Free The Moment of Everything by Shelly King Page A

revealed the inspiration that is the mark of true genius. He layered potato chips on top of the bologna and cheese before covering it with the second slice of lavishly mayo-ed bread. The result was a Fourth of July explosion of sweet and salty and savory that surfed waves of cholesterol. We could feel our arteries clogging with each bite.
    “Jesus wept,” Dizzy said. “Who would have thought you could get those numbers out of a few love letters? Fuck me sideways. Any local retail outfit around would love to have that kind of traffic. Your reporting system must be spinning like a slot machine hitting the jackpot.”
    “I had to turn off the tracking app on my phone,” I told him. “Jason hates the sounds a cell phone makes, so I was on vibrate, but it was like walking around with an angry hornet in my pocket.”
    Most of the hits were from the Dragonfly’s Facebook page I’d created. But then other traffic came in from different pages, such as other used bookstores, blogs about romance and dating, blogs about books, blogs about the lost art of letter-writing, Twitter feeds from a romance novelist and grad student at Northwestern. The fifty or so people I’d e-mailed the site URL to the night before had shared it with another fifty or so people. But a few of those people had a much wider audience, so the numbers jumped to the hundreds and then the thousands quickly. My in-box for the [email protected] account I’d set up twenty-four hours ago already had more than a hundred e-mails. I scanned the subject lines. People wanted more, lots more. They wanted to know what happened to Henry and Catherine. Did they get married? Are they still together? It was a collective lunge toward a happy ending, and I wished I had one to give them.
    “Have you told Avi about these numbers yet?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “It’s so new. And I’m not sure what the best approach is.”
    “Food is always the best approach,” Dizzy said. “Call her up and ask her to lunch.”
    “I don’t think I can just call up someone like Avi and ask her to lunch. Besides, I’m broke. Where am I going to take her to lunch?”
    He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.
    “Here’s fifty bucks. Chase around that Korean food truck that only tweets its location. She’ll think you’re original. If she likes finding talent in unusual places, wait until she tries the food.”
    “And how are we supposed to chase down this mystical food truck? I sold my car, remember?”
    Dizzy stopped for a moment and then started digging in his pocket for his keys.
    “Dizz, it’s okay. I’ll ask her to meet me someplace near the bookshop. And thanks for the loan.”
    “It’s a gift,” he said. “A thank-you for saving that sorry-ass book club the other day. Sugarbritches, I’m already mentally redecorating your office for when you come back.”
    Dizzy dropped another slice of bologna in the hot skillet on my stove and tipped his spatula in the direction of my bike, which was parked in the living room.
    “That really is a nice bike. Hell, I’d sleep with him for that bike. So you think this Rajhit guy is the next ex–Mr. Right Now?”
    “Is your pessimism meant to be reverse psychology?”
    “Nah, it’s pretty much genuine. What are you waiting for?”
    “I don’t know. There’s just something so kind of earnest about him.”
    “Yeah, we don’t want any of that. No fucking forthrightness either. And that honesty bullshit is just asswipe for the lame-minded and gullible.”
    “Do you have a point here?”
    “My point is this,” Dizzy said. “If you’re going to rule someone out, it’s got to be for a bigger flippin’ reason than he’s got some exceptional quality that requires a nineteenth-century adjective to describe it. Look, I know Bryan messed you up a bit when he went to Austin…”
    “It’s not that,” I said.
    “Bullshit it’s not that,” he said.
    “I mean it’s not that he left. It’s what it was like