Page 129 of Rest In Pink
It was a printout of an online ad for a really beat-up Big Chef.
Did you hear me say I want to move in with you?“You’re going to buy another Big Chef?”
“Already bought it.”
He was looking at me so seriously that I knew I was missing something. Then he slid another paper across to me, this one a drawing.
It was the floorplan of his Big Chef, with another Big Chef stuck on the end, making an L. In the new diner, he’d sketched in a big bathroom with a big tub and a big bedroom with a bed you could actually walk around. And the space where the current bedroom was? It had a desk drawn up against the bookcase headboard. He’d made an office.
In fact, it saidLiz’s Officeon it.
My throat closed up and I lost my breath.
“It’ll be here in a week,” he told me. “Patsy ordered it for me. You and I will fix it up together. Partners.” He took a deep breath. “Look, we’ve been kidding ourselves. At least I’ve been kidding myself. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t know what that means exactly, but we can find that out together. If you need time to think about it, I understand—”
“I don’t need time to think,” I said, my eyes hot and stinging as my voice shook. I looked down at the drawing he’d made.
Liz’s office.
“I wantthis,” I said. “I want to stay with you and fix up the Big Chef and make love with you. I mean, I can play it by ear—”
Molly plopped herself beside him and Rain slid in next to me, and Molly said to Vince, “Why do you both look so serious? If you’re breaking up with her, I’m going to . . . tell Rain to do something horrible to you.”
I looked at Rain.
“You do look serious,” she said. “And if he is dumping you, I will fuck him up, but I don’t believe it for a minute. That man is insane for you.”
“I am not dumping her,” Vince said. “She’s moving into the Big Chef.”
“Really!” Molly said, turning on a dime. “Let’s see it!”
“See what?” I said, wiping my eyes. I really was being an idiot.
“Thering,” Molly said.
“There is no ring,” I said. “Why would there be a ring?”
“He didn’t give you a ring?” Rain said.
“He gave me something better,” I said.
Vince slid the drawing down to the end of the booth, and Molly and Rain bent over it, and Molly said, “Oh,” because she’s the other person in the world who really knows me, and Rain said, “Good work, Ranger,” and then Mac must have noticed the commotion and came over to glare at Vince probably because I was wiping my eyes from all the relief crying, and Vince pointed to the drawings.
“You bought another Big Chef?” Mac pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat down at the end of the booth next to Rain to study it. “You’re gonna need help,” he told Vince. “I’m in. Will’s gonna want part of this, too.”
“What will I want?” Will said from behind him, and Mac hooked another chair from a nearby table and shoved it next to Molly’s side of the booth and said, “Sit down. We have plans.”
Will sat down beside him and said, “So you’re going to do this?” and then Patsy came in from the street to look over his shoulder and said, “‘Bout time you told her,” and they all bent over Vince’s drawing, and I looked across the booth to him, the guy I was going to live with.
I’ve never done that before.
“Look, I’m serious here,” he said to me. “We haven’t known each other very long—”
“Six weeks,” I said.
“—so we’re going to need some time, but . . .”
His voice trailed off and I nodded.