"She must have thrown a chunk of garlic into the washing machine when she did the sheet she put on my bed last night."
I couldn't help laughing after telling her.
"She didn't? Really?"
I nodded.
"Oh, brother," Ami said. "I'll have it changed while we're at lunch. Why doesn't that woman go off and join a circus?"
Maybe she thinks she has, I thought, but I kept it to myself.
Ami shook her head.
"You're right to laugh about it, too. We've got to look on the bright side of things. It's actually very funny," she declared.
She did have the amazing ability to forget unhappiness and become ebullient and jovial. I decided she was an emotional chameleon, able to blend into any atmosphere, wherever she was and whatever she was doing. Anyone looking at us when we entered the Nest, especially looking at her, would think the events at our house the night before were surely fiction. She knew many of the people who were having Sunday lunch there, but only one woman, Joy Stamford, a round-faced redhead, had the nerve to ask her outright if the story she had heard this morning was true.
"The Foley boy fell off your roof and broke his shoulder last night?"
Ami didn't even bat an eyelash, nor let her smile slip off her face.
"It was so stupid, Joy, it's not even worth discussing," she said. "I'm sure the Foleys are so embarrassed they'll go into hibernation."
"Well, what happened?" Joy insisted, playing now for the two other women at her table.
"We really don't know. There was a
commotion, and then Wade found him lying there and called an ambulance."
All the women looked at me.
Ami saw where their attention had gone.
"And poor Celeste is just as much in the dark as everyone else. Maybe he was just a Peeping Tom," she added. "Poetic justice. How's the lobster salad today? I just hate it when it's stringy."
"Oh, it's wonderful," one of the other women said, and we went to our own table, where Ami held court much the same way she did everywhere she went.
"You see," she said, smiling and nodding at anyone who looked our way, "you don't show how upset you are. That's what they're hoping to see. They so enjoy someone else's troubles. You take their mean comments and just deflect them a bit and laugh, and thus you frustrate them. I know how to handle them. They are my mother's people. I've been in their world and lived in their country and spoken their language.
"And so will you, Celeste. You'll be even better at all this than I am. I'm sure of it," she said, and ordered us our lobster salads.
Early that evening, before we were to go out to dinner as Wade had proposed, my phone rang. It wasn't Trevor, as I expected, however. It was Waverly.
"He's in some pain," he said, "and asked me to call you for him. They have him under some sedation, but he managed to get out his plea like a dying man's last request," Waverly said in overly dramatic tones. "You should see the cast they have him in," he added. "He won't be driving for some time, and he won't be climbing up to your room either."
"Tell him I hope he gets better quickly," I offered. "Sure. If you want, I'll take you over to see him tomorrow. He's home. We can go right after school."
"I can't. I have a driving lesson, and then I have a piano lesson," I added.
"What about the day after tomorrow?"
"I can't," I simply said.
"That's not being very nice. He risked his life to see you, and left my party to boot," he added. I envisioned his impish smile.
"From what I heard, he risked his life going to your party," I countered, and Waverly laughed.
"Hey, I just wanted you to know I'm available to serve you in any way you'd like. Any way you think I might be of some assistance," he added, with sexual overtones that could not be ignored.