Blindsided.
Because she’s looking at Todd.
The diner is shrinking. The walls are closing in, gripping me. I can’t breathe. This has to be a mistake. An error. She has to be joking. I have to be seeing things. There is no way her husband can be Todd. There must be another man behind him, maybe a short man I can’t see. A pipsqueak little fellow right behind Todd, who’s walking over to her table. But there’s no mini man hiding behind him. It’s just him, and he freezes when he sees me, then quickly recovers, taking the seat across from his wife.
Wife.
It’s as if there’s a knife in my heart, digging for all the soft spots and scooping them out. Serving them up on the table for the two of them. The girl-child I’ve been chatting with, my new f**king breakfast best friend, is the college-age creature from Vegas who stole my about-to-be-husband.
I’ve never seen her in person before. I have only seen one photo I found of her on Facebook the day after his voicemail, as I sobbed and clicked, surrounded by unopened wedding gifts sent to our apartment. Now I feel stupid for not studying her photos more, for not hunting out more pictures of her online. I stopped after that one – a faraway shot of her at a gymnastics meet since, of course, she’s a gymnast – because it hurt far too much. But now with her here in front of me, I catalogue her features. Her cheeks are rosy, her skin is soft and smooth, her hair is auburn red and shampoo model bouncy with perfect waves, and her boobs remind me of Salma Hayek’s.
They’re so freaking huge.
Fine, I’m only six years older, but I have straight brown hair that I color blond, and weird eyes that are sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes gray, and my br**sts are decent, but not dead ringers for cantaloupes. I’m only twenty-seven and I know it sucks to be left at any age. But the fact that he left me for a co-ed – giving himself a trophy wife for all intents and purposes – didn’t help my self-esteem. I’d been with him for five years; she’d been with him for one night, and she got him all the way to the altar. I got stuck with two mixers I never use, and party-of-one as my middle name.
“Hi McKenna,” Todd says in his best business-like voice.
“Oh….” It’s like a long, slow release of air from Amber, as her mouth drops open, and she shifts her gaze from him to me, registering who she’s been chatting with.
She recovers faster than me though, because I’m still speechless and stuck in this chair, sitting next to Amber. She is the name of all my heartbreak. The name that drummed through my brain for the better part of the last twelve months, like an insistent hum in the pipes you can’t turn off. Amber, Amber, Amber. The woman he wanted. The woman he chose. I will never hear that name without thinking of all that she has that I don’t. The man I once wanted to marry.
“You know, why don’t we just get a new table?” she says to Todd.
He scans the restaurant. This is the last empty table. “There’s no place else to sit,” he says, and it’s clear he has no intention of leaving.
What’s also clear is that he’s the only of us – him and me – who doesn’t care that he ran into his ex-fiancé. That realization smacks me hard, but it reminds me that I need to pull myself together and channel whatever reserves of steely coolness I have in me.
“It’s fine. I’m almost done anyway,” I manage to say even though my food hasn’t arrived.
“So how’s everything going with you?” He reaches for a menu and scans it. He doesn’t even look at me while he’s talking. It’s not because he’s rude. It’s because I am nothing to him. There’s a stinging feeling in the back of my eyes. I tighten my jaw. I won’t let them see me cry.
“Great. The blog is great. The dog is great. Life is great,” I say, pretending I am a robot, an unfeeling robot who can spit out platitudes. I have to. I have to protect my heart because it feels like it’s being filleted. “I see you like this place now?”
“I love it. Favorite diner in the whole city.”
My throat catches, and I grit my teeth. “That’s great. And such great news about the hard-boiled eggs too.”
He gives me a curious look.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” I affix a plastic smile when the waitress brings me my food. She turns to Todd and Amber. They order as I slide my laptop into my bag and consider ditching the place right now. Who needs food when there are ex-fiancés and their new wives to remind you of all that was stolen from you?
“And I’ll have a coffee too. No more soda in the morning for me,” he adds before the waitress leaves.
The burning behind my eyes intensifies. It’s just coffee, I tell myself. But he used to hate coffee. He detested it, and now he’s drinking it instead of Diet Coke.
He turns his attention back to Amber. “But no coffee for you still,” he says to her in a babyish voice. She smiles at Todd as he lays a hand gently on one of hers. I try my hardest to mask the all-too familiar feeling of my insides being shred by him. God, I loved this man. I was a fool, but I loved him like crazy, I fell for him the day I met him randomly at a bus stop several years ago. He was mine, and he was wonderful, and he was the only one I wanted.
“Well, it was great seeing you,” I say, and start to push my chair away.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. I totally forgot that I ate a bagel already today. Stupid me.” I smack my forehead, as if I’m shocked at my own forgetfulness.
“I do that sometimes too,” Amber says. “Forget stuff. I think it’s because I have baby brain right now.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh,” she says, and there it is again. That long expression of surprise.
Todd nods several times. “We had a baby. Two weeks ago.”
My heart races into a very painful overdrive of disbelief as it pounds against my chest. This can’t be happening. Todd clasps his hand over Amber’s and she beams at him, and that smile, for her, just for her, threatens my precarious sense of I’m-totally-fine-with-being-ditched-the-day-before-our-wedding.
“We have a little sweet little baby girl. Her name is Charlotte.”
The diner starts spinning and I grab the edge of the table. I squeeze my eyes shut, hoping, praying that’ll do the trick and hold in the tears that are threatening to splash all over my face. He changed everything for her, all the way from children to breakfast choices. And he took everything from me, including our name for a baby he wound up having a year after leaving me a voicemail that said he didn’t want to marry me because he couldn’t picture having kids with me.