The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,96
real-life friend. For friends, you go the extra mile, even at the risk of looking dumb.
“One day, Felix Glassman, the husband of yet another woman Steve was sleeping with, showed up on my doorstep with pictures of his wife and my husband. Basically, they were trying to reenact scenes from the Kama Sutra.”
I made a retching sound that wasn’t entirely for effect. Thinking about those photos still made my stomach churn. Pris hugged the pillow to her chest and looked appropriately horrified.
“That’s awful. You must have been so humiliated.”
I shrugged. “Actually, I was almost getting used to it by then. But I felt embarrassed and guilty and somehow responsible for all the pain and humiliation that Steve had caused poor Felix Glassman. So I started to apologize. But before I got very far, Mr. Glassman looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, were you shtupping my wife?’
“Felix was right. An apology by proxy is meaningless. I couldn’t make amends for something Steve did. The person who needed to be sorry was Steve, and he wasn’t.”
The doorbell rang. The lesson ended. Hopefully, it would stick.
“They’re here!” Pris grabbed the duvet and quickly spread it out on top of the bed. Lorne’s voice boomed up from the foyer, asking if anybody was home.
“We’ll be right down!” I called.
I gave the pillows a final fluff and headed for the bedroom door, only to be met by the commotion of excited male voices, shouting something about bugs and pebbles, and the pounding of feet—more feet, as it turned out, than I had been expecting. Eight more, to be precise.
At the top of the stairs, I was greeted by a din of barking. Two dogs bounded up the staircase at something approaching Ludicrous Speed, coming straight for me. There wasn’t time to get out of the way so I braced for impact.
It was no good.
Before my brain had time to really process what was happening, I was bowled over by an avalanche of jumping, writhing, wiggling, licking, joyfully barking puppy flesh. It wasn’t frightening so much as disorienting, like finding myself thrown into a washing machine with a pack of huskies and put on spin cycle. There were, in fact, only two dogs and both were fairly small. But it felt like more at the time, a lot more.
“You okay there, Celia?”
I caught sight of Lorne’s extended hand through the flurry of lolling tongues and fluffy ears and grabbed hold. He pulled me into a sitting position, extracting me from the dog pile. The pounding of size-thirteen feet on the stairway, a sound that would soon become familiar, announced Teddy’s arrival on the scene.
“Bug! Pebbles! Why did you run off like that? I told you to wait so I could bring Cousin Celia down to meet you first. Bad dogs!”
The dogs, two spaniels with reddish-tan patches on white coats, sporting long ears with waves of curls, and black shoe-button noses, sat down on their furry behinds. Their tails thumped the floor slowly, tentatively, and in unison. Staring at Teddy with a mixture of guilt and confusion, their enormous chocolate-brown eyes said that they might be really, really, really sorry, if only they could figure out what they’d done wrong.
While I was lying at the bottom of the dog pile, blinded by fur and fending off sloppy advances, I’d thought they might be mastiffs or Saint Bernards or some other huge breed, golden retrievers at the least. But no. They were spaniels and petite ones at that. I’d met cats that were bigger.
The larger of the two, Bug, whose protruding eyes earned him his name, scooted close to me with drooping, shamed shoulders and started to gently lick my hand in what I supposed was a doggish apology. His littermate, Pebbles, moved toward me too. I wiped my hand on my jeans and gave her a quick pat on the head before she could lick me too. “You really didn’t need to do that,” I told Bug. Lorne pulled me to my feet.
“I’m okay,” I said, addressing everyone, including the dogs. Their tails thumped harder and quicker as if they actually understood they’d been forgiven. The smaller one, Pebbles, actually looked like she was smiling. Pris, who had been watching from the sidelines, crouched down and started scratching the dogs’ ears, looking in their eyes and cooing. I wiped my hands on my pants again, wicking away the last traces of dog spit. Lorne, who seemed