Tess slung her bookish bag over her scrawny shoulder as we entered our favorite bookstore and headed straight to the café. “Two tall skinny lattes with a double shot, one with foam, one no-foam,” she ordered.
“Make mine a triple. And I’d like a chocolate-chocolate-chip cookie too. Tess?”
“A cranberry scone, please.”
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony sounded, and Tess fumbled in her purse beneath Virginia Woolf ’s elongated nose. She flipped open her cell. “Hi, Julia.” Her eyes flicked to mine. “She’s fine. Oh, she must have had her phone off. We went for a drive and stopped to get a latte. Did you want to talk to her?”
I frowned and shook my head no.
“Oh, sorry. I think she just went into the ladies room. But we’ll be back soon, don’t worry. And tell your mom not to worry either. See you in a bit.”
“Thanks.” The last thing I wanted was to talk to Julia the Perfect. I grabbed my latte and cookie, hunching my shoulders in an attempt to hide the neon sign on my chest flashing, “Jilted bride, jilted bride,” and hurried to the farthest corner table before I blinded everyone in sight.
“Feel better?”
I nodded. But I was lying.
“Okay, so the first thing is to get you the heck out of Dodge. The last thing you need is to hang around here and face everyone’s pity and platitudes when your heart has just been ripped from your chest. Plenty of time for that later.” Tess sent me a speculative look from behind her red rectangle glasses. “Know what I think you should do?”
“What?”
“Go on that cruise to Mexico anyway.”
I stared at her. “My honeymoon cruise? Are you kidding?”
“You need to get away. Besides, you paid for the tickets, right?”
“I put them on my credit card so Chris wouldn’t max his out.” Defending my fiancé to my family had become a way of life. They were always criticizing him — his “lack of responsibility,” his “flakiness,” his “immaturity.”
All except for Tess.
Only now it looked like she might be joining the anti – Chris O’Neil chorus. But she knew better. Especially on my almost wedding day.
I looked at my watch. “In an hour and twenty-four minutes I’m supposed to be walking down the aisle to the man of my dreams.” Tears started to prick my eyelids again, but I forced them down. “Man of my dreams — hah! Who does he think he is to do this to me?”
“Now you’re talking.” Tess slapped my knee in girl-power solidarity.
“Ow!”
“Sorry. Don’t know my own strength.”
“I’ll say. For a little woman, you pack a lot of power.”
“You know what they say — good things come in small packages.” Tess, who usually avoided clichés like the plague — unlike me, who thinks they have a time and a place, like here — waggled her reddish-brown eyebrows over the top of her skinny red glasses.
“Chloe?”
I knew I should have stayed in the car. I braced myself, pasted on a smile, and turned to face the force of nature that was Becca Daniels.
“I’m so sorry!” Becca, one of my bridesmaids, flung her arms around me in typical fierce fashion. “I’ve been trying to call you all morning, and when you didn’t answer, I stopped by your parents’ house and they told me you and Tess had gone out. Are you okay? You must be devastated. That jerk!”
Heads swiveled our way.
“Why don’t we sit down?” Tess suggested.
“Sorry.” Becca’s olive skin reddened beneath her inky pixie-cut bangs. “Was I being too loud?”
“You?” Tess lifted an eyebrow.
“So, what happened?” Becca whispered as we sat down at the laminate bistro table.
“I-I don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry. What can I do? Just tell me. Anything. Whatever you need.”
“Well, you could — oh, no. I don’t believe it.”
“What?” Becca and Tess said in chorus.
“Ryan.”
I’d forgotten that he often grabbed his Saturday breakfast here. Clearly a little thing like a cancelled wedding wasn’t going to stop his stomach. “He’s coming this way. I’ll die if he sees me.” Grabbing an oversized Picasso art book from the closest table, I scrunched my head down behind it.
Tess also hid her head by ducking it under the table on the pretext that she’d dropped something. But Becca shot up from her chair. Unable to see anything but Don Quixote, I listened to her Birkenstock clogs clunk away then stop.
“Becca? What are you doing here?” Ryan’s voice carried easily to our table.
“I work here.”
“I know. But I thought you took off for the wedding.”
“You mean the wedding that wasn’t? The wedding where the Cowardly Lion groom bailed at the last minute?”
I cringed behind my book camouflage.
“You don’t know the whole story.”
“I know that your cold-footed friend didn’t even have the guts to give Chloe a heads-up that something was wrong.”
“He tried, but he didn’t know how. But I agree. If it were me, I’d have handled it differently.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“I’d never have let things get this far if I was having doubts. I’d have definitely shared my concerns with my fiancée earlier and not waited until the last minute.”
A brief silence ensued.
“But,” Ryan continued, “I think Chris did the right thing.”
It was all I could do not to pop my head up from behind my book and say, What?
Becca had my back. “What? Leaving his bride at the altar on her wedding day?”
“He didn’t leave her at the altar — he let her know the night before.”
“Big of him.”
“It was the best he could do. He didn’t want to embarrass her in front of the entire church.”
“And you think he didn’t, just because he wasn’t in the actual building?”
“Would you rather they’d gotten married and it wound up in divorce? At least they hadn’t taken their vows,” Ryan said. “I have to give Chris props for that. It was a really hard thing for him to do, but ultimately it was the right thing.”
“Yeah, maybe for him, but what about Chloe?”
My nose began to itch, but I knew I didn’t dare scratch it. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to our table. Apparently Tess decided crawling around on the floor any longer would do precisely that, as she surfaced to huddle beside me behind the book.
“For Chloe, too,” Ryan said, his tone gentling. “Which I think she’ll see in the long run. Chloe wasn’t ready for marriage. And if you’re honest, you’ll admit it. Beating your sister to the altar isn’t a good enough reason to get married.”
I gasped. So much for not drawing attention. I tried to cover the gasp with a cough, sneaking in a nose scratch beneath my glasses at the same time, all while still hidden behind my oversized art book.
Ryan backtracked. “Maybe that was a little harsh. But did you really see them as a good match? They’re so different. Chris is an adventure guy, a risk taker, a daredevil. And Chloe’s so . . . well . . . not.”
“But differences are what make a relationship interesting,” Becca argued. “If they were exactly alike, it would be boring.”
The B-word hung heavy in the air like a wet sheet on a clothesline.
“Maybe it’s best if we let them sort it out.”
“Yeah if the Cowardly Lion ever returns from the wild.”
“He will. He just needed some alone time.” Ryan paused. “Please tell Chloe when you see her — tell her I’m sorry for the way this all went down and that I’ll be praying for her.”
I peered around Picasso and watched Ryan’s blue Chuck Taylors vanish through the door.
“You forgot your breakfast,” Becca called after him, but he was already gone.
Slamming the art book shut, I sprang from my seat. “He’ll be praying for me? He’
d better pray for his risk-taking, daredevil friend, ’cause when I find him, I’m gonna kill him. Bet he won’t find that boring.”
Tess grabbed her literary purse. “Come on, Chloe. You’re going on your honeymoon. And I’m coming with you, so let’s go buy a bikini. I’m thinking red thong.”
2
“Can’t keep still all day, and, not being a pussy-cat, I don’t like to doze by the fire. I like adventures, and I’m going to find some.”
Little Women
“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Becca’s excited voice pierced the salty air.
Refusing to be left behind while Tess and I had fun in the sun, Becca told her boss she was finally going to take those days off he’d been bugging her about, and Monday morning we were on our way.
Good thing Tess is a travel agent.
She managed to pull the right strings to get Becca last-minute cheap tickets on our five-day Mexican cruise and also save me penalties from switching Chris’s reservation to Tess’s name and trading in the queen-size honeymoon bed for two singles.
Tess and I had a great room with a balcony and ocean view — which I kept imagining Chris and I sharing — while Becca was squashed into not much more than a closet with no view. But she didn’t care. She was hardly ever in her room anyway, only to sleep and change. She was always dragging us off to some new shipboard activity — tennis, trivia games, karaoke, even salsa dancing, where Tess surprised both of us with her fancy footwork.
“You need to go on one of those ballroom-dancing TV shows,” I said to my aunt later that night while she was brushing her teeth before bed. “You’d blow everyone else out of the water.”
She rinsed and spit. “Nah, I’m too old. But I could see Becca doing it.”
“What wouldn’t Becca do?”
I thought back to the first time we’d met Becca. There was a booksigning at Dunkeld’s for a local, not-well-known-yet author, who had written a spy thriller in which the hero donned many disguises — including a clown suit — in his pursuit of the bad guys. And as Tess and I joined the others in the sparse audience to listen to the author and get our books signed, suddenly the Mission Impossible theme blared from the speakers, and a clown clad in a baggy, lime green polka-dot costume, fake red nose, and frizzy orange wig, came racing through the bookstore toward us.
A curious crowd followed on his heels.
The frenzied clown zigzagged between the rows of now-filling chairs in time to the frenetic spy music. And when he got to the middle aisle between the chairs, he promptly dropped to the ground and rolled in a trio of somersaults to the podium, ending his journey with the splits, which prompted a round of enthusiastic applause.
The clown jumped up, bowed, and moved behind the podium where he yanked off his wig and fake nose, revealing a grinning, elfin, and very obviously female face.
“Welcome to Dunkeld’s,” the lady clown said, reaching up to ruffle her inky black flattened hair back into short, spiky position. “My name’s Becca, and I’m happy to introduce you to our local author Peter Lincoln, who’s going to give Tom Clancy a run for his money with his latest spy novel, The Hunt for Norville Blake.”
After the successful signing, Tess and I went up and introduced ourselves to Becca, who, we learned, was a clerk at Dunkeld’s and fellow bookaholic like us. She’d recently graduated from college with an English degree, and invited us to join a women’s book club she was just beginning.
That was nearly two years ago, and since then, Becca had also invited me to join her on several of her wild-and-crazy escapades — bungee-jumping, paintball wars, snowboarding, and speed-dating.
I always decline politely. The book club is enough.
Today, Becca the Adventurous had managed to talk me — dare me, actually — into snorkeling off Cabo San Lucas while our ship was docked for the day.
Me, the girl who’s scared of water.
Not all water, though. I have no problem with the pool at my parents’, and I linger in the tub for my Saturday night soak. But the ocean’s a completely different animal. Not the least is all the creepy-crawly creatures and animals of the deep. Fish I don’t mind so much. Actually, I love fish — a little sea bass or grilled salmon and especially fresh-cracked Alaskan King crab with drawn butter.
“C’mon, Chloe. You’ll love it!” Becca urged. “There’s nothing like snorkeling. Wait’ll you see all the gorgeous fish. The colors will take your breath away.”
“What will really take my breath away is when I see sharks. Big old hungry sharks looking for a little lunch.” I hummed the music from Jaws. That movie terrified me when I saw it as a kid — as it would have anyone in her right mind — and left me with a lingering fear of the sea. And especially sharks.
“That was Hollywood. And that was also a great white. Not even a real one. It was a goofy mechanical shark they built for the movie. You won’t see any great whites around here.”
“So you’re promising me that if we go snorkeling, we won’t see any sharks?”
“Nah.”
Tess looked at her.
“Probably not,” Becca amended. “Not that close to the surface. And if we do, it would only be harmless, cute little nurse sharks. What we’ll most likely see are beautiful colorful fish, maybe some coral, and, if we’re lucky, sea turtles.”
Colorful fish worked for me. But it was the sea turtles that really did the trick.
I’ve always had a thing for turtles. I had a couple when I was little and always loved to watch them poke their heads out of their shells and meander slowly across my bedroom carpet. To get up close and personal with a huge sea turtle in its natural habitat would beat the childhood carpet races and then some. “Okay, nature girl. Lead the way.”
Tess plopped a straw hat over her wispy auburn hair. “While you two do your Jacques Cousteau thing, I’ll be checking out the shops. Let’s meet at Cabo Wabo’s for lunch around twelve thirty. I hear they have great seafood and fabulous margaritas. See you in a few hours.” She waggled her fingers at us as she strode away.
I was tempted to follow her. Was I really ready to do this deep-sea adventure? Who knew what frightening things lurked in the deep? But then, who knew that I’d be spending my honeymoon with two girlfriends rather than with the man I loved? Not exactly what I’d dreamed of when Chris and I had planned our romantic cruise. He’d had to calm my water fears as well. “Don’t worry, babe, I’ll protect you,” he’d promised, pulling me close, when I’d shared my deep-sea reservations with him.
Yeah right. Just another one of the promises he’d broken. Had he ever meant anything he said? Or was it all just a big lie? And if so, how could I have been so deceived? So stupid.
Or maybe just intentionally blind?
Not going there. Not now. I can’t. This was supposed to be my honeymoon. I shoved my hand beneath my glasses and dashed away the wetness, focusing my attention back to Becca and what she was saying.
She assured me we wouldn’t go too far from shore. Becca also said that I could rent a wetsuit, which would keep me warm and give me extra buoyancy in the water. But no way was I going to wriggle into one of those rubber torture devices and squash all my butt-and-thigh cellulite together into a giant piece of Swiss cheese for the whole world to see. Especially when I noticed a couple of women close to my size walk past in the black rubber suits with a big L on the front.
Yeah right. Let me just announce to the whole world that I’m a loser. And a large one at that. Almost as bad as a scarlet A. Almost.
Becca led me to the rental shack where we picked up our snorkeling gear. I stuck my feet into the ungainly, oversized flippers and took a few tentative steps. Can you say duck out of water?
Daisy Duck had nothing on me.
I removed my glasses, placed them in the pocket of my shorts and carefully rolled my clothes into a towel which Becca said would be safe left on the beach.
She snapped my mask into place, but everything remained blurry.
“Hey, I c
an’t see.”
“My bad. I forgot you need a prescription one. Come on.” She removed the offending goggles and hurried off to exchange them while I waddled behind her in my awkward footwear.
Forget Daisy Duck. I was Bozo the Clown. All that was missing was the red hair and red nose, but a couple hours in the sun would take care of the latter.
We exchanged the mask for one that allowed me to actually see, and Becca showed me how to insert my mouthpiece and use the snorkel. I could tell she was impatient to get going.
I followed her into the ocean and instantly regretted my decision to nix the wetsuit. That water was seriously cold! I warmed up, though, after we swam and splashed around for a few minutes, which also helped me get used to the flippers, which worked so much better in water.
Becca inserted her mouthpiece and motioned for me to do the same. Then she gave me a thumbs up and submerged her head. I took a deep breath, stretched out so I was floating on my stomach, clutching a pink foam noodle, and stuck my face beneath the water’s surface.
Wow.
Finding Nemo didn’t do justice to the glorious water world laid out before me. It was like swimming in a Jackson Pollock painting.
I looked over at Becca and could see her eyes crackling with excitement behind her mask. I returned her thumbs up as I drank in the amazing sights passing before me.
A school of electric-blue-and-yellow angel fish swam past, followed by a mass of vivid orange fish with big dark eyes and a fan-like thing on their backs. They soon darted off, except for one little guy who straggled behind and swam right up to my goggles, checking out this strange creature invading his watery space. I lowered my hand to pet him/her — how can you tell if fish are male or female? — but he was too fast. In an instant he was gone.
Becca waved, and then dove down like a mermaid, checking everything out farther below. Not me. I was a happy girl just floating on top of the water and looking down on the myriad sea life.
All at once, something brushed against my ankle. My heart dynamited from my chest, but when I glanced at my feet, I saw it was another school of little yellow fish darting past.
Daring Chloe Page 2
