Between daydreaming about a woman who had screamed at me in the park, and having nightmares about my ex-wife screaming at me to tidy the house – because Brontë’s dog bed and toys were ruining the aesthetic she was going for in her latest video – I was pretty sure I was going crazy. So actually, maybe getting laid wasn’t what I needed. That would involve another woman, and right now the only female I could stand had four legs, was sleeping at my feet on the sidewalk, and wouldn’t be on this earth much longer.
Fuck.
I pulled my attention back to Joe and smiled.
“If she had yelled at Brontë, I’d have shit on her shoe myself.”
Joe laughed, patted me on the shoulder, and started for the door of the shop. “Get ya anything?”
“Thanks but I’m just about finished and then it’s back home to get some work done on the book.”
“You’ll let me know if you need any help?”
I grinned. Joe Castelluccio, a soldier turned baker and coffee maker, was always offering to help with my writing.
“I’ve no experience,” he’d always say. “Just life experience. But that ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.”
“Of course,” I said now. “If I find myself in a bind, you’ll be my first call.”
“I’ll provide the sustenance,” he said and then gave me a little salute and disappeared inside, the smell of fresh baked pastries and coffee wafting onto the sidewalk behind him.
I made my way home slowly, my best girl ambling quietly beside me as I kept an eye out for any accidental bathroom breaks. Thanks to the woman in the park, I was scarred for life. But also: to be a pet owner was to be aware at all times. I might’ve thanked her for reminding me, if she hadn’t publicly ripped me a new one.
Still… those eyes.
“Stupid poo shoe lady,” I said to Brontë, who looked back at me as if to say she agreed.
An alert sounded from my phone and I read the reminder I’d set for myself with an equal mix of happiness and dread.
LAUNCH PARTY. 7PM
My good friend, Jessa Reyne, was having a launch party for her new book tonight and, while I was excited to support her, I was not thrilled about having to dress up and be around some of the people who would likely be in attendance. There was always a handful that were overly eager to hear about how my current work in progress was going. The interest was lovely, but also oftentimes felt like pressure. Add in their curiosity about how I was doing personally post-divorce, all up in my business about women I might be seeing or friends they wanted to set me up with - or just outright flirting with me - and I immediately wanted to send a text saying I wouldn’t be able to make it after all. “Sorry Jessa, can’t make it. Turns out most writers are introverts. Who knew?” Or maybe, “I’d love to but my dog shat on a woman today and we’re working through the trauma tonight with lots of behind-the-ear scritches (for me).”
But Jessa and I went way back, our debut books coming out the same year and in the same genre, leading us to doing a number of panels at conferences together. Our career trajectories had nearly mirrored one another’s, and we’d kept in touch over the years, meeting up when we could – as she lived on the West Coast – and cheering one another on from afar on social media. There was no way I’d miss her event. She was worth the effort of changing out of sweatpants and throwing on some jeans.
“Gonna have to get out the good clothes tonight,” I told Brontë as I unlocked the front door. She blinked at me and then heaved her old body over the threshold and headed straight for her bed in the kitchen.
A half hour later I left the present world for the fictional one on my laptop, a timer beside me counting down the minutes of an hour-long writing sprint that would hopefully get me through the current chapter I was in and into the next. My allotted time was nearly up when my phone rang.
I tried to ignore it but since it rarely rang these days – most normal people not being monsters and just sending a text – I worried it was an emergency. Either that or a telemarketer.
It was neither and I grinned as I answered the phone.
“Hey!” I said into the receiver.
“What up, G?”
I laughed at my kid sister’s excited voice shouting through the earpiece. She’d recently read a book set in the 1990s and had taken on a little (too much) of the slang. I’d been subjected to “da bomb”, “yo, home skillet”, “as if”, and too many “booyahs” to fathom in the past month. For her eighteenth birthday, which was right around the corner, I was planning to surprise her in person and gift her with a yellow Teletubby, a poster of Pearl Jam that had been signed by the band members circa nineteen ninety-two, and the rare and exotic banana clip for her hair – all found on eBay. She was also getting tickets to a concert she was dying to go to with her best friend, but I wouldn’t give her that until after the other items.
Marley was my half-sister, born to my stepmother and father when I was sixteen. Having been an only child until then, I’d been enamored with her from the first moment I got to hold her, her big blue eyes staring up at me while her little pink mouth worked itself into shapes as if she were already preparing for all the crazy stories she’d tell me over the years.
“What up, M?” I said into the phone, turning off my timer and leaning back in my chair. I would pause the rotation of the Earth for Marley.
“It’s not funny when you use my initial,” she informed me. “And yours doesn’t actually count because G is what people really said. Which… I don’t understand. What’s the G for?”
“Gangster,” I said.
“Ahhhh…”
