Size 12 Is Not Fat (Heather Wells 1)

Instead of going upstairs, I go down the hallway—Cooper’s grandfather had it papered in black and white stripes, which was apparently all the rage in the seventies gay community—and find the man of the house sitting in a lawn chair on the back terrace, a bottle of beer in his hand, my dog at his feet, and a red mini-Igloo at his side.

He’s listening—as he usually is, when he’s home—to a jazz station on the radio. Cooper is the only member of his family who eschews the screeching of Easy Street and Tania Trace for the more dulcet tones of Coleman-Hawkins and Sarah Vaughn.

“Is he gone yet?” Cooper wants to know, when he notices me standing in the doorway.

“He will be soon,” I say. Then it hits me. “Are you hiding back here?”

“You got that right,” Cooper says. He opens the Igloo and takes a beer from it. “Here,” he says, offering it to me. “I figured you’d need one of these.”

I take the cold bottle gratefully, and sink down onto the green padded seat cushion of a nearby wrought-iron chair. Lucy immediately darts over and thrusts her head between my thighs, snuffling happily at me. I rub her ears.

That’s the nice thing about having a dog. They’re always so happy to see you. Plus, you know, there are health benefits. People’s blood pressure goes down when they pet a dog. Or even a cat. It’s a documented fact. I read it in People magazine.

Of course, pets aren’t the only thing that can help keep your blood pressure down. Sitting in a really tranquil place can do it, too. Like, for instance, Cooper’s grandfather’s terrace and the garden below, which are totally two of the best-kept secrets in Manhattan. Leafy and green, surrounded by high, ivy-covered walls, the place is this tiny oasis carved from a former eighteenth-century stable yard. There’s even this little fountain in the garden, which Cooper, I see, has turned on. It gurgles comfortingly in the late-afternoon stillness. As I stroke Lucy’s ears, I can feel my heart rate returning to normal.

Maybe when I pass my six months’ review, and I’m finally able to enroll in school, I’ll become a pre-med major. Yeah, it’ll be hard to do with a full time job—not to mention Cooper’s billing. But I’ll find a way to make it work.

And then maybe later I’ll get like a scholarship or something to medical school. And then, when I graduate, I can take Lucy with me on rounds, and she can calm down all of my patients. I’ll totally eradicate heart disease, just by having my patients pet my dog. I’ll be famous! Like Marie Curie!

Only I won’t wear uranium around my neck and die of radiation poisoning like I read that Marie Curie did.

I don’t mention my new plan to Cooper. Somehow, I don’t think he’d fully appreciate its many facets. Although he’s a pretty open-minded guy. Arthur Cartwright, Cooper’s grandfather, angered by the way the rest of the family had treated him after he’d revealed he was gay, had left the majority of his vast fortune to AIDS research; the entirety of his world-class art collection to Sotheby’s to auction, with the provision that all proceeds from the sales go to God’s Love We Deliver; and almost all the property he’d owned to his alma mater, New York College…

…all except his beloved pink brownstone in the Village, which he’d willed to Cooper—along with a cool million bucks—because Cooper had been the only member of the Cartwright family to have said, “Whatever floats your boat, Gramps,” when he’d heard the news about his grandfather’s new boyfriend, Jorge.

Not that Jordan and the rest of the Cartwrights had been overly worried by Arthur’s cutting them off. There’d still been plenty of money left in the Cartwright family bank vault for everyone else.

Still, it hadn’t exactly made Cooper, already the family scapegoat for getting himself thrown out of multiple high schools and choosing college over a place in Easy Street—not to mention his tendency to date highly attractive heart surgeons or art gallery owners named Saundra or Yokiko—the most popular member of the Cartwright clan.

Which truthfully doesn’t seem to bother him. I’ve never met anyone who seems more content with his own company than Cooper Cartwright.

He doesn’t even look like the rest of his family. Dark-haired, whereas the rest of them are blond, Cooper does have the requisite Cartwright good looks and ice blue eyes.

Though his eyes are where any resemblance to his brother Jordan ends. Both are tall, with gangling, athletic builds.

But whereas Jordan’s muscles have been honed by a personal trainer several hours a day at his personal home gym, Coop’s are from playing aggressive rounds of one-on-one down at the public basketball courts on Sixth and West Third, and from—though he won’t admit this—high-speed on-foot pursuits through Grand Central on behalf of whatever client he’s currently employed by. I know the truth because, being the one who does his client billing, I see the receipts. There is no way someone can go from a cab—a six-dollar trip ending at 5:01—to a Metro North ticket booth—round-trip ticket to Stamford, departing at 5:07—without running.

Because of all this—the niceness, the eyes, the weekend-hoops thing…not to mention the jazz—of course I’ve fallen madly in love with Cooper.

But I know it’s completely futile. He treats me with the kind of friendly nonchalance you’d normally reserve for your kid brother’s girlfriend, which is what I am apparently destined to remain to him, since, compared to the women he dates, who are all waiflike, gorgeous, and professors of Renaissance literature or microphysicists, I’m like vanilla pudding, or something.

And who wants vanilla pudding when they can have crème brûlée?

I’m going to fall in love with someone else just as soon as I can. I swear. But in the meantime, is it so wrong that I enjoy his company?

Taking a long sip from his beer, Cooper studies the tops of the buildings around us…one of which happens to be Fischer Hall. You can see the twelfth to twentieth floors, including the president’s penthouse, from Arthur Cartwright’s backyard garden.

You can also see the vents to the elevator shaft.

“So,” Cooper says. “Was it bad?”

He doesn’t mean my encounter with Jordan. This is obvious by the way he nods his head in the direction of the college campus.

I’m not surprised he knows about the dead girl. He would have heard all the sirens and seen the crowds. For all I know, he could even have a police scanner tucked away somewhere.