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“Oh, puh-lease,” I said. “Like they don’t have phones in Ecuador.”

He shrugged.

“And your lights were on. I mean, I bet your lights were on.”

“They’re on timers.” He blew out a puff of air. Cannoli licked his cheek. “Listen, here’s the thing. I have a business conflict. I didn’t want to have to explain it.”

“Ohmigod, so you are a drug dealer.” He shifted Cannoli in his arms. “What are you talking about?”

“What are
you
talking about?” I crossed my arms over my chest and looked right at him.

He looked right back at me. His hazel eyes had flecks of gold in them. “Okay,” he said. “I should have called you.

There really is a business conflict. I also have this bad habit of ending up as somebody’s rebound relationship. No way I’m going there again.”

At this point, I was so confused I couldn’t quite remember whether I even wanted to go there anymore, or even where there was, for that matter. But the more he seemed to be re-jecting me, the more I was convinced he might be wrong. I took a little step forward and tried to think of something brilliant to say. “But . . .” was all I could come up with.

“Listen,” he said. “You hit the nail on the head. I think it was in your fourth message, although maybe it was the fifth.” He smiled.

“Cute,” I said.

“You were right about the stars. Timing
is
everything.” I shut my eyes.

“I’m not denying the chemistry, Bella. You’re smart, you’re beautiful . . .”

I opened my eyes again. I was really starting to like this guy.

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“. . . and somebody is going to be lucky to have you in his life someday. But, I’ve been there. You’ve still got some stages to go through. You probably haven’t even had hot sad sex with your ex yet.”

My jaw dropped. The two people sitting on the aisle seats closest to us turned to look. I shut my mouth again. There was absolutely nothing I could say without incriminating myself.

Cannoli started trying to wiggle her way out of Sean Ryan’s arms. He handed her over to me, then took the first-class blanket off and wrapped it around my shoulders.

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll just be kit buddies. Is the left side of your table still open tomorrow?”

Sean Ryan narrowed his eyes. “You brought your kits with you?”

“Never leave home without them,” I said. He didn’t say anything, so I decided to push my luck. “And you’ve got to eat, so you might as well come to my nephew’s wedding.” Sean Ryan massaged his forehead with one hand. “Okay, you can come to the college fair,” he said. “But, for the record, this goes completely against my better judgment.”

“Relax,” I said. “We’ll keep a table length between us at all times.”

“But not the wedding,” Sean Ryan said. “I can’t go to your nephew’s wedding.”

• 25 •

SEAN RYAN HAD A BUSINESS DINNER THAT NIGHT,
or at least he said he did. He offered to drop me off at my hotel, but I told him I had plans, which was a big fat lie.

After we got off the plane, he held Cannoli while I used the bathroom, then I watched his carry-on while he did. I looked around for an indoor patch of grass for Cannoli, who had the tiniest bladder of us all, but no such luck.

“Thanks,” he said when he came out. I noticed he’d washed his face and tidied up his hair in the men’s room. I wondered if he’d done it for me or for the person he was meeting for dinner.

“Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do,” my mother’s voice said behind me. She and my father giggled like a couple of kids and kept walking right by us.

“Do you know those people?” Sean Ryan asked. He grabbed his carry-on with one hand and Cannoli’s empty backpack with the other.

I shook my head. “Apparently not,” I said. “But they used to be my parents.”

We watched them for a moment. Somehow my father’s arm was around my mother’s shoulders. Sean Ryan cleared his throat and looked away. “Well, isn’t that nice to see,” he said.

“How long have they been married?”

“They’re not,” I said. “They hate each other. And I can’t believe they’re not worried about me. I mean, you could be anyone.”

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We started walking, my parents’ sweat suits like faraway fluorescent beacons in front of us. We took an escalator down and stepped onto a tram. The Atlanta airport must have been about a million miles long. I kept thinking we were going to be in Texas by the time we got out, but it was only the baggage claim area.

“Okay, then,” Sean Ryan said after we caught our luggage as it came by on the turnstile. “I’ll pick you up tomorrow at your hotel at eleven.”

“Don’t be late,” I said. I reached out my hand to shake his hand.

He laughed.

“Hey, you made the rules,” I said.

He leaned over and gave me a little peck on my cheek, and I tried not to notice his Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam. He reached over to pet Cannoli in my shoulder bag.

“Take good care of her,” he said. I wasn’t sure which one of us he was talking to.

Sean Ryan, Cannoli, and I all followed the signs out to the ground transportation area. He turned right, so we went left.

There wasn’t even a hint of fall here. It was at least thirty degrees warmer than it had been back home in Marshbury.

There also wasn’t one single bit of grass or dirt outside the airport. Even the median strip was a concrete sidewalk.

Where did Atlanta’s pet travelers pee? Maybe city dogs just learned to use the sidewalk. We kept walking. It looked like if we crossed the road that all the cars used to get onto the highway, we might come to a planted-up area, but we also might get killed.

Finally, I just lifted Cannoli up and plopped her down on a great big ashtray built into the top of a trash barrel. “Good thing you’re not a German shepherd,” I said.

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She looked up at me in disbelief. There were a couple of cigarette butts and the nasty-looking remnants of a cigar, but as far as ashtrays went, it was pretty clean.

“Come on,” I said. “Cats do it all the time. Just try to think of it as a litter box.”

Finally her Chihuahua-size bladder won out. I glanced away to give her some privacy. Two women looked over and whispered something to each other, too polite to say it to my face. Clearly, we weren’t in Boston anymore.

We walked back to ground transportation. I was pretty sure I remembered Mario telling me something about shuttles being available, but I wasn’t sure if they would be pet friendly, so I decided to splurge and treat us to a cab.

“Welcome to Lannah,” the cabdriver said.

“Who’s Lannah?” I asked.

He laughed. “Where you headin’, Ma’am?” I put Cannoli down on the seat beside me and started rifling through my shoulder bag. “I think it’s somewhere on Peachtree.”

He looked at me in the mirror. His skin was the color of mochaccino, maybe a MAC NC30, with a sprinkle of freckles that looked like chocolate. “You gotta do bettah than that, Ma’am. They all Peachtree in Lannah.” I had no idea what he was saying, but I loved the melodic way it sounded. I found the address for Hotel Indigo and read it out loud to the cabdriver. We pulled out into the traffic.

I opened a water bottle and drank half, then fed some to Cannoli, since I figured she could handle it now. I looked out the window. I held Cannoli up so she could look out the window, too.

Most of the traffic was coming out of the city and toward us, but there was plenty going in our direction, too. The highway had so many lanes it made Boston look like the boondocks.

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“Is the traffic always like this?” I asked.

“You should see it when the Chicken Pluckers Convention comes to town.”

I laughed, in case it was a joke. He looked at me in the mirror. “Where you from, Ma’am?”

“Bahs-tin,” I said, for the first time in my life. In a minute I’d be saying
Pahk the cah in the Hahvid yahd
on cue.

“Okay,” he said. “I got one for ya. A couple from Bahs-tin was tourin’ the back roads of Georgia. They’d seen the folk art and were fixin’ to eat in an authentic Southern restaurant.” He put his blinker on and switched lanes. “They stopped at the first one they came to. The dinner menu consisted of grits, sweet tea, and chicken three ways. The Bahs-tin gentleman straightened his tie and said, ‘Excuse me, Ms., but could you please tell us how you prepare your chickens?’

“The waitress took her time thinkin’ about it. Finally she said, ‘Well, sir, in these here parts we don’t do anything real special. We just tell ’em straight out they gonna die.’ ”

“Did you get that one from the chicken pluckers?” I asked when I finished laughing.

“Drive ’em every year,” he said. “We love ’em in Lannah.

Those good ol’ boys know how to eat, and they sure are fond of naked women.”

That last part made me a little bit nervous, so I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the way to the hotel. Then, since I arrived safely, I gave the cabdriver an extra-big tip for the joke.

The hotel was on Peachtree Street, not to be confused with West Peachtree or Peachtree Road or Peachtree Place. Maybe I could leave a trail of peach pits behind us when I took Cannoli out for a walk, just to make sure we found our way back to the right Peachtree.

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As soon as I saw it, I knew why Andrew and Amy had picked this hotel for everyone to stay in, even though it was closer to the Fox Theater than it was to the Margaret Mitchell House.

Hotel Indigo was the cutest boutique hotel ever, just the kind of place Mario and Todd would have picked. It was a funky little oasis in the middle of midtown, with a totally hip and welcoming indigo blue awning with a seashell on it over the entrance, and a front patio dotted with bistro tables and flanked by a flower garden. I didn’t know where the chicken pluckers stayed when they were in town, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t here.

In the lobby, we were greeted by another shock of indigo blue, with crisp white and soft green accents. “Oooh,” I said to Cannoli. “Let’s move here.”

Cannoli was ignoring me. She strained at her leash, trying to reach a dog about her size, which was wagging its tail like crazy.

“That’s Indie,” the guy behind the desk said. “He’s a Jack Russell terrier. Indie’s the star of the show around here.” If I were an eight-pound Chihuahua/terrier mix with a dye job, I think I would have found Indie pretty hot, too. He was an inch or two taller than Cannoli, with a cinnamon face edged in nutmeg and a mostly white body. He had a strong, proud chest and intelligent eyes. I realized I was checking out a dog, which was more than slightly scary.

I finally dragged Cannoli away, after promising her that maybe Indie could go for a walk with us later. Our room was up on the third floor, facing Peachtree Street, and it was soft beige with an abstract mural on one wall, and black, white, purple, and green accents. The bed had a great white bead-board headboard that was beachy enough to make me feel at home. There was a cute haiku that made the tiny bathroom Summer Blowout

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seem more poetic than inadequate, and the Aveda bath products were a nice touch, too. You can tell a lot about a hotel by its bath products.

We got our clothes hung up and everything else put away. I leaned back against the headboard and put my feet up on the bed. I flipped through the channels on the TV.

Cannoli walked over and sat right in front of the door. I ignored her. She started scratching at the floor. She let out a sharp bark.

“All right, all right,” I said. “Wow, you’ve really got it bad.” Ten minutes later, I had my sneakers on, directions to Piedmont Park in one hand, and leashes attached to Cannoli and Indie in the other.

“Okay, you two, it says ‘walk ten blocks north on Peachtree Street, then walk about four or five more blocks down Tenth until you get to the park.’ This better be worth it.” We worked up a good appetite getting there, so we stopped at a shacklike place called Woody’s right across from the park.

I got a delicious hot dog for me and one for the dogs to split. So far I was lovin’ Lannah.

The dog park in Piedmont Park was easy to find—we just followed the dogs. There was a small-dog park within the dog park within the park park. It seemed like there should have been a song for it, maybe something like the old kids’ song about the knee bone being connected to the shinbone.

Cannoli and Indie played like crazy, mostly with each other, but sometimes with Indie’s other friends, whose owners all knew him by name. “Stayin’ at the hotel?” a few of them asked me.

I nodded and smiled, and even told some of them about Andrew’s wedding. Everybody was so friendly that at first I thought they were being sarcastic. They were well dressed in 194

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kind of an upscale, urban professional-looking way. I tried to imagine what it would be like to move to this warm, happy place where people talked to strangers. Maybe I’d find a place to live near Piedmont Park. Somewhere not over a hair salon.

Somewhere nowhere near my family.

Then I pictured myself showing up at Andrew and Amy’s apartment every Friday night with a pizza box, overcome by the urge to create a Marshbury South down here. Or, just my luck, it would turn out that my family was connected to me as if we were all wearing bungee cords. As soon as I’d move, then
boing
, Mario and Todd would spring here next, then Angela and her family, then Tulia and hers, then Sophia and my ex-husband. . . . Pretty soon we’d all be living on top of one another again. Maybe faux Italian Shaughnessys could only survive in a pack.