Page 87 of The Lipstick Flip

I made my way to the top of the stairs. I stood out of sight. I listened.

“Oh my God, Howie,” Noah snapped.

“I can hear you breathing up there,” Si said.

“Well,” I said. And for lack of anything better: “Fuck you both.”

I wasn’t sure why, but I slammed the door on my way into the bedroom. It did make me feel a little better.

I showered. I changed into the clothes Noah had left out for me: jeans, a nice thermal, a heavier wool shirt he’d told me twice not to button. I pulled on my socks and then sat there, trying to listen.

Were they still talking?

No fucking clue.

I opened the door and said, “I’m coming down.”

When I got to the kitchen, Noah’s eyes were red, but he wasn’t dead, and he didn’t try to run.

Si looked, if anything, more tired. She’d eaten all my mixed nuts. “Didn’t anybody tell you about indoor voices?”

“Want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.

To my surprise, it was Noah who answered. “Girl talk.”

Si huffed a breath that might have been a laugh. “Show me the house, Howie. Noah’s got to finish getting ready.”

I tried to clock Noah’s expression. He smiled and shook his head, which I guess meant he was okay. So, while he went upstairs to dress, I took Si on a tour of the house. I didn’t want her doing the stairs, so we stuck to the main floor, but there was still plenty to see.

The good thing about Si—one of the good things, I guess—was that she wasn’t one of those jackasses who had to tell you how they would have done something, or how you’d done everything wrong. She said stuff like “That’s a different sink,” and I explained how we’d had to return the other one because the bowl was cracked, and she said, “It looks good.” Or when we were looking at the cabinets, which she would have installed if she’d been up to it, she touched the joining and said, “Somebody did good work on this.”

She didn’t care about the light switch, even though I told her it took me almost two days to get it working. “It’s a light switch, Howie. Why’d it take you two days?”

Once the tour was over, I settled her in the living room again. One addition to the room—now that Noah had decided that yes, we were going to live here, and yes, he was going to have to give the whole house a complete makeover—was a television, so I found a game for Si to watch, left her with the remote and the Coke, and threw away the empty tin of mixed nuts.

“What’d she say to you?” I whispered to Noah in the kitchen.

He was setting out turkey-and-cheddar pinwheels, and he paused to frown at me. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit it was nothing.”

“She’s very protective of you.”

“Oh my God,” I groaned. “She’s insane. What the fuck did she say?”

“Howie,” Noah said, and he waited a beat, like he wanted to make sure I heard him. “Leave it.”

Which was about as clear as you could get. So, I left it.

Instead, I helped Noah finish setting up. And while we’d done our best to keep things simple, the reality was that this was still a Noah party, and so it was going to be, well, a lot. There was the food—the pinwheels, the meatballs, the bruschetta. If you’ve never tried to put tiny tomatoes on tiny pieces of bread while there’s a fucking clock running, you don’t know what pressure is. I hauled in the galvanized tubs from the garage, wiped them out, and iced down the soda and the water. Noah started the music—he’d worked on the playlist every night for the last week.

And pretty soon, people started to arrive. A lot of people from MagnaCare; Noah’s co-workers came in a steady flow. I knew some of them from before, but others were new. The new ones tended to give me long, considering looks, probably because they’d already gotten an earful about what a piece of shit I was. But they were all polite, and Noah had a great time chatting and laughing and pulling me from group to group. I did my part, which was to smile and nod and say good things about Noah, and even if I was a piece of shit, I thought I did him proud.

When I spotted Theo and Auggie in the entry hall, I kissed Noah’s cheek, excused myself, and made my way over to where they were standing.

“Well, well, well,” I said. “If it isn’t the dynamic duo: Discipline Daddy and his boy wonder, Spanky.”

“This is why I said we should just send a card,” Theo said.