She did slowly resume her job search, but only halfheartedly, driven by the need to eat, at least occasionally. But she didn’t look very hard because she preferred, at least for the moment, the obscurity of a string of odd jobs. Which pretty much left her alone with her self-pity and the occasional pint of Ben and Jerry’s Brownie Fudge Ice Cream. Well. Okay, frequent pint.
If only Dagne would leave her alone. Dagne was really beginning to bug her. She was not content to watch Rachel slide into a deep depression, and when Rachel would not return her calls, Dagne forced herself on Rachel, arriving at her house, letting herself in, acting all mad and irritating Rachel to no end.
“Get up!” she cried at Rachel. “You’re going to get huge lying around like this!”
“Actually, I’ve lost a couple of pounds,” Rachel said, and continued to eat popcorn from a bag the size of a king pillowcase. She’d picked three or four of them up at her last temp job, Kettledrum Popcorn, Inc.
That had made Dagne mad, as usual, and she had stalked off to a very clean dining room and had started going through the hutch while Rachel watched The Bachelor.
It was the night The Bachelor was to pick his four top favorites and tell them all that he was falling in love with them. And for some reason, as he started to tell the first one that he felt a real connection, Rachel started to sob. “Don’t believe him!” she wailed at the television. “He’s lying! You can’t trust him, you’ll never be able to trust a word he says.”
Amazingly, she never even saw Dagne hurtling through space toward her. She was stunned when Dagne snatched the popcorn from Rachel’s hand, and the remote, which she used to turn off the television before she hurled it into the dining room and shouted, “SNAP OUT OF IT!”
“You’re screaming at me,” Rachel said tearfully.
“Yes, I’m screaming at you! I’m screaming at the top of my lungs because I can’t take it anymore! You and this little pity party have got to stop, Rachel. Okay, okay, he hurt you, he lied to you, he should have told you the truth, but how long are you going to go on like this?”
“Oh shut up!” Rachel shot back angrily. “I’ve forgotten all about Myron!”
“Jesus, Rach, I’m not talking about Myron! I’m talking about Flynn.”
The very mention of his name was like a knife in her heart and with a gasp that surprised even her, Rachel came up off the couch, gathered her robe tightly around her, and marched past Dagne in her Holstein cow slippers to the kitchen.
Naturally, the bitch followed right behind her.
“Leave me alone, Dagne!”
“I am so sick of this. How long can one person feel sorry for themselves?”
“I don’t know, and what do you care? You have boyfriends! Two at last count, Glenn and Joe!”
“Glenn dumped me, remember? And Joe is not my boyfriend,” she said, her face turning fireplug red, which, of course, meant that she was gaga for him.
Rachel poured a glass of wine, pushed past Dagne, and moved into the dining room, feeling, all of a sudden, like a fish out of water, like she couldn’t quite catch her breath.
“Joe’s just been working with me to retrieve the items I sold on eBay, that’s all,” Dagne insisted.
“Oh, sure,” Rachel snorted. “Christ, Dagne, you don’t even get it. At least you don’t believe he is there for any other reason, like maybe, for you.” Just admitting it aloud was a sucker punch, and Rachel inadvertently gulped back a terrible sob.
“Flynn was there for you,” Dagne said, the shout gone from her voice. “He loves you.”
“Oh God, Dagne, do me a favor and stop trying to make me believe some stupid spell. Right, right, he loves me so much he’s gone back to England,” she said, and took a huge gulp of wine.
“No, he hasn’t. He’s here in Providence.”
The floor seemed to shift a little; Rachel looked at Dagne from the corner of her eye. “What do you mean? He’s here?”
Dagne nodded. “He’s been tracking down the stuff I sold on eBay, too.”
That news hit Rachel hard—she had convinced herself that he’d left, had flown back to England and had put her out of his mind. To think he’d been in Providence all this time, while she had been mourning him . . . “So he’s been here and never bothered to let me know. Oh yeah, that’s love all right.”
Dagne looked at her with such exasperation that Rachel cringed. “Well, he might have called you if your phone wasn’t disconnected. And he might have come by if you hadn’t told him you never wanted to see him again.”
“Did he say that?”
“It’s pretty obvious.”
“Oh, God,” Rachel moaned.
“Anyway, I don’t give a shit what you think,” Dagne said with all authority, and picked up her purse, and tucked a giant bag of popcorn under her arm. “Because you are incapable of thinking straight. But if I were you, I’d get myself ready. I put a major spell on you, girl. And when the moon is full, which, for your information, is only days away, true love is going to come hopping back into your life. For good.”