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“I just don’t get it,” Chaz had said to us after Shari excused herself to go to the bathroom between courses at di
“That’s the same thing she says to me,” I’d said with a sigh.
“Maybe it’s hormonal,” Luke had suggested. Which, considering all the bio he was taking, was a natural leap.
“For six weeks?” Chaz had shaken his head. “Because that’s how long it’s been. Ever since she started that job… and moved in with me.”
I’d swallowed. It was all my fault. I just knew it. If I had just moved in with Shari like I’d promised, instead of ditching her to live with Luke, none of this would have happened…
“If you think you can do so much better,” Chaz is saying now, shoving the songbook across the table of the booth we’re sitting in, “why don’t you give it a whirl?”
Shari looks down at the black binder in front of her. “I don’t do karaoke,” she says coldly.
“Um, that’s not what I recall,” Luke says, waggling his dark eyebrows. “At least, not from a certain wedding I remember… ”
“That,” Shari says dourly, “was a special occasion. I was just trying to help out Big Mouth over there.”
I blink. Big Mouth? I mean, I know it’s true and all… but I’ve been getting better. Really. I haven’t told ANYONE about meeting Jill Higgins. And I’ve managed to keep from Luke the fact that his mother’s lover (if that’s who the guy even is… which, more and more, I’m starting to suspect) has called theapartment yet again. I’m a veritable vault of incendiary information!
But I decide to cut Shari some slack. Because I did leave her in the lurch and all.
“Come on, Shari,” I say, reaching for the binder. “I’ll find us something fun to sing. What do you say?”
“Count me out,” Shari says. “I’m too tired.”
“You can never be too tired for karaoke,” Chaz says. “All you have to do is stand up there and read from a teleprompter.”
“I’m too tired,”Shari says again, this time more adamantly.
“Look,” Luke says, “somebody has to get up there and sing something. Otherwise, Frodo is going to perform another ballad. And then I’ll have to slit my wrists.”
I’ve started flipping through the binder. “I’ll do it,” I say. “I can’t let my boyfriend commit suicide.”
“Thanks, honey,” Luke says, winking at me. “That’s so nice of you.”
I’ve found the song I want and am filling out the little slip of paper you’re supposed to give to the waitress if you want to sing. “If I do this,” I say, “you guys have to do one, too. Luke and Chaz, I mean.”
Chaz looks solemnly at Luke. “‘Wanted Dead or Alive’?”
“No,” Luke says, shaking his head vehemently. “No way.”
“Come on,” I say. “If I’m doing it, you guys have to—”
“No.” Luke is laughing now. “I do not do karaoke.”
“You have to,” I say gravely. “Because if you don’t, we’ll be subjected to more of that.” I nod toward a group of giggly twenty-somethings, each wearing the light-up penis necklaces and slackly drunken expressions that give away the fact that they are part of a bachelorette party—as if the fact that they’re screeching “Summer Lovin’” from Grease into a single microphone is not evidence enough.
“They are making a mockery of the karaoke,” Chaz agrees, pronouncing “karaoke” with the correct Japanese inflection.
“’Nother round?” the waitress, wearing an adorable red silk mandarin dress, with a not-so-adorable metal bar through her lower lip, wants to know.
“Four more,” I say, sliding two song slips toward her. “And two songs, please.”
“No more for me,” Shari says. She holds up her mostly full beer bottle. “I’m good.”
The waitress nods and takes my song slips. “Three more, then,” she says, and goes away.
“What did you mean,two songs?” Luke asks me suspiciously. “You didn’t—”
“I want to hear you sing that you’re a cowboy,” I say, my eyes wide with i
Luke’s mouth twists with suppressed mirth.“You—” He lunges at me, but I shrink against Shari, who goes, “Stop it.”
“Save me,” I say to Shari.
“Seriously,” she says. “Cut it out.”
“Oh, come on, Share,” I say, laughing. What’s wrong with her? She used to love goofing around in dive bars. “Sing with me.”
“You’re so a
“Sing with me,” I beg. “For old times’ sake.”
“Get out,” Shari says, giving me a shove toward the end of the bench we were sitting on. “I have to go pee.”
“I won’t get out,” I say, “unless you sing with me.”
Shari pours her beer over my head.
Later, in the ladies’ room, she apologizes. Abjectly.
“Seriously,” she says, sniffling as she watches me stick my head beneath the hand dryer. “I am so, so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s okay.” I can barely hear her above the roar of the hand dryer—not to mention the keening of the bachelorettes on stage. “Seriously.”
“No,” Shari says. “It’s not okay. I’m a terrible person.”
“You’re not a terrible person,” I say. “I was being a jerk.”
“Well.” Shari is leaning against the radiator. The ladies’ room at Honey’s is not what anyone would call the height of chic decor. There is one sink and one toilet, and the walls have been covered in vomit-beige paint that does little to hide the layers of graffiti beneath it. “You were being a jerk. But not any more than usual. I’m the one who’s turned into such a massive bitch. I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Is it your job?” I ask. The hand dryer is solving the problem of my wet hair. But it isn’t doing much for the beery smell coming from my Vicky Vaughn Junior minidress. That’s something I’m going to have to tackle with the Febreze bottle when I get home.
“It’s not my job,” Shari says mournfully. “I love my job.”
“You do?” I can’t hide my surprise. All Shari ever seems to do is complain about her hours and workload.
“I do,” she says. “That’s the problem… I’d rather be there than at home, any day.”
I open my double-flap seventies Meyers handbag (in stu
Shari’s face crumples. She puts her hands over it to hide her tears.
“Oh, Share.” My heart twisting, I step away from the hand dryer to put my arms around her. Through the door, I can hear the thump-thump-thump of the bass as the bachelorettes shriek that it’s up to you, New York, New York.
“I don’t know what happened,” Shari sobs. “I just feel like whenever I’m with him, I’m suffocating. And even when he’s not around… it’s like he’s smothering me.”
I am trying to be understanding. Because that’s how best friends are with each other.
But I’ve known Chaz for a long time. And he has so never been the suffocating or smothering type. In fact, it would be hard to find a more happy-go-lucky guy. I mean, except when he’s jabbering on about Kierkegaard.
“What do you mean?” I ask her. “How is he smothering you?”
“Well, like he calls me all the time at work,” Shari says, furiously wiping away her tears. Shari hates it when she cries… and consequently doesn’t do so very often. “Sometimes even twice a day!”
I blink down at her. “Calling someone twice a day at work isn’t all that much,” I say. “I mean, I call you that many times a day. A lot more than that, actually.” I don’t even mention how many times a day I’ve started e-mailing her, now that I spend so many hours at a workstation with an actual computer, on which I’m supposed to record any notes and messages for the lawyers I work for.
“That’s different,” Shari says. “Besides, it’s not just that. I mean, there’s the whole cat thing.” My revealing to Shari that Chaz was thinking about adding a four-legged friend to their domicile had resulted in her being “diagnosed” with a previously unknown dander allergy, and the sad admittance that she would never, alas, be able to live in a house or apartment with anything furry. “There’s also the fact that when I get home from work, he wants to know how my day went! After already having talked about it on the phone.”