Starfire (Peaches Monroe #3)(49)
Author: Mimi Strong

“I’m just visiting,” I said. “I’m a tourist myself, from Washington State. That’s north of here.”

He looked confused, his white-flecked dark eyebrows knitting together. “But you look so… what is word… comforting.”

“Comfortable.” I nodded, smiling. “I’ve been traveling more lately.”

Another man with dark hair, much younger—maybe nineteen—joined us.

“I’m Arturo,” the handsome young man said, reaching out to shake my hand.

“Chelsea,” I replied, blushing over my lie.

Arturo turned to the older man. “Dad, I leave you alone for five minutes, and you’ve got the prettiest girl in all of San Francisco to come sit at our table.”

I fanned my face, trying to be modest, but eating up the compliments.

Arturo didn’t have a thick accent like his father, but he certainly was Italian. The compliments didn’t stop, and neither did his eyes, scouring my face, my eyes, my jaw, my hair, my collarbone, my br**sts, and my hands as I self-consciously reached for my mug.

The two were investigating a business opportunity for their family business back in Italy. As they told me a little about their home, and life in the Italian countryside, I wondered if my friend and former lover Keith Raven was meeting strangers at that very moment and discussing the same. For a moment, talking to these visitors, I felt a connection with Keith, and a warmth.

Keith had described our time together in such positive terms. When I left for the airport, he said he could feel me sparkling in his heart, like a diamond.

As Arturo and his father playfully competed for my attention, I felt what Keith had described. A brightness.

Time passed quickly, and soon a familiar-looking man was hovering near the table.

“This is my friend Vern!” I announced, and introduced him to the Italian men.

Vern nodded to the door. “We’ll be chasing the light,” he said politely.

I went to shake the Italian guys’ hands goodbye, but they both stood as I stood, and insisted on kissing me on the cheeks.

As I exited the cafe with Vern, the cool air and quiet outside made me realize how noisy the cafe had been. A singer with a guitar had started playing on a small stage about thirty minutes earlier, and everyone had carried on at a louder volume.

The convivial meeting in the cafe was exactly the kind of experience you want to have when you’re traveling, yet not the kind of thing you can ever plan or seek. Isn’t it so beautiful that the best moments in life are this way?

Not that I didn’t have a good time with Dalton… mixed with some bad times, and let’s not forget the weird.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” I said to Vern. “We were shopping for flowers, and then—”

“No explanation needed. I understand how Mr. Deangelo can be.”

“This disaster might be on me.” I let out a big sigh that morphed into a self-aware laugh. “The funny thing is, when we got here, I was making dire predictions about a disaster, and then it happened.”

“We reap what we sow.” He held open the back door of the large truck.

Dalton was not inside the vehicle.

“Are we picking him up at the hotel?” I asked as I got settled into my seat.

“No.” Vern closed the door and left me hanging as he walked around to the passenger side.

I asked, “Is he meeting us at the airport?”

Vern adjusted the rear view mirror to make eye contact with me. His eyes looked sad, viewed apart from the rest of his face.

“He’s catching a commercial flight back to LA.”

“But we didn’t say goodbye.”

“He asked me to give you this.” Vern handed back an envelope. “I packed your luggage for you and everything’s in the back. We’ll be going straight to the airport from here, and I’ll have you back home in time for a late dinner, unless you’d like to pick something up quickly here?”

I mumbled that the original plan sounded good, and we started driving.

I tore open the envelope and pulled out a commercial greeting card with a frog on the front. The frog wore a tie, so clearly it was a boy frog.

The caption under the boy frog said: I’ve got something to say!

Inside was a giant RIBBIT in puffy letters.

Underneath that was a smaller line in red text: In other words, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?

The card was hand-signed Dalton, a.k.a. D-Man.

Dalton’s signature was the only thing that hadn’t been pre-printed on the card.

“This is terrible,” I said.

Vern heard me mumble and asked if I need anything or had any questions.

“I’m fine,” I said.

I stared down at the card with the frog, in all of its terribleness. It was exactly like something my father would give my mother—that’s how bad it was.

But the dumb card was better than nothing.

As we drove, I started to get doubts.

Did I actually deserve an apology, regardless of how terrible the apology was? The cause of our recent fight didn’t seem obvious, in retrospect. First, I’d insulted his moth-eaten shirt. But he’d sprung some new information on me about stalking me. And I’d called him a liar, which was possibly true, but unsubstantiated. Then he’d tossed dog water on me before I could toss it on him. He did have a point that I should have said something sooner about the scooter, but I honestly had been trying to be easygoing.

And now I had a RIBBIT card.

I didn’t know whether to tear the card in half and toss it out the window, or put both card and torn envelope carefully in my purse with my wet jean skirt, to take home and start a scrapbook with.

CHAPTER 22

I brought the RIBBIT card with me to work on Monday morning.

A few times during the day, I’d pull out the card just to look at it. Holding the card in my hands made me feel like a kid at the end of a fantasy movie—the kind of movie where everyone says the events were just a dream, yet the girl unfurls her hand to find a shimmering, magical feather.

The RIBBIT card was my magical feather, and Dalton was real. The engagement was both fake and real at the same time. Thinking about that made my whole body ache.

At twelve-fifteen, things were going fine at the store when I got hit with a Lunch Break Returner.

I wiggled my toes inside my shoes to keep from screaming.

Lunch Break Returners are all about Getting All The Fucking Things Done, especially on Mondays.

If you open a retail business yourself some day, take my advice and find a way to not be there between twelve and one o’clock on Mondays. Put a scarecrow behind the counter, leave the door unlocked while you go for coffee, and put a help-yourself bucket of cash next to the cash register—like the honor-system candy buckets some people put out at Halloween.