Golden Girl(55)

The back of the house is all windows, and the lights are on so Amy can see, clear as day, Savannah and JP sitting at the kitchen island, a bottle of Casa Dragones tequila and a bowl of popcorn between them. Amy tiptoes to the windows so she can get a better look and try to hear what they’re saying—but the windows are closed. There’s air-conditioning.

Savannah has on white jeans and a black tank. She’s barefoot, wears no makeup or jewelry, and her hair is piled on top of her head in a bun. She’s talking, blinking rapidly, sipping tequila, and then her expression crumples and she starts to cry.

JP stands up. Please let him be leaving, Amy thinks. There’s no sign of dinner. Maybe they’ve already eaten, or maybe popcorn was the most Savannah could manage. JP holds out his arms and Savannah falls into them like a woman in a movie and starts sobbing into JP’s chest. He places one hand on her back and one on the back of her head and starts rocking side to side.

This is…awful. If Amy had just stayed home and imagined what was transpiring here at Entre Nous (“Between Us”) it couldn’t have been any more traumatizing than this.

They’re commiserating, Amy thinks. They lost someone important to them both and this dinner is necessary so they can talk and heal. Amy just has to be patient.

Savannah raises her face and gazes at JP with a vulnerable expression. Are they going to kiss? Are they? How many times has JP told Amy in detail what a bitch he thinks Savannah is? He was so ruthless that Amy found herself defending Savannah. She started an important charity, she saves children’s lives. And she’s got great style.

The moment lingers on, the two of them seemingly suspended in the moment just before a kiss.

Amy runs out of the yard. She catches her toe on the edge of one of the flagstones and goes flying to the ground, scraping her knee. She gets to her feet. She needs to go home and check JP’s top drawer to make sure her beautiful engagement ring is still there. But as she reaches the sidewalk and heads to her car, she knows she won’t find it. She knows it’s gone.



Her leg is bleeding, but she doesn’t care. She won’t get home before JP. She wants him to get home first and wonder where she is.

JP and Savannah? Impossible. Amy is sure he’ll pull away and say he has to go, and all the way home he’ll wonder what came over him, getting to the edge of an intimate moment like that. Amy reaches Main Street and thinks, Club Car piano bar? She can mix in with the mass of humanity belting out “Stop Dragging My Heart Around,” and no one will realize she’s by herself. But when she reaches the Club Car, there’s a line out the door. No, thank you. She considers Straight Wharf (the clientele is too young) and Cru (she has spent enough money at Cru this summer). She decides to head back to the Gaslight since Nick (sort of) invited her.

She can hear the band playing before she enters. She stops at the vending machine at the entry that dispenses tiny bottles of Mo?t et Chandon champagne for twenty dollars a pop (as it were). It’s gimmicky and exorbitant, but suddenly, Amy wants champagne to celebrate the hideous mess her life is rapidly becoming.

The champagne is delivered ice-cold. Amy drinks straight from the bottle, then wanders over to the bar, and, believe it or not, her very same stool is unoccupied. It’s magical, as though novelist Vivi has been holding this seat for Amy’s eventual return. But Amy’s not a character. She’s real. She hoists her petite bottle of Mo?t up to Nick in a cheers.

“Hey,” the guy next to her says. “Your leg is bleeding.”

Amy looks down at her leg. Yes, it’s pretty gruesome; there’s blood running down into her sandal.

The guy hands her a stack of cocktail napkins and she looks up at him. It’s Dennis.

“Oh,” Amy says. “Hey.”

Dennis laughs. “We have to stop meeting like this.” He peers behind her. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“Who?” Amy says, and Dennis laughs again. Dennis looks…okay. He has a tan that ends at his shirt collar and his eyes look intensely blue. There’s a Cisco Whale’s Tale in front of him. Is he here alone? “Are you here alone?”

“I am,” he says. “Beats sitting home in an empty house.”

Amy nods. Why is it fine for a man to sit at a bar alone but nothing short of pathetic for a woman? “JP is having dinner tonight with Savannah.”

“Ah,” Dennis says. “That must be tough on you.”

“It is,” Amy says, blinking against tears. Why is Dennis Letty the only person who has considered her feelings? She raises her bottle to Dennis’s blue can and they both drink.

“I’ll watch your seat,” Dennis says. “Why don’t you go clean up your leg and then we can dance.”

Dance with Dennis? Amy thinks. One part of her rebels against hooking up with another man that Vivi got to first. The other part says, Couldn’t hurt, sounds like fun.

“Okay,” she says. “Be right back.”





Vivi




When Vivi swoops down to check on Savannah, her BFF, the godmother of her children, the person whose advice and guidance she held above all others, she finds her in the kitchen of Entre Nous being rocked back and forth in a man’s arms.

Aha! Vivi thinks. Who have we here?

Then she sees it’s JP.

Plot twist! Vivi thinks. Savannah and JP hate each other. For the sixteen years that Vivi and JP were married, Vivi felt like the baby pulled between her mother and father in that grisly Raymond Carver story. JP felt threatened by Savannah for reasons Vivi could never quite understand (he probably sensed that Vivi’s loyalty to Savannah was stronger than her loyalty to him). Savannah, meanwhile, never thought JP was good enough. “He’s damaged,” Savannah used to say. “He never knew his father and he has an unhealthy relationship with his mother.”