Queen of Babble Gets Hitched

• Chapter 15 •

“This is so wrong,” I say as I sprawl naked across Chaz’s equally naked chest.

“Is that why it feels so right?” he wants to know.

“If there’s a hell,” I say, “we’re going straight to it.”

“At least we’ll be together,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure Elvis will be there. And Einstein. He was an adulterer too, right?”

I groan and turn my head only to find that I’m looking at a mural on the wall of a castle on a hill. It’s not even a very good mural.

But I don’t turn my head again because on the other wall is an even worse mural of a knight riding a white horse. Chaz is staying at the Knight’s Inn, which has windows with imitation diamond panes and a turret to make it look like a castle. When I asked him why in God’s name he would choose to stay at a Knight’s Inn out of all the hotels in Ann Arbor, he’d said, “Lizzie. I’ve got a turret in my room. How can you even ask me that question?”

“And Shakespeare,” Chaz says now. “He was an adulterer. So at least hell won’t be boring.”

“I’m not an adulterer,” I say. “I’m not married. I’m just engaged. And we’re on a break.”

“Did you specify the parameters of the break?” Chaz asks. “Did it include rampant monkey sex with your fiancé’s best friend?”

“Stop it,” I say. “You took advantage of me when I was in a weakened emotional state.”

“Me?” Chaz starts to laugh, his stomach muscles causing my head to bob up and down. “You assaulted me in your parents’ driveway. I was just coming by to pay my respects, and the next thing I knew, your tongue was in my mouth, and your hand was down my pants. I was so scared, I almost called nine-one-one to report a sexual predator on the loose.”

“Seriously,” I say. “What are we going to do now?”

“I can think of a few things,” Chaz says, lifting the sheet that’s covering us and looking under it.

“We can’t let animal lust get in the way of our friendship,” I say.

“I don’t want to be friends with you,” Chaz says matter-of-factly. “I stopped wanting to be friends way back last New Year’s Eve. Remember? You’re the one who had to go and ruin everything by getting yourself engaged to someone else. While I was sleeping, I might add.”

I roll off him and lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, which is made out of that hideous stuff that has sparkles in it. There’s an overhead light that has been crafted to look like an old-fashioned lantern. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it has a lipstick camera in it that has been videotaping our every move for the past two hours. The Knight’s Inn seems like it might be that kind of hotel.

Which makes it the perfect place for my tawdry affair with my best friend’s ex-boyfriend and my fiancé’s best friend.

“You don’t even believe in marriage,” I wail miserably to the lipstick camera. If there is one.

“Well, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t marry you, that’s for sure,” Chaz says. “You’d just go around sexually assaulting my best friend behind my back while I’m in France and you’re at your grandmother’s funeral. You’d make the worst wife ever.”

I lean over to hit him, but he rolls over on top of me, pinning my arms down beneath the sheet. A second later, he’s staring deeply into my eyes.

“Lizzie,” he says, looking serious for a change. “You need to stop beating yourself up about this. You and Luke have been over for a long time. You should never have said yes when he asked you to marry him. I told you that that morning in your apartment. If you had listened to me then, you could have saved everyone a lot of heartache. Especially me. And yourself.”

I glare at him. “Do you think I don’t know that?” I demand. “But you didn’t exactly go out of your way to act like Prince Charming that morning, you know. You could have just told me you loved me then, you know.”

“I seem to recall that, number one, you never gave me the chance… you were already engaged to someone else by the time I woke up, and that, number two, I did tell you I love you, and you took it as a joke and walked out.”

I blink. Then say indignantly, “You mean at the sports bar? But you were so nasty! I didn’t think you were serious.”

He looks hurt. “I bared my soul to you, and you thought it was nasty. Nice.”

“Seriously,” I say. “You were horrible. You couldn’t possibly have expected me to think you meant a word that you said—”

“I was mortally wounded!” Chaz insists. “The woman I loved, and whom I thought loved me in return—don’t lie, you even said at Jill Higgins’s wedding the night before that we were going to try taking things to another level—had just pledged herself to another!”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous,” I say. “Agreeing to take things to another level and saying that I’m in love with you are two completely different things.”

“If I was nasty, like you say, I had a right to be,” Chaz says. “You were acting like a crazy woman. Getting yourself engaged to a guy who is so completely wrong for you—”

“You didn’t seem to have any objections when Luke and I got together last summer,” I point out.

“Sure, I had no objections to your sleeping with him,” Chaz says. “I never thought you’d want to marry the guy. Especially when I knew perfectly well you weren’t in love with him.”

Still pinned beneath his body weight and the sheet, I can only glare at him some more. “I beg your pardon,” I say. “But I most certainly was.”

“Before the Great Christmas Sewing Machine Incident, maybe,” Chaz says. “But not after. It just took you awhile to admit it to yourself.”

I blink at him, trying to figure out if what he’s saying is really true. There’s a part of me that’s sure it isn’t.

But there’s another part of me that’s equally scared it is.

“But you finally came around to admitting you’re in love with me now,” Chaz says as he reaches for the room service menu. “So what does it matter? Now I need sustenance. All of this cuckolding makes a knight hungry. What should we have? Beef nachos supreme? Or… ooh, bacon and cheddar potato skins with sour cream. Such fine fare this establishment offers… oh, wait. Cream cheese and turkey pinwheels. Who could resist?”

“I can’t tell him,” I burst out.

Chaz stares down at me. “About the cream cheese and turkey pinwheels?”

“No,” I say, poking him through the sheet. “Get off me, you weigh a ton.” Obligingly, Chaz slides off me. “Luke. He can never know.”

Chaz leans up on one elbow, his head in his hand. “I can see why,” he says, regarding me, his blue eyes expressionless. “Who eats turkey with cream cheese? That’s a disgusting combination.”

“No,” I say, sitting up. “About us. He can never know about us.”

Chaz’s tone doesn’t change. “You’re going to marry Luke and keep me around as a boy toy? How twenty-first century of you.”

“I… I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I say. “How can I… I mean, he loves me.”

Chaz taps the menu. “Lizzie. Let’s just order. We don’t have to figure it all out tonight. And they stop serving at eleven.”

I chew my lower lip. “I just,” I say. “I… I’m not very good at this. At being… bad.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chaz says with a grin. “I think you did an exemplary job of it earlier.”

I lift up one of the flat, uncomfortable Knight’s Inn pillows and smack him with it. He laughs and tugs it away from me, then wrestles me back down to the mattress.

We barely order our nachos in time to make the eleven o’clock cutoff.

“Where were you last night?” Sarah wants to know when I come tromping into the house the next morning.

“And aren’t those the same clothes you were wearing yesterday?” Rose asks cattily.

Their eyes light up a second later, however, when Chaz follows me through the screen door.

“Chaz!” my mom cries, looking genuinely delighted. “What a surprise!”

“I’ll say.” Rose shoots me a look so laser sharp, it might have melted steel. “When did you get into town, Chaz? Don’t tell us… last night?”

“How sweet of you to come,” Mom says, going to give Chaz a hug. Having dated Shari for so long, he’s an old family favorite. Well, with my parents. My sisters don’t play favorites. Except among their kids.

“Of course I came,” Chaz says as my mom releases him and my dad wanders in from the den, his reading glasses perched on top of his head and the newspaper dangling from his fingers. “I was a big fan of Mrs. Nichols.”

“Well, my mother was something of a character,” Dad says, shaking Chaz’s hand. “Good to see you.”

Rose and Sarah, meanwhile, are taking in the beard burn that no amount of foundation on my part has so far been able to cover up. Chaz’s five o’clock shadow starts growing at approximately ten in the morning, and any kissing after that takes its toll. Conscious of their scandalized yet delighted gazes, I check out the new offerings—a pie from one of the neighbors, a floral arrangement from Gran’s dentist—while Chaz accepts Mom’s offer of coffee and a piece of the coffee cake the Huffmans brought over.

As soon as they’re out of earshot Rose takes two quick steps toward me and hisses, “Sssssslut,” in my ear while giving me a quick pinch on the butt as she heads into the kitchen to refill her own coffee mug. I let out a yelp—she always gives the most painful pinches.

Then Sarah moves in to whisper, “I always did think he was cute. You know, not, like, traditionally cute, but tall, at least. A little too hairy for me, though. But isn’t he still in school? Does he not have a job? How’s he going to support you without a job? Are you going to have to support him? I’m all for being a feminist, but not that feminist. Look what happened to Rose.”

My eyes are still filled with tears from Rose’s pinch. I have to sit down because I can’t see to navigate the living room furniture, which my mother has rearranged to make space for all the floral arrangements that have been arriving. The next thing I know, a sheet of paper is thrust into my hands.

“Here,” a child’s voice says.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“It’s my newspaper.” When my vision clears a little, I see that my niece Maggie is standing in front of me. “That will be one dime, please.”

I reach into my pocket, find some change, and give Maggie a dime. She walks away without saying thank you.

I look down at the sheet of paper. It is printed in sixteen-point type and arranged to look like the front page of an actual newspaper. She’s clearly had someone’s help with it, since, being in the first grade, she’d only just learned to read and write. The headline, which is in twenty-six point, screams, “GRANDMA NICHOLS DIES!!!!”

Below that, the article goes on to describe Gran’s death in grisly detail, with a line about how Elizabeth Nichols is quoted as being “very sad.”

“Now, Lizzie,” Mom says, coming out of the kitchen with Chaz in tow, holding a steaming mug of coffee and a plate of coffee cake. “I wanted to let you know, we’ve selected a reading for you to do at the service this afternoon.”

“A reading?” I look up from the paper. “What kind of reading?”

“Just a passage from the Bible that Father Jim picked out,” Mom goes on as Rose drifts out from the kitchen and takes a seat by the piano. “I’ll get you a copy so you can practice. Each of you girls is doing one.”

“Gran never read the Bible,” I say, “in her life.”

“Well, you can’t have a funeral without Bible readings,” Sarah says.

“And these are very tasteful Bible passages, honey,” Mom says. “Don’t worry.”

“Tasteful Bible passages,” Chaz says, putting his plate of coffee cake down on a side table. When Mom looks at him, he grins and raises his mug of coffee toward her in a salute. “Great coffee, Mrs. Nichols!”

Mom smiles. “Why, thank you, Chaz.”

I’m too miserable to smile. “Mom,” I say. “This funeral… it’s like it doesn’t even have anything to do with Gran. We should be having a celebration of her life. The things in it should represent things she really loved.”

“Like what?” Mom asks with a tiny snort. “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and beer?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie,” Rose says. She shoots a look at the kitchen door, through which my dad hasn’t reappeared, apparently still being busy getting his own coffee and cake to go with it. She drops her voice to a whisper as she hisses, “Grandma embarrassed us enough while she was alive. Let’s not have her embarrass us in death too.”

I widen my eyes and swing my head around to look at Chaz, who’s choked a little on the mouthful of coffee he’s just swallowed.

“So, Chaz,” Dad says as he comes into the room, followed by Angelo, Rose’s husband, who is wearing a black suit with no tie and a black shirt unbuttoned almost to midchest. “Are you still in school?”

“Yes, sir,” Chaz says. “I have about three more years of course work left, then I have to start writing my dissertation, and then I’ll have to defend it. I hope after that I’ll be able to find a job and start teaching.”

“Oh?” Mom makes room on the couch for Dad to sit down beside her. “And where are you hoping to find a position? Back here in the Midwest? I know how you feel about the Wolverines. Or out East?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Chaz says with a shrug. “Wherever Lizzie is.”

Mom pauses with her coffee mug halfway to her lips, looking as if she’s not quite sure she’s heard Chaz correctly. Rose narrows her gaze and directs it pointedly to the ring on my left hand, while Angelo looks confused. Sarah coughs. Dad just grins affably and says, “Well, that’s nice,” and shovels the rest of his coffee cake into his mouth.

“I don’t get it,” Angelo says. “I thought Lizzie was engaged to that Luke guy. Chaz, weren’t you goin’ out with that lesbo friend of hers?”

“Who’s Luke?” Dad wants to know.

“Oh, you remember, dear,” Mom says. “We talked to him on the phone. That nice boy Lizzie met in France.”

“I’m still engaged to Luke,” I say quickly. “Things are just… complicated right now.”

“Are they ever,” Rose says, getting up and grabbing Chaz’s and Dad’s empty plates. “Too bad Gran’s gone. She’d have loved this.”

And I realize, a little belatedly, that Rose is right. Not only would Gran have loved what’s going on between me and Chaz, but she’d have been rooting for it. She was the one who’d urged me not to get engaged. She was the one who always thought Chaz was my boyfriend all along.

And a hunk too, if memory serves.

Gran had been right.

About a lot of things, it turns out.