly at my best.

There’s a swoosh by my head and a flash of rhinestones as a woman glides past me and goes up the steps, the train of her black-rhinestone-studded dress following behind her. She stops at the second piano bench, tips her rhinestone hat to the applause of the crowd around us—a crowd getting larger by the minute—and swings her knees beneath the piano as she slides onto the bench.

I look around for multiple exits. My chest restricts further.

Ignore it, Penelope.

Tamp it down.

Tamp.

It.

Down.

Nash is oblivious. “You remember it?”

“I remember the restaurant staff getting way too invested in Hugh’s weird new conquest to determine the best olives,” I say, “and then of course Ricky totally freaking the waitress out when he grabbed her ankle underneath the table just to see what it would feel like in a scene he was writing—”

“I thought she was going to sue,” Nash says with a reminiscing grin.

“To his credit, he was aiming for Neena—and honestly, that would have been hilarious. And then Crystal tried to order chicken wings—”

“Of which there were none on the menu, naturally—”

“And Jackie called the hostess aside to ask her to ‘inform the owner of the establishment that the sign saying Des oreilles en chou-fleur is actually a taunt to readers that our ears are the size of cauliflowers, as anyone with even an amateur level of French would understand.’”

“And Gordon was still wearing his Gandalf hat,” I say. “So. Basically you saw a normal day at the office.”