“Is she okay?” Dax asks.
“Oh, she’s fine,” answers Kiersten, “just a one-margarita kind of woman, that’s all. Hey, Aunt Livi—”
Kierst grabs the broken corner of a Cool Ranch Dorito from the bowl next to the margarita blender and chucks it at my aunt’s open mouth.
Even though Kiersten was cut from her beer league softball team, the chip finds its target perfectly. There’s a horrific thirty seconds where Aunt Livi breathes in and the chip sort of catches in her throat. Her eyes fly open as she makes this half-startled, half-scared face before Kiersten’s mother-of-three instincts kick into action.
She pulls Aunt Livi to her feet while slapping her hard on the back. It takes three hard smacks before the chip flies out of Aunt Livi’s mouth and across the living room to be forever lost in the orange shag carpeting.
“Good grief, what in the heck was that?” My aunt’s face looks like an overripe tomato.
Kiersten hands her the margarita with a face of pure innocence. “I think a paint chip fell from the ceiling and landed in your mouth while you were snoring.”
My aunt’s eyes skim the peeling white paint above her as she takes a long drink.
“Well, thanks, pudding.” Aunt Livi hands Kiersten the now-empty glass. “I owe you one.”
She looks around her living room, her eyes stopping on Dax, who was not there when she fell asleep. “Oh, Daxon, it’s lovely to see you. You’re looking as dapper as always.”
Dax blushes and gets up from his seat to give her a kiss on the cheek. I catch Kiersten enjoying her view of Dax’s ass as he bends over. She catches my eye and winks, and I feel my own cheeks heating.
“You woke up just in time, Aunt Livi,” Kiersten says. “We were just about to start the part of the night where we roast Stuart mercilessly.”
My aunt looks over at me as if asking if I’ve signed on to this activity. I shrug, figuring it’s cheaper than therapy.
“Do you want to start us off?” Kierst asks Dax.
He shakes his head, also eyeing me. “Ladies first.”
Kiersten licks the salted rim of her glass, then sits on the lounger, flopping her head in my direction. “Before I say what I’m going to say, you’re absolutely sure you and Stu aren’t going to kiss and make up, right?”
My mind drifts back to our breakup three weeks ago. “I threw a full glass of merlot on his blue Tom Ford suit. He didn’t speak to me for three days after that time when I had a bloody nose, and some droplets splattered on his khakis. And they were only J.Crew and it was an accident.”
Kiersten snorts. Likely because she has always thought Stuart was too precious. I purposely kept the nosebleed story from her because of it.
“I think you were more in love with the idea of Stuart than the actual person,” she says.
My urge to glare at her is stifled by the realization that her words eerily echo Stuart’s from our breakup.
“You liked Stu because he had his life together,” she continues. “And a swanky apartment.”
This time, I do glare. “You make me sound like a heartless gold digger.”
Kiersten takes a long sip of her drink. “That’s not what I meant. At least not like a money gold digger. But maybe an emotional one.”
I’m too angry to respond. Or maybe too drunk. Either way, Kiersten takes my silence as a license to continue.
“Stuart was safe. He was easy. He gave you the predictability you craved. He was the human equivalent of toast and butter, but you can only live off of toast and butter for so long.” She gets up from her spot on the lounger and moves to wedge herself between Daxon and me on the couch, taking my hand in hers.
“I get your need for toast and butter, Gems. Hell, with the winners we scored as parents, I understand it completely. But I think you’ve swung the pendulum a little too far in the opposite direction. You need a little spice in your life.”
Kiersten thinks that all her time spent in therapy qualifies her to psychoanalyze me and my life. Our parents were, to put it simply, duds. Married young, my mom was often off finding herself, leaving Kierst and me to source our own dinners. My dad flipped between being unemployed with a regular seat at the local bar to rather gainfully employed at a remote oil field camp in Northern Alberta. So maybe she’s not too far off in her theory that their emotional damage drove me to someone so predictable and consistent. I liked how Stuart would drive in from Toronto every Friday night to take me to Fornello’s Italian Eatery. He’d have the grilled chicken and merlot and always offer to share. After dinner, we’d have mediocre missionary sex because every other position aggravated his old soccer hip injury, but he’d tell me it was because he liked looking in my eyes when I came. I always knew what to expect with Stu. A cashmere crewneck every Christmas, a You look great whether I showed up in lululemon or a negligee. You could give the man thirty-one flavors of ice cream, and he’d always choose vanilla. I know it’s messed up, but I found the monotony comforting.