Lovely You Read online

  My phone rang and it was my boss. I just couldn’t deal right now with talking to her about why Klere hadn’t followed through with all her promised posts and mentions of us after the gift bag I had greeted her with, the clothes she had walked out of our showroom with, the dinner, the drinks, the everything. Pascale would probably fire me. Nope, couldn’t deal right now.

  I saw my phone signal that Pascale had left a message and then just as I got onto the bridge to cross the Golden Gate, it started to ring again. This time it was from…oh. That was the Hawaiian area code.

  There was no need to get excited at seeing those numbers. I didn’t give two fucks about anyone in Hawaii. I jabbed the button on the steering wheel to answer. “Hello?”

  “Scarlett? Hi. This is Nate.”

  “Nate?” I questioned, keeping my voice extremely cool.

  “Nate Lange. From Hawaii.”

  “Oh,” I said, and let some recognition creep into my voice. “Right, the property manager. Did I leave something behind?”

  “No. I wanted to let you know that I’m coming to San Francisco.”

  The car next to me laid on the horn as I swerved into that lane. I hoped Nate hadn’t been able to hear it through the phone. “And how does that relate to me?” I asked, as detached as I could sound at the moment. “I don’t usually have much to do with my grandmother’s employees.”

  A sound came through the phone, almost a laugh, but angry. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s true. But I need to ask a favor.”

  I felt a smile start to grow on my face. Well, wasn’t this something. Coming to me to ask a favor? Maybe my day was starting to look up, because it would feel really, really good to listen to his request and then, without any reason or rationale, simply say, “No.” I was looking forward to it. “A favor?” I asked blandly. “What do you need?” I prepared to shoot him down.

  “Not me,” he said. “It’s for a friend. Do you remember Joey? It’s for him.”

  Chapter 4

  Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Joey, the veteran who had lost his leg. Joey, the guy with the broken heart.

  I sighed, heavily. “Of course I remember Joey. What does he need?”

  Nate filled me in. He had mentioned before that Joey was having some other problems, and now he was saying that they were health problems. He needed to go to the VA hospital here, in San Francisco, where apparently there was some advanced clinic or department or something that could help him, when the facilities in Hawaii couldn’t. But it was so expensive to stay in this city.

  “I was hoping you had some leads on a place where we could bunk,” he finished. “For a few weeks, for cheap.”

  “‘We?’ Both of you are coming,” I clarified stupidly.

  “He needs someone.”

  “Don’t you have a job?” I asked. “You’re just going to leave it?” As if I hadn’t run out on my own job a few months prior.

  “It’s my company. I own Naupaka Property Management. I explained to my clients that I have to take a break and I hired a guy to temporarily replace me. If they want to find someone else to look after their houses instead, they’re welcome to. But I’m the best, so I don’t think they will,” he explained. The conceited ape.

  “Don’t you have any military friends here that you could ask?” I asked him.

  “Not anymore. Most of them have moved away. It’s expensive,” he explained, in case I didn’t know that about the city where I lived, too.

  “My grandmother has several rental properties in San Francisco,” I told him. “You should talk to her.”

  There was a pause. “I already did,” he stated.

  Ok, so if he had already braved my nasty grandmother, then I was definitely the last resort. He was desperate, hadn’t wanted to reach out to me at all, but he was doing it for his friend. I got it. I wanted to tell him to screw himself, but this was for Joey. So I thought about it.

  “I may know someone who will need a house sitter,” I said slowly. One of the photographers we used a lot was going to Greece for a few months and he had said something about needing someone to care for his orchids.

  “It needs to be a place with an elevator, and where they won’t mind a service dog. He has seizures and his dog helps him out with that. He needs Pia with him.”

  I rubbed my temple where I had started to get a headache. Another car honked, long and loud, as my car drifted a little between lanes again. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s the best I can do for you.”

  “For Joey.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “Scarlett?” Nate asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll look, ok?”

  “You can call me back at this number—”

  I cut him off. “Bye.” I hit the accelerator and went back to my blank apartment as fast as I could. I went right to the couch, covered myself up with my blanket, and grabbed the remote. After half an hour of watching trick shots on a pool table, which was apparently some kind of thing people did, I picked up my phone and returned Pascale’s call.

  “Hi, P,” I said when she answered, and continued right away before she could say anything. “I want you to know that Klere—”

  “Yes, it was perfect,” Pascale interrupted me loudly. “Great job, Scarlett.”

  “What?” I was dumfounded for a second, then quickly opened to one of Klere’s pages. It was all there—all of the sample posts I had drawn up for her, even the subtly misspelled hashtags so that people would think they were genuinely hers, not dictated by a fashion PR person (me). Klere had copied everything I had sent her, word for word.

  “I was really worried about taking you back on, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have if Juliette March hadn’t stepped in on your behalf,” Pascale hollered. “But you really came through with Klere. I heard that when she got flown to Chicago to promote Durak Vodka, she drank everyone under the table, projectile vomited, filled her carry-on with liquor bottles which she had to leave at the TSA counter in the airport, and then didn’t give them one hit on any of her social media. Not even a mention. And you got three posts out of her, just about us! Well done,” she yelled.

  I felt my muscles relaxing as Pascale started screaming about our next project, some buyers coming in from the east coast on Monday.

  “Am I talking loudly?” she asked me suddenly.

  “Uh, a little.”

  “I’m in my boot camp class and it’s hard to hear in here with the music and the grunting,” she explained.

  “Well, don’t let me interrupt you. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you when I’m done,” she said instead, because there was nothing most people wanted to do more on a Sunday evening than work.

  “Great,” I told her, and I heard someone moaning in the background. “Is everyone ok there?”

  “Someone’s rolling right through the sweat puddles on the floor freaking out. Looks like another torn ACL,” Pascale explained to me. “Wimp.”

  I went back to watching the trick shots, and re-reading Klere’s posts. I sent her a quick note thanking her and saying how much fun I’d had with her, how we’d love to have her visit again, but I didn’t expect an answer as I wasn’t promising her money or loot. We’d probably invite her up again and have to run through the whole process for a second time. Except I’d have to make the night crazier, the gift basket bigger, everything, in fact, super-sized for round two so she wouldn’t be bored. I got overwhelmed with a wave of self-pity at the thought of it. Trick-shots turned into a jumping contest where dogs ran and flew off the end of docks and I kept watching.

  My phone rang again, and it was my sister, so I answered because Zara would be relentless and call back repeatedly until I did. She wanted to rehash the party, to go over what everyone had been wearing, to get my opinion on the caterer she had used, the florist, to talk about my mom and how she had adopted Lanie.

  “Does that bother you?” I asked cautiously. “The relationship they have? Lanie is so annoying.” We had gotten along as kids, kind of, but now
…I would have been hard-pressed to name someone who pissed me off more.

  “Why would it bother me? I think it’s sweet that Lanie and Mom get along so well. I like her. It’s nice for Brooks that everyone will be friends with his wife, too, like you guys are with Bradley.”

  There was a long silence and I considered that 1) I wouldn’t be friends Brooks’ spouse and 2) I wasn’t with Zara’s, either. And that 3) Zara really, really set a low bar for people she liked, with her husband as exhibit A and Lanie as B. And me as C.

  “Um, did Bradley act a little strange today, do you think?” Zara asked.

  “Bradley?” I repeated.

  “My husband,” Zara told me, to make sure there was no misunderstanding. “Brooks was making some remarks about his behavior and his drinking.”

  I had to tread very carefully here. Zara was still on my side and I wanted to keep her there. She was like my mom, too, in that she never wanted to see any problem with the people that she loved. If I told her that her husband had grabbed my butt, it would have been a misunderstanding, I would be misconstruing his brotherly affection. His affection for my ass, maybe. “What did Brooks say about his drinking and his behavior?” I asked instead of voicing my opinion.

  “He said that Bradley was an alcoholic and acting like an idiot. What do you think he meant by that?” my sister asked me.

  “Uh…”

  “I didn’t want to start an argument at Isla’s party,” Zara continued, “so I pretended that I hadn’t heard him, but then I watched Bradley a little. Do you really think he drinks too much?”

  I needed to pull my sister back from the land of denial, just a little bit. “How often would you say that he drinks to excess? Like, in a way that affects his behavior, or affects you or the kids?”

  “Like in a week or in a month?” she asked, then said, “Five times,” without waiting for my clarification.

  “He drinks too much five days out of the month or five days of every week?” I asked her. “Zara, if you mean every week…” Because I had known that it was a problem, but I had no idea how big.

  I heard kids yelling in the background and Zara had to go deal with them. She was done talking to me about it, anyway. I looked at her social media pages after we hung up, and they were full of pictures of Isla’s perfect party. The two kids looked so cute, Zara was beautiful, smiling happily in every shot. Even Bradley looked good in the family picture, and the one she had posted with him kissing her cheek. “He thinks I did a great job with everything today!” she had written underneath. “Best friends make the best husbands.”

  I started to feel queasy, looking at it all, so I went back to the dog competition on TV. I liked being able to tell immediately who was the winner and the loser, and even the loser dogs seemed to be having a blast. I lay on my couch and thought about giving up my life here to go live wherever these people did, to raise dogs to jump off the ends of docks. I even started searching on my phone where those places would be and what kind of salary I could expect when I noticed a few messages from work that I thought I should answer, and after a while of doing that, I forgot about my possible career as a dog long-jump trainer.

  ∞

  “A dog?” Javier asked.

  “A service dog. Really well-behaved.” I assumed that was true.

  “Sorry, I can’t have dogs at my apartment.” He swallowed and looked at me. “I’m really sorry, Scarlett,” our office intern said. He sounded a little scared. “Sorry,” he repeated. “I guess I don’t like them much, either. I’m not allowed to have them and I don’t like them. But…”

  “Never mind,” I told him. I understood his point about not liking dogs. Despite considering a career as a trainer the night before, I didn’t like them much, either.

  Javier had been almost my last resort. Despite what Nate was probably thinking, I had asked around—practically everyone I knew, and I knew a lot of people. The general answer to, “Do you know anywhere in or near San Francisco where two guys can live low-rent or free?” had been mostly laughter. It was one of the most expensive housing markets in the world; if anyone knew of a place like that, even short term, they would have already been living in it. Javier, the intern I had just asked, took the BART train into work for more than an hour and a half each morning from the apartment he shared with three roommates (I had heard him complaining to the receptionist). I had asked him just in case, but I already knew the answer. No, just like everyone else.

  And it had been two days since Nate had called. I had been very busy at work, which had made it hard for me to call him back. My nights had been full, too, with a cheese rolling competition and replays of a dog sled race, and evading calls from my mom. I thought of Joey, needing medical treatment. Fuck. I went into my little office, scrolled through my call list, and waited as it rang.

  “Scarlett?” Nate’s voice sounded muffled.

  “I asked around and I didn’t find anything,” I said abruptly. “I have the names of some rentals I checked out online and hotels near the hospital but none of them are, um, inexpensive. I’ll send them to you anyway.”

  “Ok.”

  “I really did ask around. I reached out to a ton of people,” I asserted. I had even called my grandmother about her various properties (she told me she didn’t have time to discuss it) and suggested to my brother that he get out of the house that he and Lanie were renting from me, which had started another fight with him. “I talked to practically everyone I know. There’s nothing.”

  “I appreciate that you tried.” There was a thump and he swore. “I’m in a crawl space right now and it’s hard to talk.”

  “Can’t his family help with these expenses?” I asked, then thought of his brother’s house, where we had dropped off Joey the night we had gone out in Hawaii. It had been more like a shack than a house.

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “I did try…” I stopped. Why did I care if Nate believed me or not?

  “Thank you.” Despite still sounding like he was talking to me from the bottom of a well, he also sounded sincere. “I believe that you did, and thank you.”

  I thought about the place where Joey lived; I thought about the cost of the flights from Hawaii to California. Mother fucker! “But I came up with another solution,” I heard myself say. “He can stay with me.”

  There was silence, and Nate had said he was in a crawlspace, so I assumed I had lost him and started to put the phone down.

  “Are you sure?” he asked suddenly.

  “I just said it, didn’t I?” I snapped back, because no, I wasn’t sure, and I hadn’t thought it through, and I was already regretting it. But now I couldn’t take it back. “There’s an elevator in my building, my landlord doesn’t give a shit about dogs.” Probably. “It’s fine.”

  “That’s very generous.” Now Nate’s voice was guarded, careful.

  “Yeah, well, generous is my middle name.”

  More silence.

  “If he doesn’t want to stay with me, great. Enjoy San Francisco,” I said.

  “No, I’m sure he will want to. Thank you, Scarlett.” His voice sounded very deep, or maybe it was just because it was echoing around the crawl space.

  “Whatever,” I said quickly. It wasn’t a big deal. “I’m not there very much, so I’ll probably barely see him.” I warmed to the idea. “He can take the master bedroom because there’s no tub in the bathroom that’s attached, just a big walk-in shower that will be easy for him to use. Plus I’m right near a lot of public transportation.” I continued to list the attributes of my apartment, like I was selling it.

  “It sounds perfect,” Nate told me. He filled me in on their arrival—which drove home that both of them were coming, and I had definitely offered space for just one person. But Nate was a big boy. I thought of his hard muscle, the wall of his chest that I had felt when I pressed myself against it to kiss him, and that thought filled me with shame. Yeah, he was definitely a big boy. He could find his own damn place in S
an Francisco if he felt like he needed to babysit his friend.

  I wrote down some details about their flights as he spoke but I wanted to get off the phone immediately, yesterday if possible. “Great, sure. I have to go, because I do this working thing. Bye.”

  “Wait.” I heard a sigh through the phone. “Scarlett, are you sure about this?”

  I understood him perfectly. He was asking if I was going to back out and leave his friend high and dry, stranded in an expensive city and needing medical treatment. Like I was the shittiest person in the world. “Yes, I’m perfectly sure!” I barked. “Goodbye.” I hung up before he could start to question me more, because I might have admitted to being the shittiest person in the world. The woman who didn’t even call back her own mother when she was the only one in the world who loved me. Now feeling guilty and pitiful as well as pissed off, I called my mom.

  “Hi, honey!” she answered, her voice so warm and loving that I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from getting emotional.

  “Hi. I’m returning your call,” I answered shortly. “I don’t have much time. What’s up?”

  She wanted to discuss Zara. Apparently, my sister had also talked to our mom about her disgusting husband Bradley. “Did you notice him behaving oddly at the reception at their house?” my mom asked me. “Lanie says—”

  I had no desire to hear what my future sister-in-law had to say about anything. “I’m sure Lanie is spot-on in her assessment,” I interrupted. Lanie was so great at reading people, in fact, that it took my brother having to make a formal announcement for her to clue into that they were a couple. He had made this big love declaration in front of both me and her mother, Juliette, which had been enough to turn someone’s stomach. Idiots.