Meena stabbed the Up button, then looked around furtively. She was tired after her long day and hoped one thing—just this one little thing—would go her way.
And that was slipping onto the elevator of the building in which she lived without running into her neighbor Mary Lou, so that she could take the eleven-story ride to their floor in restful silence.
Meena’s building—910 Park Avenue—was elegant, with a doorman guarding its shiny brass doors, a marble lobby, a crystal chandelier, and an underground garage with parking spaces for which residents could pay an additional $500 per month (though Meena would have preferred to put that money toward a certain Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote … if she could have afforded an extra $500 a month, which she couldn’t).
But her apartment didn’t exactly live up to the building’s elegance: it needed repainting badly; the moldings along the ceilings were crumbling; the parquet floor needed sanding; the antique fireplaces didn’t work; and the French doors leading to the minuscule balcony that looked out over her neighbor Mary Lou’s terrace (which was practically the size of Meena’s whole apartment) stuck. And she was running out of closet space.
The important thing was, it was hers—or at least it would be, when she finally paid David back for his share of the down payment. They’d been fortunate to have bought when the market was at rock bottom and the previous owners had been divorcing and desperate to sell … and just as a small inheritance from Meena’s great-aunt Wilhelmina, for whom she’d been named (her mother had spelled it Meena for fear that her teachers and classmates might forever mispronounce her name “Myna”), finally came through.
Though David was long gone, Meena never pictured her apartment as a place to which she could bring back a date. But when she’d seen Shoshona leaving the office with a good-looking guy (whom she now realized had to have been the infamous Stefan Dominic; Meena had only managed to catch a glimpse of the back of his dark head before the two of them had disappeared onto the elevator for after-work drinks), she’d felt a twinge of envy.
Meena couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been on a date … unless she counted the first—and last—time she’d let Mary Lou set her up with a guy, someone from her husband’s office … the one whom Meena had felt compelled to inform over calamari when they’d met at a trendy restaurant downtown that he needed to have his cholesterol checked, or he was going to have a heart attack before the age of thirty-five.
Needless to say, he’d never called for a second date.
But hopefully he had called his doctor and gotten on Lipitor.
And yet she persevered in praying for the one thing that never, ever seemed to come true.
With the frequency of their encounters, Meena might as well have been dating her neighbor.
Every morning, poof! Mary Lou appeared, just as Meena pushed the Down button. Same thing each evening.
It was uncanny.
And every single time, any hope of having a civilized commute was shot.
Because then Meena was forced to listen to Mary Lou wax enthusiastic about whatever new guy she’d met whom she was convinced would be just perfect for Meena or whatever incredible story line idea she’d thought up the night before for Insatiable.
Oh, really? Meena would be forced to reply politely. Thank you, Mary Lou. Actually, I’m seeing someone. Someone from my office.
Or, No, really, I’ll definitely run your idea that Victoria Worthington Stone should become foreign ambassador to Brazil by Fran and Stan. I’m sure they’ll love that.
Except that there was no guy from Meena’s office whom she was seeing (except Paul, platonically; he’d been happily married with three kids for twenty-five years), and the countess had never, not even once, come up with a single usable story line for her favorite character, Victoria Worthington Stone.
It was too bad, because Meena genuinely liked warm, if somewhat over-the-top Mary Lou and her unassuming, slightly harassed-looking husband, Emil.
It was just that Meena was beginning to feel a little how Ned must have felt the day of his nervous breakdown in the ABN dining room … especially since David had left, and Mary Lou had become obsessed with Meena’s love life. How was Meena going to bring a date home if her older brother was always hanging around the apartment, making fettuccine Alfredo? Someone just needed to give Meena a little push in the right direction.
And Mary Lou had obviously appointed herself that person.
This became especially obvious that day, when Meena was once again unable to meet her goal of avoiding the countess at the elevator. …
Poof!
There she was.
“Meena!” the countess cried. “I’m so glad I ran into you! Did you get my e-mail? Emil’s cousin, the prince, is coming to town. You’re going to love him; he’s a writer, just like you. Only he writes books, not for a soap opera. A professor of ancient Romanian history, actually. You got my e-mail about the dinner party I’m having in his honor this Thursday, right? Do you think you’ll be able to make it?”
“Oh,” Meena said. “I don’t know. Things are crazy at work—”
“Oh, your job!” Meena realized she should have kept her mouth shut, since Mary Lou warmed to the subject immediately. “You work way too hard at that job of yours. Not that I don’t love every minute of it. Last week when Victoria made out with Father Juan Carlos in the vestibule after she went to confession over her guilt about sleeping with her daughter’s riding instructor, I had to stuff a napkin in my mouth to keep from screaming my head off and startling the maid while she was vacuuming, I was that excited. That was so brilliant! That story line was one of yours, wasn’t it?”
Meena inclined her head modestly. She was proud of the Victoria-and-the-hot-priest story line. It was different when it was a priest who was nobly restraining himself from sleeping with a woman. Father Juan Carlos didn’t also want to kill Victoria.
“Well, actually—” she started to say, but Mary Lou interrupted her.
“Still, you’re going to drive yourself into early menopause slaving away for that show. Anyway, listen …”
With a ding the elevator doors opened, and Meena and the countess stepped inside to begin what would, for Meena, anyway, be the eons-long ride up.
Mary Lou then proceeded to give Meena a long description of the castle in which the prince spent his summers in Romania. Mary Lou was intimately acquainted with it, because it was near the castle where she and her husband summered for two months every year—two blissful months during which Meena was able to ride the elevator countess-free.
By floor five, Meena was wondering why she’d never gotten a feeling about Mary Lou’s or her husband Emil’s impending demises. It was odd, really.
On the other hand, it was possible her power to predict death, which had shown up when she’d reached her tweens, was starting to wane now that she was approaching thirty (a girl could dream).
More likely, however, given Meena’s luck, it was morphing into something else … look at the strange feelings she got around Leisha and her baby.
By the tenth floor, Meena had heard all she could stand about Saxon architectural influences.
“Oh, would you look at that,” Meena said when the elevator doors finally, and mercifully, opened at their floor.
“Oh, Meena,” the countess said as the two of them strolled toward their respective doors. “I forgot to ask. How’s your brother doing?”
And there it was. The Head Tilt.
The Head Tilt was accompanied, of course, by the Sympathetic Look. The countess was no stranger to Botox, as Meena well knew, since the countess