“Yeah, I guess it was just the flu or meningitis or black hairy tongue disease or something other than pregnancy.”

Dad blushes and pretends he doesn’t get it. “Take it easy tonight. You need to be ready for Saturday.”

“I know.” Mentally I calculate the date and day of the week—being sick always throws me off. I’ve been thinking it’s Monday all day, but it’s Thursday. No wonder everybody’s hanging pink and red stuff everywhere. When Valentine’s Day falls on the weekend, it’s always out of control.

I get into the dining room to give Aunt Mary a hand as five o’clock rolls around and the early bird diners arrive, right on cue. The decorations are all up in here already. Trey and Rowan must have started right after school. They have them draped in a lovely, nontacky way across the picture windows. Both Rowan and Trey are pretty artistic, which is why they’re hanging decorations and I’m serving. I get the drink orders for the first two tables by the windows while regretting being unable to print the pictures I wanted at the library.

When I’m setting down their drinks, a shiny, dangling heart turns on its twine and catches the light, sparkling. I fight off the twinge of longing inside. Maybe BFF Sarah is right, and I’m sad and pissed that nobody ever asks me to go to any dances. And that I’m almost seventeen and I still haven’t had my first kiss. I stare at the heart for a second and then turn away before the patrons think I’m weird.

And then, halfway to the kitchen, it hits me. I stop, stand, and pivot to look at it once more as it catches the light. “Shit,” I whisper. “Really?” I drop off my tray and run through the kitchen, past Tony and Dad, and out the back door, almost wiping out in my haste to get into the door to the apartment, and race up the stairs.

I flip on the TV and watch the scenes unfold, pause on the dining room window, and stare at it. Crawl up to the screen and stare harder. “Oh my dogs,” I say. I turn the TV off, grab the spare delivery-car key, my coat, and the Marilyn wig, and fly back downstairs, outside, to the car, and take off, not even caring if anybody’s watching me, or if anybody needs a pizza delivered. Because this can’t wait.

Twenty-Seven

I pull into the parking lot of Angotti’s as dusk turns to dark. On my head is the platinum-blond wig, and I’m trying hard not to think about there being any bugs in it. I have one directive—I need to get to approximately where I’d be standing if I had been recording the scene, about twenty or thirty feet from the building and slightly off to the side closer to the back door. I need to have that perspective. I turn the engine off and hop out, holding my wig on my head and using the car as cover.

In my vision, there are light fixtures in the window, hanging from the ceiling—I could see them through the window. I remember noticing they weren’t there the first time I came here to look at everything, but that was because it was the night of the wedding, and I assumed the tables were all rearranged.

But they’re still not there. Nothing’s hanging in the window. People sit there eating, but the lights are either recessed or too high to be seen.

Or maybe they weren’t lights at all.

Maybe they were decorations.

“Valentine’s Day,” I murmur, and the missing piece falls into place. “Snowstorm forecasted for this weekend. Those were decorations hanging down, not lights. Jeez.” I shake my head. “This whole thing happens on Valentine’s Day?” A surge of fear pulses through me. “Could the timing be any worse?”

As I stand there in the shadows, the back door to the kitchen swings open hard, slamming against the block wall and ringing out into the quiet night. It’s Sawyer. “Let it go,” he’s saying to the bright beam of light that follows him. His voice is angry. “I’m telling you, don’t engage with that son of a bitch. You’re just enabling him.”

The blond girl I saw the other night follows Sawyer out and slams the door shut. She stands on the step lighting a cigarette while Sawyer tosses broken-down cardboard boxes into the recycling bin. “I can’t help it,” she says. “He drives me insane.”

Sawyer closes the recycling bin and joins the girl on the step. He shoves his hands in his pockets and bounces on the balls of his feet. I shrink back into the shadow of the car. I don’t think they can see me out here, though in retrospect, I should have chosen Elvira rather than Marilyn.

“If you try to argue with him, he’ll engage. He’ll bring out his whole tradition and honor bullshit and use that as an excuse to be a bastard. And everybody else just looks the other way.”

She takes a long, angry drag on the cigarette and, as smoke trickles out the corners of her lips, says, “What do you mean, engage?”

Sawyer stops bouncing and turns to face her. I strain to hear. “I mean he’ll probably fucking hit you, Kate, okay? So just . . . don’t.”

I lean forward, as if that’ll help me hear them, but a car pulls into the parking lot and their words are muffled by the noise of the tires. It sounds like she says “You marry me, one chicken?”

And while the driver parks, Sawyer says something like “I make you table, butterface.”

“Shut up!” I hiss under my breath at the offending car. The driver turns off the engine and gets out.

The girl takes another drag. She and Sawyer just stand there and nod at the guy as he approaches the customer entrance and goes inside.

Kate blows out smoke and drops her cigarette butt to the ground. She stomps on it and twists it out slowly. “He hit you, then.”