Page 30 of A Toast for Laurent

“It didn’t help that she lied to me about how bad the cancer was.” She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. She blinked them away and exhaled.

“She wanted you to stay in school.”

“Don’t defend her.”

“It’s what she wanted, Phoebs.”

“And what about what I wanted? Maybe I wanted to be there for her. Brush her hair when she was too weak to do it herself. Watch hours of HGTV and Food Network and talk about all the places we’d go one day because we’d both be in denial about how bad it was, but at least then it would have beenmychoice.” She waved her hand in the air as if she could swat the anger and frustration she still harbored away. “When I was cleaning out her house, I found her bucket list. It was yellowed from age, wrinkled… probably from being folded a million times. She had so many places on there, and you know how many she had checked off?”

“How many?”

“Not a single one.” She sighed, then nibbled at her bottom lip. “She had me young. At twenty-four. She always said I was her life, and when I went to college, she knew she did her job and she could do all the things, knowing she got me to eighteen happy, healthy, and on my way to a higher education. She had it all planned out. The only thing she didn’t plan for was cancer. She died and didn’t get a single check on her bucket list. Part of me refused to let that be me and the other part wanted to do it for her, since she couldn’t do it herself.

“Where’d you go first?”

She pressed her lips together and placed her hands on the table. “I didn’t have a lot of money. Her house wasn’t even on the market yet, but I had to get away. I looked up cheap air fare and booked the cheapest flight, which was to Florida.”

A laugh bubbled out of me. “Sounds very exotic.”

“The sunshine was nice, so were the beaches, and the people were friendly. I stayed for about two weeks in a rundown motel before I got a job as a bartender.”

“You, a bartender?”

“Oh, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. But it’s true what they say: fake it until you make it. Plus, as long as I showed enough cleavage, the tips were awesome. Guys didn’t care if my mojitos tasted like swamp water. Now, however, I make the best mojito around.”

“That so?”

She nodded. “If you play your cards right, maybe I’ll make you one.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, I said. “Where’d you go after Florida?”

“Exuma in the Bahamas, and from there, I flew to New York to visit Shelly before heading to Europe.”

“What was your favorite place to visit?”

“Tuscany and Milan.”

“Please tell me you drank while you were there.”

She nodded. “Oh yeah. Drank myself across the region. I probably know as much about wine now as you.”

“I doubt that.” Wine was my life.

“I’d tell you to quiz me, but I don’t want to hurt your ego.”

Before I could come back with a witty reply, the waitress brought our food.

“Anything else I can get you?” she asked.

“No, we’re good, thank you,” Phoebe said. She forked her salad, and before she put any in her mouth, she nodded her chin toward me. “What about you? What have you been doing for the last eighteen years?”

“Working.”

“Oh, come on. You’ve had to do more than that. I’m surprised you’re not married. You always said you wanted a big family like yours.”

“Sometimes things don’t work out the way you think they will, and like you said, one minute I was twenty-two, and then I blinked, and here I am at forty-one.”

I wasn’t going to tell her I swore off dating for years after she broke my heart, or that every woman I ever dated always got compared to her. Even when I hated what she did, I still couldn’t shake her. Her memory clung to me like a familiar blanket.

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