Naturally people started showing up—Lola, my neighbor and Blix’s old best friend, comes in to knit several times a week; a guy named Ernst brings his laptop and works on his screenplay there because he says the vibe is so good for his characters’ dialogue; Christine sits cross-legged on the floor and writes letters to her old boyfriend who doesn’t want to take her back (we’re waiting for a match for her to show up and get her to leave this old BF alone)—and then there are a group of three high school girls who regularly come bounding in with such panache and swagger that Kat and I have taken to calling them the Amazings.
Kat, a former accounting major who only took the job if I promised to stop using the word universe in her presence, at first didn’t see the point of my little back room salon.
She was all like, “Aren’t we a flower business? This back room side hustle you’ve got going on will not pay the bills. It’s what my grandmother would have said was just frippery.”
I hugged her. “That’s it! Frippery is the perfect name for it.” And I painted a little sign, THE FRIPPERY, for over the archway. It matches the words on our frosted glass front door—BEST BUDS painted with little vines and buds weaving through the gold letters.
“But can’t we at least suggest that people make a purchase every once in a while?” she whined, and I said, “It’s all going to work out fine as long as people are having fun; it always does.” Which she said was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard a business owner say.
But you know what? It has worked out just fine.
Anyway, Kat is now a believer, and she even permits me to point out the accomplishments of the universe once or twice a month now. This is because I fixed her up with the UPS guy one slow afternoon. Of course, it wasn’t me fixing her up; it was the U, that word that we do not utter. Whenever he was around, she was covered in sparkles, and he was just the same. Now that she’s in love, she’s less irritated by all the wacky talk about energy and spirits. Love does that to people, I notice. Improves their outlook on life.
“By the way,” she says, as I’m heading into the Frippery to fluff the pillows, “did you happen to see a woman and a little girl out there when you came in?”
I’ve been studying myself in the mirror to see if I can detect any signs of first-day pregnancy, but I come back out. “Scads of them. Women and baby girls everywhere you look.”
“No. This is a middle-sized girl, maybe seven or eight. They were looking for you.”
“Nope.”
“I told them you’d be in later, and they said maybe they’d go get some breakfast. They flew in from England last night, and the mom looked like she could really use some caffeine. I sent them to Yolk.”
“England’s a long way to come for a bouquet of roses,” I say.
“Maybe your reputation as a matchmaker is now international.”
I wave her off. “The important question of the day is: Do you think I could really be pregnant?”
“You really could be pregnant.”
“Huh. And I suppose Patrick would eventually get used to the idea, wouldn’t he? I mean, he wouldn’t leave me or anything.”
She stares at me. “Good heavens, what’s happened to you? You’re the one who’d be telling somebody else that hell yes, everything’s going to work out! I can just hear you now: ‘It’s life, it’s meant to be, it’s’”—she makes a face—“‘the universe doing what it does so well!’”
“I know, I know. It’s just that I want this so badly. I’ve never wanted anything this much. It makes me scared I won’t get it.”
She rolls her eyes. “Did you talk to Toaster Blix about it?”
“Didn’t have a chance this morning,” I say. I once made the mistake of telling Kat how I sense Blix’s presence near her old temperamental toaster, an appliance that insists on throwing bread at me on a regular basis. And how, in times of trouble, I can simply go stand near the toaster and feel her energy there. Kat, of course, finds this hilarious.
“Well, go into the Frippery then and see if you can summon her from the dead. She’ll set you straight. Remind you who you are.”
CHAPTER FOUR
TESSA
It takes all her willpower, but Tessa Farrell makes a point of not checking her cell phone all the way through breakfast, even though it’s been vibrating in her bag the whole time she and Fritzie have been in the restaurant. (If you can refer to this too-precious little sliver of real estate as a restaurant—it’s called Yolk, according to the name burned into the piece of wood over the door. If you want to be technically correct, Tessa thinks, this place is actually closer to being a pretentious little closet that somehow got crammed with six tables.)
It’s Richard, of course. The phone. Sending erotic messages and texts, then trying to follow up with a phone call to say dirty things in her ear and make her laugh. And although she’d give anything just now to hear his liquid, chocolaty baritone transmitted through the transatlantic satellites, she won’t allow herself that.
Good God. How has this happened to her? This stupid aching need. She hasn’t ever had one moment of sentimentality her whole life, and now she can’t think of anything besides how much she loves Richard and how much she wants to be in bed with him. It’s beyond ridiculous. She always thought that the whole business of falling in love was merely a hoax perpetrated by the movie industry to get people to feel bad about their own dull lives. Or, worse, propaganda to get people to consign their lives to perpetuating the species. She’d lived her whole life resisting all of that rubbish.
And now it’s all she can do to keep from running out into the street and throwing herself in the path of the nearest Uber, making the driver take her to the airport, so she can catch a plane and fling herself into Richard’s arms. Richard, who last time they were together stopped her anxious yammering on about something by simply leaning over her and smiling and saying, “Will you fucking shut up and kiss me?”
She wants so much to talk to him that her head throbs with the need for his voice, but Fritzie is watching her closely, and Fritzie hates when she’s absorbed with the phone or with Richard. She has an eight-year-old’s razor-sharp instinct for sniffing out a rival for attention, and so she despises Richard. She puts her hands over her ears at the mention of his name, and over the past few months, whenever Tessa would leave Fritzie with a sitter so that she and Richard could have a date, Fritzie would scream bloody murder and then do some horrible thing. Once she threw out the new lacy thong Tessa had guiltily bought for herself, casually tossed it right in the dumpster, laughing. Another time she poured Tessa’s perfume down the sink—Chanel No. 5, which Richard had given Tessa for their one-month anniversary. When he gave it to her, he said she reminded him of Coco Chanel, and for a whole week he called her his Coco.
Tessa sighs and regards her plate of golden-yolked eggs and the multigrain toast, buttered so precisely to the edges that it looks almost surgical. Fritzie, slouching in her chair, is pushing her food around the plate. She won’t eat. She knows her mother wants her to eat.
Outside the window, all of Brooklyn—weird, crowded, hot, overcast, Augusty Brooklyn—tramps by. So different from their home in San Francisco.