On the Rocks(12)

Just ask Napoleon.

Grace snapped her fingers in my face, forcing my wandering mind to focus on the conversation instead of on the image of myself walking down a church aisle looking like a giant stick of cotton candy. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me. I have to get out of the city on the weekends or I’ll go crazy. Please come with me. We both need to get away, and you know it.”

“Sorry, what?” I asked as I shook my head, hard, as if thrashing my skull would get the image of myself in that dress out of my head like it can get water out of your ear. For the record, it didn’t. All it did was make me look like I had a serious mental problem.

Awesome.

Grace, despite being one of the smarter girls I know, was in a very sticky situation at work. Actually, “sticky” probably wasn’t the right word to describe having an affair with a married colleague. I have no idea how you describe that. Don’t get me wrong, I love Working Girl just as much as the next person, but I really didn’t think that this love affair was going to end with her sitting in a corner office while “Let the River Run” played through a loudspeaker at her law firm. It was hard to be supportive of something that could single-handedly ruin every aspect of her life, but she was my best friend, and I would never turn my back on her. I hated what this relationship was doing to her and feared that she was on a collision course with disaster, but I was in no position to judge. I mean, I was basically having an affair with the frozen food section of the grocery store. For smart girls, both of us were pretty stupid when it came to handling relationships with the opposite sex. In fact, we sucked at it.

“So you want me to dip into my savings so that you can keep yourself busy while Johnny is home with his family?”

“No. You should dip into your savings because you’re too young to give up. If that’s not enough of a reason, then yes, you should do it because I’m your best friend and I need you and I would do the same for you.”

“I work with nuns. If I was having an affair with one, we’d have a shitload of other problems.”

“You know what I mean. It will be fun. My friend Bobby from law school is out of work right now. He’s living at his parents’ beach house for the summer with a friend while he looks for a job. I’m sure he has other friends he’s known forever bouncing around down there too. Some of them have to be cute and interesting, right? And since you’re very much single, and you clearly won’t be meeting a guy at work, I think it’s a great opportunity for you to start over. How many straight guys teach at your school anyway?”

“Zero.”

“Exactly. Which is why you should come to Newport and spend some time with normal adults. Get a tan. Drink some cocktails with umbrellas. Go for walks on the beach that will help your mental health and get you exercising again. Hang out with me and meet some new friends. And quit acting like you have so many more appealing options.”

Clearly, I didn’t. That being said, I still had some reservations.

Summer rentals are infamous for throwing disparate groups of people together who would otherwise never speak. Sometimes real friendships develop. But since I had no interest in meeting anyone new in my current mental state, I was pretty sure I was going to hate everyone. I had no doubt that Grace’s friend was a nice guy. At least, I really hoped that was the case, because the last thing I needed was to be forced to hang out all summer with another sociopathic male. The old me would’ve loved to be at the beach, but the new me was really worried that this random combination of people was going to cause more stress than anything else, and I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to make it through three months without spearing someone to death with barbecue tongs. Of course, the alternative was going home to my mom’s house to escape the brutal summer heat and living with my wedding-obsessed sister and intolerably psychotic mother. So maybe hanging out with a bunch of strange dudes and risking a lifetime sentence in a women’s prison somewhere was worth considering. Life has its trade-offs.

“Please don’t make me beg,” Grace added, looking at me with an expression that I had seen only a few times before, and then she was usually giving it to her father when she was trying to convince him to give her the car keys or let her go out with the captain of the football team in high school. No wonder he always gave in.

“Even if I did spend some of my savings on this, it doesn’t change the fact that you’ll be in the city all week. What will I do by myself? I don’t think spending that much time alone is necessarily good for my mental state either, ya know?”

“I told you. That’s what I think is great about this. You’ll be no more alone out there than you would be if you stayed locked in your apartment in the city. Get a job, hang out with Bobby and his friends. I’ll be working during the week one way or the other, so who will you hang out with if you stay here? I think getting a summer job is huge. It will give you extra money so you can stop bitching about the cost of the house, and it will get you away from your laptop and that toxic cyber-relationship you’re clinging to like a security blanket. He’s gone, Abby. He’s not coming back. Answering his messages is an epic waste of your time and only makes him feel like less of an *.”

I knew she was right. Once again, my mind drifted back to Ben.

Damn. Make that eleven times since I woke up. I was so hoping that today would be better.