I gape at her for a moment before gathering myself and reaching across the table to shake hands with Sheila. “Nice to meet you.”
Sheila grins. “They didn’t tell you Goldie hangs out with us seasoned ladies, did they?”
I shake my head, picture Holt’s grin as he mentioned Goldie’s friends, and now I get it.
Another white woman, this one with light-brown hair cut in a bob, but the same crow’s feet, slides in next to her. “Are we meeting Goldie’s friend? Finally? Good. We need more young blood in this club. Hello, you gorgeous thing. I’m Evelyn.”
I shake her hand too. “Hi. I’m Ziggy.”
“I’m gonna get a hug as soon as we stand up, but I know better than to ask a pregnant lady to stand before she wants to. I actually got divorced once because my husband didn’t respect my need to sit while I was carrying.”
The enchantment is starting to win over the rage inside me, but it’s not the bar. It’s the friends. “I’m barely five months. I’m good.”
“Still. We’ll hug at the end. I’m so excited you’re here. Do you have any ex-boyfriends you’d like to outlive? Or any who have died and need alternative obituaries to those awful stuffy pieces they print in the papers?”
“These are your best friends?” I whisper to Goldie.
“My favorite people on the planet,” she confirms with a smile as she sips a wine spritzer.
“Even more than Fletcher is,” a Black lady in a matchingshirt to the other two older women says as she, too, joins the group. “That boy…”
“That boy,” Sheila and Evelyn echo.
Goldie’s smiling so widely, I don’t question if I’m being pranked. She’s too happy. “Ziggy, this is Odette. She’s president of the Outlive Our Ex-Boyfriends Club.”
I shake Odette’s hand too. “How many more of you are there?”
“It’s just us three,” Sheila says.
“Goldie couldn’t handle us if there were more,” Odette adds.
“Theworldcouldn’t handle us if there were more,” Sheila corrects.
“They adopted me after I found my ex-boyfriend cheating on me with one of my best friends,” Goldie tells me.
“Did you get to write his obituary yet?” I ask.
The three older women cackle.
Goldie’s grin glows even brighter. “No, but I did recently get the satisfaction of hearing they broke up when she was traded to a team on the West Coast and he refused to follow her since he likes to think of himself as the most successful one in any given relationship.”
“Traded?”
“Women’s soccer.”
“Goldie has more friends her own age now, but she still makes time for us,” Evelyn says.
“Because she knows who good people are,” Odette adds.
Sheila beams at all of us. “She likes our wisdom, and we like that she thinks we’re wise.”
“And hilarious and kind and generous,” Goldie adds.
This is the kind of relationship I would’ve loved to have had with my grandma.
Crap.
Dammit.
