“Thank you.”
“Wait, wait, don’t you hang up yet. Now if I were to come over there—which I am not. But if I did, and went all Megan Price on your ass, I would tell you one thing: Be Nikki Heat. Stay strong. Whatever it is, you’ve got to stay positive.”
“That’s three things.”
“And you can start by corking the wine bottle.”
“Oh, that was gone an hour ago. I’ve moved on to the hard stuff.”
“Just promise me, Nikki. You do what I said? And call anytime. Please?”
“Hey, Laur?”
“Yeah?”
“Never call this number again.”
The two ended the call laughing—but only Nikki’s laughter turned into tears.
She struggled to all fours, found the cork for the tequila bottle on the floor, then hauled herself up using the side of the tub as a handrail. The shot glass must have fallen into the bath water, so she drank straight from the bottle.
It was definitely a night of wrong choices.
The beauty of a hangover, Nikki thought the next morning, was that it did wonders for confusing the source of pain. Was it from the knot on your head some bruiser gave you with his shoe, or from the tender ribs you got hitting your bathroom floor in one of your life’s more un-shining moments? Or was it from the hangover itself? As she took a sip of her second vanilla latte of the day, Heat knew where the real pain lived, and that was why she was standing on a sidewalk on Warren Street at seven-thirty waiting for someone to unlock the front door of the Fountain Pen Hospital.
“I left him a voice mail, personally, to let him know it was fixed,” said Terry Wiederlight, one of the owners, as he returned from the back room holding a small cardboard box the size and dimensions of a pen. “Always glad to see you, Nikki, but Rook was so eager to get this Hemingway back, I’m surprised he didn’t come himself.”
Maybe to convince herself as much as Terry, she smiled and said, “He’s tied up on an assignment. But he’s going to want this when he’s free, I do know that.”
“That’s great, I hope it’s real soon. I expedited this. You know how Rook gets when he’s obsessed.”
“Sometimes all we need is one little thing to keep us going, Terry.”
“You are so right. Although this is no little thing, is it?” He uncapped the Montblanc collector’s edition pen and let her examine the replacement nib, which looked exactly like the original: gleaming Rhodium-plated 18-karat gold with deco scrollwork engraved around the number 4810, the metric altitude of the eponymous highest peak in the Alps.
“He is going to be so happy.” Once again, for herself, she added, “When he sees this.”
On her way out, Terry said, “Hey, if you two are getting each other wedding gifts, they also have other limited editions in the Writers Edition series. Maybe the Agatha Christie or the Edgar Allen Poe. Although he’s not much of a mystery writer, is he?”
Even with the Montblanc protected to excess in Bubble Wrap, Nikki carried the package in her hand like a fragile keepsake, beginning to worry that this entire errand was acting out some delusional fantasy, as if she were like Miss Havisham, clinging to a pen instead of a decaying wedding dress. Whether it was a positive gesture of hope or an exercise of pure denial, picking up Rook’s pen constituted for her an affirmation of his life in the absence of facts. It not only had to do, it needed to do. For now.