Mom and Pam sigh.
Old people stuff, Amanda mouths.
I nod.
“Ours was an affair of passion—”
“Hold on. You dated Jordan?” Amanda asks with an incredulous squeak.
“Yes.”
“But he’s straight!”
“How would you know, my dear? And besides, love has no gender.” Lüq spreads hu’s arms wide, the long arms like wings when draped by hu’s muumuu. Hu looks like a butterfly. A bald, aging butterfly with a Grateful Dead complex and tattooed-on eyeliner.
“I went on a date with him after being matched together in an online dating program,” Amanda declares, blunt and bold.
Lüq freezes. “Le Hawk has made love with my ex?” Hu’s jaw shifts slightly, a tongue rolling in hu’s cheek, and Lüq gives Amanda a creepy once-over that is about as thorough as Jeffrey licking clean a pint of ice cream.
“Good for you,” Lüq finally says. Amanda is still speechless.
“I didn’t sleep with him!”
“Pity. Your loss.”
“What? His loss! HIS!” Amanda screeches.
“I sense an imbalance in your energy, Le Hawk.” Lüq sighs.
“That was me,” Mom says. “Sorry.” She reddens, and turns to Elle. “What was in that latte?” She stands, makes a very embarrassing sound, and asks, “Where’s the bathroom?”
Elle points. “The latte is made with the finest breast milk provided by the—”
Pam, mid-sip, sprays the contents of her mouthful everywhere.
“Le violence!” Lüq cries out. “Is your life force in anguish?”
“I think Marie’s bowels are,” Amanda mutters as Mom sprints for the facilities.
“There was breast milk in that latte?” Pam asks me, her voice anemic and shaky.
I shrug and whisper, “I’m sure Anterdec would never—”
“Of course,” Lüq says. “Research shows that it is a vital source of anti-aging nutrients. I drink it every day.”
Amanda gives me a look. “It halts your aging?” The guy is easily in his fifties, so—
“Yes. I am eighty-one years old. Do I look it?”
“You’re eighty-one and you dated Jordan?” Amanda is still stuck on this, while I’m left wondering if pregnancy and lactation might hold some key to immortality. “Jordan’s in his forties!”
“I might have to rethink that whole breast-milk-drinking thing,” I mutter. My stomach seizes, rising up in anarchy. Okay. No. I’ll take the wrinkles.
“Love knows no age,” Lüq sniffs.
“No age. No gender. Love doesn’t know shit, does it?” Amanda whispers to me.
“And Jordan Montelcini is a blood-sucking little worm.”
“Agreed!” Amanda crows.
“What did he do to you?” I ask Lüq.
“He broke my heart.”
I pat Lüq’s hand. “It happens to all of us at least once. Sometimes love just isn’t enough.”
“Ain’t,” Mom says, returning to the group.
“Ain’t what?”
“Sometimes love just ain’t enough. If you’re going to quote cheesy love songs, get the titles right.”
I ignore her.
“Why do you hate him so much? His very existence bothers you?” I ask Lüq.
Lüq gives me hu’s compete attention, my eyes falling into hu’s. “Do you not understand, child? Only from great love can come such anger. We find ourselves impaled by rage only when we feel betrayed by big love. If we are lucky, we experience so much love that one day—” Hu’s voice hitches with emotion and I’m overcome, grabbing the first person I can touch, needing connection.
The hand I squeeze is Mom’s.
“—that one day, we burn with hatred like Hades himself, consumed wholly by the power of all that is vile, wishing our former soulmate a pain-filled, loathsome death worthy of a beggar stewed in excrement.”
That went in an unexpected direction.
“Jordan Montelcini is an ass,” Lüq sobs. “But he was my ass, and now I have to go through the rest of my life assless.”
“Me, too!” Mom wails. “It all just flattens out like a fat pancake after fifty.”
“That’s not what hu meant, Mom!”
“But it’s true! I could bend over and you could use my ass as an end table, honey. I could sell this ass as a level in the tool department at Home Depot.”
What’s the SKU number for whackadoo?
“It’ll happen to you, too, honey. Genetics.” She gives Amanda a sympathetic blink. “And you.”
“Me?” Amanda squeaks.
“Just look at Pammy,” Mom says, shaking her head with pity. Poor Pam reaches around the back of her chair to pat her own ass.
“What about my tushie?” Pam is alarmed.
“It’s been more than twenty-five years,” Lüq says with a sigh, hu’s eyes glassy and unfocused as hu interrupts. Hu is clearly caught in the reverie of the ’80s. “His mother made him break up with me, and then that wretched wench destroyed my floral designing career. She wanted Jordan for herself.”
Amanda looks like she just licked the top of her Turdmobile.
Lüq claps, switching gears like nothing. “The ladies are here for a relaxing spa day, not a tour of my broken heart’s four chambers. You, my dear,” Lüq adds, touching my hair, lifting the long strands like they’re drugged snakes being readied for medical testing, “need a complete intervention. Top to bottom.”