Adulation (4 page)

Ever since e-readers became popular, Whitford’s customer traffic had decreased exponentially. Inaddition to the café to recapture the clientele, Whitford’s debuted its own e-reader (poorly named the “Trinket”) during Labor Day weekend, just in time for Christmas. We’d recently removed several rows ofshelving and display stands to make room for the new booth (which, ironically, we called “the Pen”) thathoused display models and on-site technical support. Although the product rivaled the Kindle and itscompetition technologically speaking, the fact that it entered the market so late in the game was setbackenough for the critics.

I loved Whitford’s and didn’t want to see them go the way of Blockbuster and Tower Records—extinct, thanks to technological progress and all things Apple—which was where they seemed to beheaded. Whitford’s had never dominated the market, nor had they been simultaneously praised andscorned for being so large and masterful, like their rivals Barnes & Noble and Borders had. Rather, itwas a relatively small, family-owned chain that operated like an independent store—half the size of thebig-box stores (although still quite spacious), aimed at keeping inventory small and customer  relationscozy while connecting to the local economy through community outreach (Georgie’s job). “Books, notbottom lines, are our passion” was their slogan. I’d been working for them since high school, when I’dbegun as a part-time sales associate. They’d been just as loyal and loving to me as I was to them. Havingworked my way up to a full-time stock manager, I now received a fixed, yearly salary, decent benefits,and, with the exception of the Christmas season and the Trinket debut, worked predominantly weekdayshifts and no evenings. The pay, of course, was crappy, but better than most retail jobs. Besides, workingin the stockroom gave me the pleasure of being around books all day without having to deal with thepeople who read them. Best of all, I left work at work, came home by dinnertime, and had oodles of timeto write—at least, that had been the plan.

I’d been working in the stockroom for almost two hours, my only company being the eighties new-wave station on the radio, when Georgie entered looking like a Michael Kors spokesmodel. Since thesummer ended, he’d been going to the tanning salon despite my telling him how fake it looked, and hadgrown his dark brown hair out to look less Jim Parsons and more Matt Damon.

Georgie, Theodora (whom we called Theo for short), and I had been best friends for twenty years,since they both came to Whitford’s as seasonal help during college. I could hardly remember how I hadlived life without either one of them. Whereas Theo was always my counselor and confidante, sister

extraordinaire (to say  nothing of the fact that as a chiropractor she gave the best treatments), Georgie was my kindred spirit. We tried to avoid the girl-with-gay-best-friend (or gay-guy-with-girl-best-friend) clichés, and woe to anyone who dared to even whisper the words “Will and Grace” to us—they incurred the wrath of a glare with all the force of a tsunami. And yet sometimes we had no choice but to surrender to the stereotypes: Georgie was way better at shopping than I was, and I was way more into sports, for starters. We were probably all evenly matched in the kitchen, although Theo was the best baker and I kicked ass when it came to stir-frying. Georgie, on the other hand, made killer drinks.

He set a shirt box covered with Smurfs wrapping paper on my workstation and threw his arms around me, swinging me back and forth, before I had a chance to warn him of my contagions. Ah, Georgie. He gave the best hugs regardless of the occasion.

“Happy birthday, my sweet Sunrise!”

“Thanks,” I said, my voice muffled in his chest—Georgie also had a good four inches on me. “You probably shouldn’t have done that, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve got Theo’s cold. In her defense, she gave me fair warning that she was sick. But how could I resist an opportunity to split a pitcher of mudslides, followed by several rounds of drunken Wii Bowling?”

“Serves you right,” he scolded. “So? How does the ol’ four-oh feel?”

“Feels like the ol’ three-nine.”

“Well, you know what they say: Forty is the new twenty.”

“I thought forty was the new
 
thirty
.”

“Between Botox, Reebok EasyTones, and the Dr. Oz show, there’s no reason why you can’t be as smokin’ as you were in college.”

“Really? Because between my hair and my heels, I was six feet tall in college. Plus I wore genie pants. That is not something to aspire to.”

Georgie let out a cackle that always brought a smile to my face. “So what are you wearing for Bobby Flay tonight, Sunny Delight?”

I swallowed and winced as I met a thousand needles in my throat. “I’m canceling tonight. I can’t sustain a night in the city feeling like this.”

He looked at me, incredulous. “Are you serious? No. There is no way I am letting you sit alone on your birthday and feel sorry for yourself.”

“Who said anything about feeling sorry for myself?”

He folded his arms and gave me a look that defied me to prove him wrong.

“I’m going home and watching DVDs in bed with a bowl of chicken soup. If Bobby Flay doesn’t get to see me, then no one else does.”

“Sunrise Smith, you are going
 
out
 
for your birthday. You think Danny Masters is going to be sitting in bed with a bowl of chicken soup tonight?”

How had it slipped my mind that today was Danny Masters’s birthday too? Both of our names were marked on my calendar. Even the photo that Georgie had taped to my workstation didn’t tip me off. I tried to picture what Danny Masters might be doing tonight: a star-studded party; dinner at some trendy restaurant that sold sushi for a hundred bucks a pop; or perhaps somewhere special with  just him and his daughter. Was he on again or off again with Charlene Dumont? If they were on again, then they were probably in Palm Springs, or Mexico, or the south of France, or perhaps even the Hamptons, or
 
somewhere
 
that mattered. And if they were in bed, then surely there was no soup involved.

“Danny Masters probably doesn’t have a wall of mucus preparing to line his nose and throat,” I said.

Georgie made a face. “TMI, dearie. C’mon! We’ll go dancing!”

The thought alone made me woozy. “On a Monday? Please, Georgie—I feel like total crap.”

“Well then, that settles it. Theo and I are going to come over and take care of you. We can watch

John Hughes movies.”

“We always watch John Hughes movies. Let’s do Cary Grant movies instead,” I suggested,considering that was what I’d been planning. “Wanna sleep over? You haven’t done that in ages. Oh, andwhat’s up with the Must Talk? Everything OK with Marcus?”

“Everything’s fine. Open your present,” he said.

I picked up the gift and tore the paper gently to preserve as much of it as possible. “Good choiceof paper. It’s going into my collection.” The paper revealed a box from Nordstrom. Opening the box, Ilifted the gold tissue paper to find an exquisite, finely woven sweater.

“From Theo and Marcus too. It’s a Stella McCartney. Next year, you get Jimmy Choos to match, Ipromise. Once I hit the lottery, sky’s the limit.”

“Holy shit, it’s gorgeous,” I remarked.

“’Bout time you started dressing to impress.”

“I love it, Georgie. Thank you. And thank Marcus for me too. I’ll call Theo during break. She can’tmeet us for lunch.”

“You didn’t see what’s under the tissue paper,” he said.

I tentatively lifted the thin, crackly paper to find an envelope with Whitford’s letterhead on it, from which I extracted three tickets to the premiere of
Exposed
 
at the Cannon Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion with Sharon Blake, Shane Sands, Paul Wolf, and...
 
Danny Masters
. I dropped my jaw and looked at Georgie, who looked as if he was ready to shriek like a fifteen-year-old girl at a boy band concert. No doubt I was wearing the same look.

“Wha...how...how did you get these?” I stammered. “It was pure luck, let me tell you. I managed to get ’em online mere seconds after they went on sale. And they sold out in like five minutes. You do know that the other tickets are for me and Theo, of course. Poor Marcus has to work. And you can have Danny; I’m all for Shane.”

“Marcus is OK with that?”

“He’s got his own crushes.”

I stared as if I were holding the last Golden Ticket to the Wonka factory. “I don’t know what to say...thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it.” And then it hit me: “My God, Danny Masters is going to be in the same room as me. OK, so it’s a big room, with a stage, and he won’t even know I’m there. But still.” Then I squealed and hugged Georgie. “I can’t believe you did this for me! All of you!”

Georgie’s bright blue eyes sparkled and he smiled widely after our hug. “You’re welcome,” he said. “And we’re coming over tonight to watch your stupid Gen-X movies  with you even though you’re totally germafied. We’ll do the Must Talk then.”

He was lying about the movies being stupid. I knew he loved them even more than I did.

Georgie, Theo, and I sat in my bed, huddled under the thick comforter, separated by pillows, and snitchingpopcorn from two enormous bowls I usually reserved for Super Bowl parties (I was relegated to “thegermafied bowl”). I had wanted to do a marathon of
 
To Catch a Thief
,
 
Charade
, and
 
The Philadelphia Story
, but Georgie and Theo won the coin toss, as did John Hughes, and we were in the middle of
 
Sixteen Candles
, to be followed by
 
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
 
and
 
Pretty in Pink
. We rarely made it to the end ofthe second movie when we planned these marathons, but still insisted on lining up all three. The nighttable beside me was littered with Kleenex, Nyquil, Tylenol, Ricola lozenges, a digital thermometer—everything but a prescription pad. Along with a classic princess phone (restored and painted baby pink,

and working), a stack of novels occupied the other table, the top one half-read, the others waiting in anticipation. One of the perks of working at Whitford’s was the 30 percent discount. There was something about the smell of crisp pages, the weight of the cover in my hands, the bending of the spine that just couldn’t be duplicated by any technological marvel. I liked counting the pages to see how far I’d come or how much farther I had to go. I liked to keep one page between my fingers, as if it couldn’t wait to be turned. Sometimes I even liked to make notes in the margins.

Not even halfway into the movie, we had gotten caught up in one of our favorite games—recasting movies of any generation with members of the Brat Pack.
 
The Great Escape
,
 
Harry Potter
,
 
Star Wars
 
, you name it. The epic or serial films were especially adaptable to this game. Theo was put in the position to settle the argument about who would make a better Edward in
 
Twilight
—Rob Lowe or Emilio Estevez. I was adamant that it had to be Rob, while Georgie was gangbusters for Emilio. Runner-up, of course, would be relegated to Jacob. “I don’t really care,” said Theo, “but Andrew McCarthy is so Mike Newton.”

Just as the school dance scene began in
 
Sixteen Candles
, I asked Georgie about the Must Talk noteyet again.

He took a deep breath. “OK. Don’t kill me, but I have news about Teddy.”

I felt a thud in the pit of my stomach at the mere mention of my ex-husband’s name. Feigningbravery, I sat up and popped a lozenge into my mouth. “Go ahead.”

“You know my cousin Eric is Facebook friends with Teddy, right? They have connections throughwork or something.”

Already I didn’t like where this was going.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Well, Eric told me that Teddy announced he’s getting a divorce and changed his relationshipstatus to single.”

I jerked so forcefully that I tipped the popcorn bowl over. “A
 
divorce
?” Georgie nodded his headslowly. My mouth hung open, jaw momentarily frozen, before I followed with, “When did this happen?”

“You mean, when did he make the announcement, or when did I find out?”

I didn’t bother to clarify.

Considering one of the reasons why Teddy and I split up was because he cheated on me, this newsshouldn’t have surprised me. But it did. Floored me, in fact. Teddy had been so hell-bent on being a dad