Rock with Me (With Me in Seattle, #4)(93)

She flashes me a warm smile that shows off perfect teeth.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey.”

“This placed is jammed today.”

“It’s like this every Sunday. The food is amazing.”

“I’ve heard great things about it. I’m so excited to finally try it.”

Okay, maybe I won’t need the laptop. Maybe this gal and I will chat for the next thirty minutes, seeing as she’s mighty friendly. I wouldn’t mind the company, to tell the truth. It beats eating over a keyboard. “You will not be disappointed. Everything’s good.”

“My husband said he’s been wanting to go to this place for the longest time. He’s just out parking the car,” she says and tips her forehead to the door.

I half expected her to say her dad was going to join her because she looks like a teenager. But maybe she was a teenage bride. “Well, both of you will love it then. I’m a total regular. A devotee, as they say,” I add in a silly little affected accent that makes her laugh.

“What do you recommend?”

“Anything. Except for hard-boiled eggs, because they’re totally gross.”

“Oh god, yes. They’re so gross. Like the most disgusting food ever.”

I lean closer and say in a conspiratorial whisper. “My ex used to love them. I couldn’t even be in the house when he ate hard-boiled eggs.”

“You want to hear something funny? My husband used to love them too. But I laid down the law. No hard-boiled eggs ever in my house. I cured him of his hard-boiled egg addiction like that.” She snaps her fingers.

I hold up a hand to high five her. “You deserve major points for that.”

“Oh, look. There he is,” she says, and when I turn to follow her gaze, it’s as if I’ve just had a pair of cleats jammed into my belly, and I don’t even play softball. But I bet this is what it feels like when the batter slides into home and you’re the catcher who’s not wearing a chest protector.

Blindsided.

Because she’s looking at Todd.

The diner is shrinking. The walls are closing in, gripping me. I can’t breathe. This has to be a mistake. An error. She has to be joking. I have to be seeing things. There is no way her husband can be Todd. There must be another man behind him, maybe a short man I can’t see. A pipsqueak little fellow right behind Todd, who’s walking over to her table. But there’s no mini man hiding behind him. It’s just him, and he freezes when he sees me, then quickly recovers, taking the seat across from his wife.

Wife.

It’s as if there’s a knife in my heart, digging for all the soft spots and scooping them out. Serving them up on the table for the two of them. The girl-child I’ve been chatting with, my new f*cking breakfast best friend, is the college-age creature from Vegas who stole my about-to-be-husband.

I’ve never seen her in person before. I have only seen one photo I found of her on Facebook the day after his voicemail, as I sobbed and clicked, surrounded by unopened wedding gifts sent to our apartment. Now I feel stupid for not studying her photos more, for not hunting out more pictures of her online. I stopped after that one – a faraway shot of her at a gymnastics meet since, of course, she’s a gymnast – because it hurt far too much. But now with her here in front of me, I catalogue her features. Her cheeks are red and rosy, her skin is soft and smooth, her hair is natural blonde and sleek, and her boobs remind me of Salma Hayek’s.

They’re so freaking huge.

Fine, I’m only six years older, but I have dark hair, and weird eyes that are sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes gray, and my breasts are decent, but not dead ringers for cantaloupes. I’m only twenty-seven and I know it sucks to be left at any age. But the fact that he left me for a co-ed – giving himself a trophy wife for all intents and purposes – didn’t help my self-esteem. I’d been with him for five years; she’d been with him for one night, and she got him all the way to the altar. I got stuck with two mixers I never use, and party-of-one as my middle name.

“Hi McKenna,” Todd says in his best business-like voice.

“Oh….” It’s like a long, slow release of air from Amber, as her mouth drops open, and she shifts her gaze from him to me, registering who she’s been chatting with.

She recovers faster than me though, because I’m still speechless and stuck in this chair, sitting next to Amber. She is the name of all my heartbreak, of all the ways I fell short. Amber is the name that drummed through my brain for the better part of the last twelve months, like an insistent hum in the pipes you can’t turn off. Amber, Amber, Amber. The woman he wanted. The woman he chose. I will never hear that name without thinking of all that she has that I don’t. The man I once wanted to marry.

“You know, why don’t we just get a new table?” she says to Todd.

He scans the restaurant. This is the last empty table. “There’s no place else to sit,” he says, and it’s clear he has no intention of leaving.

What’s also clear is that he’s the only of us – him and me – who doesn’t care that he ran into his ex-fiancé. That realization smacks me hard, but it reminds me that I need to pull myself together and channel whatever reserves of steely coolness I have in me.

“It’s fine. I’m almost done anyway,” I manage to say even though my food hasn’t arrived.