I thought their thing would fizzle out soon enough. He had caught Veronica after her father had been exposed as a serial cheater and after she tried to stab my eye out with a nail file—obviously she was in a very vulnerable state. One date and that would be it, I figured.
But that wasn’t how it worked out. They had one date, then two, then suddenly Veronica started showing up at the club all the time. She was real good at ignoring me, but she always had a smile and a hello for Nicky. Then the next thing I knew, months had passed, and he was calling her his woman in conversations. It went downhill that fast.
Over time, I could see the logic of it, though. They were cut from the same cloth: mean as the day was long, insensitive as hell, fiercely protective of those that they loved. I had never imagined losing my Duckie to the meanest girl in school, but at the end of the day, they made each other happy.
Plus, knowing what I did about the both of them, I wouldn’t have wished those two on anybody but each other.
. . .
Nicky and Veronica’s developing romance mostly just made me miss James even more. The end of a relationship is a sort of grief for the dead, I suppose, and over the next few months, I often found myself close to tears at inconvenient and unexpected times. Like when I was walking Venice Beach Promenade with Chloe. The uneven display of talent that is the Sunday drum circle drifted up from the beach to the stand where we had stopped to look at some cheap sunglasses.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked when I froze while trying on a pair of oversized green shades.
“I don’t think I like this color,” I said. That was a lie. I loved the lime green of the frames, but I still hadn’t gotten to a place where I could talk about my problems getting over James. So I lied to Chloe and put the sunglasses back.
Another time was when I was at Trader Joe’s. The checkout clerk looked nothing like James, but it was James I was reminded of when he said, “Have a nice day,” and it sounded sincere.
Toward the middle of our relationship, James had taken to kissing me on top of my head whenever we parted in the mornings and demanding that I “have a nice day” before he let me go. Then the next time we would meet, usually later that night, the first thing he would ask me was “Well, did you have a nice day?”
Back during the time that I was actually with James, when I had imagined losing him, I had always thought it would be the intimacy that I would miss the most. I thought my body would burn for him at night, and that I would long for the feel of his arms wrapped around me. To be sure, those things were a problem.
But what I hadn’t counted on was how much remembering our good times together would hurt. That’s the thing people never warn you about with breakups. It’s the good times that really get you. In fact, they hurt worse than the bad times.
Sometimes I woke up from dreams in which James and me were still together, and cried when I remembered that we had broken up under the worst of circumstances. After those dreams I was always glad that James had moved to New York. If he hadn’t, I just know I would’ve driven over to Los Feliz and begged him to take me back. His moving allowed me to hang on to my last scrap of dignity where he was concerned, and for that I was grateful.
Most of the time.
. . .
In late June, I was taking a drink order from a table of Japanese businessmen when Nicky tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Watch this.”
That’s all the warning I got before he climbed up onstage and took the mic. Chloe and the rest of the band were on break, so the stage was empty, but the mic was still live.
“I need your attention up here,” he said to the audience. “I’m about to do something I never thought I’d do in a million years.”
“This man who?” asked the Japanese businessman closest to me.
“He’s the owner of this place,” I said, handing him his Midori sour.