blades and she practically levitated to her feet. She sprinted toward Carly at full tilt, her tutu flapping in time with her ears. Just when it looked like she would plow into Carly’s shins, the dog veered to the right and loped over to Phil’s camera bag to have a good sniff of it.
“Ladies, hold that pose!” Phil shouted. He lunged for his camera bag, tossed out a biscuit to Hazel and her leash to Carly. “Hey, can I borrow him again next week? I’m doing a shoot for the Austin Film Festival.”
“It’s a her!” Carly said crossly. And then it occurred to her that Baxter would be just as good at this. “Maybe. Call me later.” She hooked the leash up to Hazel’s collar and the two of them started for the parking lot.
“Byyyeeee!” the Bride Tribe shouted after her in unison.
Carly responded with a wave overhead.
It took Hazel two attempts to actually get in the car, but she made it. Carly thought about removing her tutu but decided that Tobias Sheffington III should see that dogs had fun with her, too, all without ruining furniture or destroying discipline.
A minute or two later, Carly and Hazel were on their way across town to do the dog swap, doing the inchworm through Austin traffic again. Hazel had her head out the window and, Carly noticed, had gotten a couple of honks with her winsome grin.
How many hours of her life did she waste sitting in traffic? Too many. Naomi didn’t lose one-third of her life to sitting in a car because she walked everywhere. Carly picked up the phone and called Naomi.
Naomi answered on the fifth ring. “Hey!” she shouted brightly. She sounded like she was in a hole.
“Please tell me you are doing something fun because I am stuck in traffic for like the fourth time today,” Carly said.
“We’re at a club!” Naomi shouted into the phone. “I met this guy at the Starbucks around the corner. We got stuck behind a massive Frappuccino order and hit it off, and he had friends, and I had friends, and you have to come to this club, Carly! It’s awesome!”
“I wish!” Carly shouted back at her.
“I hope you’re calling to tell me you got a job and you’re moving to New York,” Naomi shouted over the din.
“I wish that, too! I haven’t had any luck with—”
“Are you following up?” Naomi quickly interjected. “You have to follow up.”
“I’m following up,” Carly assured her. She was following up so much she was making a nuisance of herself.
“You need to come and pound the pavement. You can stay with me and Tandy and Juliette until you find a place.”
“I’ll be there in a few weeks for the New Designer Showcase. We can meet up and I—”
“What? I can’t hear you! Carly, wait.” There was a muffled sound, and Naomi said suddenly, “You didn’t. You did?” That was followed by a squeal. “I love champagne cocktails!”
“I love champagne cocktails too,” Carly said wistfully.
“Carly, I have to go. Dan got me a champagne cocktail, and it’s delicious and he’s cute—yes,” she said, laughing, “I just said you are cute. Carly, I have to go. Call me!”
“Bye,” Carly said, but Naomi had already clicked off.
Damn it. Carly never went to clubs anymore. With Karma and Lydia married and working odd hours, she didn’t have a crew. When she’d worked at DBS, they would hit happy hour at places around town, but now that she was on her own, her relationships with her former coworkers had sort of faded away, and the opportunities were few and far between.
She glanced in the rearview mirror at Hazel’s tutu-clad butt and wagging tail. Was this the moment, then? Was this the day, the hour, the second she finally admitted her life was not going to plan?
Every day, Megan Monroe posted a #motivation tweet to remind her followers that all they had to do with lemons was make lemonade. But sometimes that wasn’t as easy as it sounded in a tweet or on a podcast. Carly felt as if she had spent the last year digging her life’s river channel with her bare hands, but her life was not running along in that channel like it was supposed to. It was breaking its banks and flowing in so many different directions that stuff was floating away from her.
She would soon be thirty years old.
In the life plan she’d made for herself when she was sixteen—she still had the spiral notebook with the