“Fine. I’ll—”
Behind me, a baby laughed, and I glanced back at the Vomitous von Trapps. The mother clutched a packet of baby wipes and bounced the human projectile launcher, who was now giggling merrily, having deposited his unhappiness on my shoe.
I sighed.
“I think someone needs the van more than me. But surely there must be something else, Sofi,” I told her with my widest, most charming smile. “Maybe if you check with a different company here at the airport?”
“Can’t.” She grabbed a piece of dirty-blonde hair and twirled it with one finger. “Their reservation systems are down too. Catastrophic outage,” she said, and it was the happiest she’d looked during our whole interaction.
I set my jaw. “Fine. Fine. I will catch a cab. Thank you so much for your exemplary customer service and willingness to go the extra mile.”
“Welcome!” she said with no irony at all.
I huffed out a breath. It was impossible to slay someone with my rapier wit when they didn’t realize we were dueling.
I grabbed my suitcase and dragged it toward the closest bathroom, hobbling along in my sticky shoe until I got some damp paper towels to clean off the worst of the damage.
Didn’t bad things come in threes? First there’d been the photographer at the nightclub, then the puke, then the rental car. Surely that was enough.
I dragged my phone out of my pocket one more time as I left the bathroom and jabbed Mason’s number. It was time to play hardball and actually leave the man a voicemail.
“Mason, sweetness,” I said when it clicked over. “Toby here. Again. You, ah, may have seen my many missed calls? You may have wondered why I didn’t text? Ahem. Well. The thing is. I find myself in a bit of a sticky situation. A situation best explained in person. You might remember that time a few months back when you said, ‘Come visit! Anytime you like for as long as you like’? Well, today might be your lucky day, precious. I sincerely hope you’re not having some kind of epic tantric sex marathon with your boy toy right now. Or that you’ve left room for me, if you are. Ha ha.” I swallowed. “But, um, seriously. Call me.”
I clicked off the phone, rubbed it against my forehead, and sighed, then scooted out of the way as the floor scrubber headed right for me.
Lovely. Here I was, being stalked by a guy with a floor scrubber, in need of a cab and possibly another strong drink. But the important thing about hitting rock bottom was realizing you were there, right?
I put my phone on top of my suitcase and dug through my bag for my credit card so I could pay for my ride, but I couldn’t find it.
Fuck. I’d left it at the car rental place. Which I now saw had turned its lights off while I was in the bathroom, like it had closed up for the night. Sure enough, Sofi was disappearing through the door to the back room.
I grabbed my suitcase handle and ran for it, only remembering why that wasn’t a good idea a second too late. I turned and watched in horror as my phone fell off my suitcase and slid across the slick floor… right past the whirly thing on the side of the floor scrubber and then—with a sickening crunch—underneath its back tire.
“No no no no no! My baby!” I screeched, running after the machine, which was dragging the carcass of my phone along inside it, leaving a trail of phone pieces stuck to the linoleum in its wake. “Stop! Halt immediately!”
But it was too late, and the floor scrubber guy drove on, blissfully unaware thanks to his noise-protecting ear-thingies.
I dropped to my knees like Demi in that scene from Ghost, gathering the remains of my darling, perfect, life-giving device in my tiny hands and cradling them tenderly.
“Oh, you were so young,” I sobbed, squeezing my eyes shut. “You had so much left to give!”
Like… my payment app. And my email. And all my stored passwords for everything in my life.
I gasped. And Mason’s phone number. And his address in my address book.
“I’m going to pinch myself,” I whispered calmly. “And when I wake up, I will be on a plane over the Atlantic. I will ask the attendant for some electrolyte water, for clearly the martinis have caused me dehydration, which in turn caused this terrible fever dream in which the paparazzi have hunted me to Florida, and I am stranded here with no phone, no credit card, and a vomit-stained Armani sandal. I will repent henceforth and live a blameless life.” I opened one eye and saw linoleum. I quickly closed it and added, “And I will give to charity. And… and not have sex for a week.” Another quick peek and I offered desperately, “A month?”
But of course, no divine intervention happened. And by the time I’d counted out the cash in my wallet—a hundred twenty-seven dollars in small bills—I realized I probably had just enough cash to pay for a cab to Whispering Key, and literally no other options. I would throw myself on Mason’s mercy, whether he liked it or not, because that’s what friends were for.
I was proud that I remembered Mason lived on Bougainvillea Boulevard and I sort of remembered the address began with a 1. Or possibly a 3. But the place was tiny, right? Mason made it sound like a ghost town from the 1950s, so how hard would it be to find him?
As it turned out, it was much harder than expected, which was really the tagline for my life these days, and when I got a moment of free time, I was going to trademark it and put it on a T-shirt.
Bougainvillea Boulevard was long and winding enough to feature house numbers that started with both 1s and 3s, and Umar, my cab driver, was unamused when I asked him to drive me up and down the street—just to see if Mason was conveniently standing outside any of them, in the dark, as one does—even before the ridiculous fat raindrops started smacking the windshield, because fuck my life.
“It’s gonna be coming down buckets any minute,” Umar predicted. “You could call your friend and ask—” He winced, possibly remembering that my grief for my lost phone was very fresh, since he’d had to lend me his own phone a minute ago so I could figure out how to cancel my credit card. “Or maybe we could stop at one of these houses and a neighbor could direct you to your friend’s house?”
I sighed. Only I would try recreating Hugh Grant’s iconic scene in Love, Actually on a ghost-town tropical island in a fucking monsoon, but the meter was literally ticking me to the end of my cash reserves, and I couldn’t think of anything better, so when Umar pulled over at the smallest house on the block, which coincidentally had the brightest porch light, I got out and ran up the path in the drenching rain to bang on the door.
It was thrown open almost immediately by a fiftyish man wearing a Pabst Blue Ribbon hat, a bathrobe, plaid boxer shorts, white athletic socks, and plastic sandals. It was, as they say, a lewk.
“Dang it, Lorenna, I said I’m not joinin’ your fool— Oh. You’re not Lorenna.”
I smiled winningly. “No, sir, I’m not. I’m actually here to—”
“I didn’t order any pizza.” He narrowed his eyes. “Besides, you don’t have a pizza.”
“Good detective work there,” I agreed. “I wanted to ask—”
“I’m not lookin’ to find Jesus,” he warned. “I’m real spiritual, but not religious.”