“I want to thank all of you for coming. Because this is a celebration. A celebration of not only moving forward, but also of letting go of the past.” Pandy glanced back at the billboard. The sun had set, and for the moment, Monica had disappeared.
“One of the things I learned during this divorce,” Pandy continued, “is that I probably never should have gotten married in the first place. But then my insecurities got the better of me. No matter how stupid it is, if you’ve never been married, it’s all you can think about. It’s always there, in the back of your mind: ‘What’s wrong with me? How come no one’s ever wanted me?’ And it’s important not to get caught up in society’s expectations—”
“Cock in the bedroom!” someone shouted.
Pandy laughed. “In any case, what I’ve realized is that I have to grow up. Which means I can’t keep on being Monica.”
“Oh, go on,” Nancy hooted. “You are Monica.”
Pandy shook her head. “Not anymore. I don’t want to be. Partly because if I stay like Monica, I’m going to end up with another Jonny.”
“Forget about Jonny. You were too good for him.”
“Men will be lining up to meet you. You’ll see,” Suzette cackled.
“No.” Pandy playfully pointed her finger at Suzette. “They line up to meet you. But that’s sort of the problem. If you have a man, great. But it shouldn’t have to be about men. And we already know this. But sometimes it takes getting divorced to learn that lesson all over again.”
Pandy’s mouth was suddenly dry. She motioned to Angie for the bottle. While she drank, she heard Brittney ask, “Did Jonny really have fourteen suitcases full of knives?”
“Shhhh,” Nancy said.
“And so,” Pandy said quickly, “I will keep this short. I do have a new book coming out, and it is not about Monica. It’s what I’m calling a ‘me’ book. Meaning it’s the book I’ve always wanted to write, and I’ve finally taken the chance to write it. I hope you’re not disappointed. About Monica.” She paused. “And the fact that I definitely don’t have a new man—”
“We’re almost out of champagne!” Portia screamed as if a nuclear bomb were about to go off.
“Music!” Meghan shouted. “What happened to the music?”
Pandy picked up her sequined top hat and placed it on her head. As she turned to step off the couch, the lights that bathed Monica’s image every evening at eight p.m. sharp suddenly flooded her face.
Pandy took a step backward. The heel of her shoe caught in one of the tears in the cracked leather.
She went down.
CHAPTER TWO
EYES FIRMLY shut, Pandy rolled over, determined not to face what she knew was out there: the light.
The morning. Why, oh why couldn’t morning ever come when you wanted it to? Why were these things always out of one’s control?
She felt around her face for her eye mask. Her fingers sensed padded foam covered in slick silk. But the straps felt wrong. For starters, there seemed to be too many. And the thing reeked. Of expensive perfume—
Pandy gasped, hinged upright into a sitting position, and flung the offending garment to the floor. She caught her breath and moaned. A band of pain radiated from the top of one ear to the other, as if her head were caught in a vise. The pain was bad, but that was to be expected. She’d had too much to drink—everyone had had too much to drink—and she hadn’t thrown a party in ages. She’d known she would wake up with a Godzilla of a hangover—one that, as she liked to say, could destroy tall buildings in New York. Mysteriously, however, this expected pain was accompanied by a more sinister sensation: a spongy, pulsating throb on the back of her head.
Like being tapped, again and again, by a small and very annoying elf wielding a tiny hammer.
Pandy’s exploring fingers discovered a lump the size of a large marble. She grimaced. She remembered falling off the couch. And then what?
She leaned over the side of the bed. What she’d thought was her eye mask was a hot pink bra with cups the size of cantaloupes. Suzette’s? Or Meghan’s? They’d both gone to the same plastic surgeon. Pandy dropped it back onto the floor. Damn friends. They’d gotten drunk, and all of a sudden they’d started trying on each other’s clothes.
The phone rang. The landline, not her device. Making it harder to ignore.
Pandy stared at the phone. Its incessant ringing was incomprehensible. Why was it so loud? Who was calling? She groaned and gritted her teeth. There was only one person who could possibly be calling this early in the morning after a major party the night before.
“Hello, Henry.” Her voice cracked on the first word, but by the time she got out “Henry,” she had managed to infuse his name with a passable imitation of the living.
Henry wouldn’t be fooled; he was all too familiar with how she lost her voice when she’d had too much to drink. He’d warned her about it many times on book tours: “If you have a glass of wine with every blogger who wants to interview you, not only will you have consumed the equivalent of six bottles of wine, but you will also have no voice. Meaning you cannot talk. Meaning you cannot tell all these journalists how fabulous your new Monica book is. Meaning, what is the point of you being on a book tour at all?”
“Funny, it never feels like six bottles,” she’d said musingly.