And I needed the money, and it was kind of like when I saw Trey lying in the driveway. My body just took over, and here we were. Before I knew it, I was vacuuming and humming, totally lost in my own world. Well, lost until I looked up and saw Gray standing there with her jaw hanging open like a fish on a hook.
My face got hot. I turned the vacuum off and could hear the Van Morrison Trey had playing. He walked in, saying, “Diana, I’m trying to do the guac like you told me, but—” And then he saw Gray and stopped in his tracks too, and we were all standing there, staring like trapped animals. Almost like me, Harry, and Big Red a few hours earlier.
“I’m having a hard time deciding where to start,” Gray said. She turned to Trey. “But I guess, first, how the hell are you here so quickly?”
He smiled disarmingly at her. “I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across the street when you were dictating that e-mail.”
Gray sighed and rolled her eyes. “Good Lord.”
Now she turned to me. “I have no words.”
All I had done was clean the woman’s house. But, then again, I was a near-total stranger who’d showed up unannounced on her front steps that morning and appeared uninvited a few hours later in her living room.
I looked at Trey. “I’ll take my hundred bucks and then I’mout of here.” Then I did what I do best when I’m on the defensive: I turned it around on her. I gave Gray a good once-over and prepared to deliver a zinger. “No wonder your husband left you. Making a mess, no groceries in the house.”Note to self: When you have money again, get Nicorette.
But instead of getting upset, she laughed. “Well, Maria did most of the shopping and cleaning and cooking.”
“So what did you do?”
Gray looked up toward the ceiling. “Well, I grew an affiliate-marketing empire out of a little blog I started in college and made sure I was at every school party and baseball game and bought the house and paid the bills and planned the vacations and the nights out and the playdates.” She smiled pointedly. “That’s what I did.”
“So where’s this Maria?”
“Greg got her in the divorce. He got Maria and Brooke and half of Wagner and the vast majority of my self-worth. I got my world turned upside down and our fine china.”
“Yikes,” Trey said. “Bitter divorcée at the party. We need to back that up, sister.”
I waved my hand. “Oh, honey, it’ll pass. It’s just one of them stages. When my girl Robin got divorced the first time, we thought we were going to have to have an intervention for her. All she could do was bash her husband. I mean, you’d say, ‘Oh, damn. I’m out of bananas.’ And then she’d be like, ‘Cal never remembered to get bananas.’ But she got over it. Well, I mean, they got married again.…” I paused, realizing maybe this story wasn’t as relevant as I had hoped.
She just looked at me like she was still confused, and that’s when I remembered that I had not been invited, and here I was holding her vacuum cleaner.
“I promise I’m not stalking you. I was in the neighborhood, and I thought Trey was hurt in the driveway.…”
Gray looked skeptical. She turned to Trey. “You were hurt in the driveway?”
He held up his arm. “My cuff link was hurt. I was on the ground, so I guess it looked that way.”
“And then he needed help carrying this stuff in, and then there was all this mess and I just…” I continued, feeling the need to defend myself.
Gray looked around, as if she had just noticed her surroundings. “It’s really clean in here,” she said.
“Well, I cleaned it up,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was happy it was clean or mad it was clean. “I don’t know what came over me—”
Gray nodded knowingly. “Ohhhhh. Now I see. You’ve been Treyed.”
He smiled victoriously, and I was confused. “I’m sorry. I’ve been what?”
“Treyed,” she said. “It’s when you plan on doing one thing and then you’re doing a million others, and you don’t even know how that happened.”
I snapped my fingers. “Yup! That’s it.” I wagged my finger at him. “You’re sneaky.”
Then another girl came walking in the back door. And now she looked confused too.
“Marcy, meet Trey,” Gray said. She paused. “And Diana, I guess. And, Trey, meet Marcy.”
Marcy squealed. “Oh my God! It’s you! It’s the famous Trey. I have heard so much about you, and I am just the most excited person in the world.” She took his hands and started jumping up and down, and there was his goofy grin again.
“I have heard so much about you too,” he said calmly.
