The rooftop of Holly’s condo is jammed, part MTV spring break party and part Hallmark Christmas movie.
“Oh, my gosh,” Noah says. “I feel just like Connie Francis in Where the Boys Are.”
He grabs Fred’s hand and races toward the pool. “C’mon, George Hamilton.”
Leah laughs. Suddenly, she sees Luka arrive and sprints across the rooftop to meet him, leaving me standing alone in the hot wind.
It is a scorching Chicago summer Saturday, where the concrete feels like a radiator, the air a rainforest and where—on my walk here—I saw a woman lose a heel into the melting asphalt.
A huge banner announcing the Annual Holly Jolly Christmas in July Party, undulates in the city breeze.
Holly is in the pool lounging on a reindeer float when she sees me.
“It’s about time!” she yells over Mariah Carey Christmas music. “Did Rudolph get lost? Where have you been?”
“Traffic was a nightmare,” I say. “And my grandparents were late getting to the store, which was a madhouse.”
“Are you trying to guilt me?”
I look around. “Well, you did steal my idea a long time ago,” I say. “So...”
“I improved your idea,” Holly counters, gesturing at her bikini and the crowd on the rooftop. “And this is simply promotion for your idea.”
She elegantly rolls out of the float with barely a splash in the pool and swims to the edge as gracefully as Esther Williams. Holly walks up the steps and emerges in a red, Baywatch bikini that reads Sleigh All Day across the bust in gold cursive. Her hair is slicked back, sunglasses atop her head, makeup intact.
“I would look like a drowned raccoon if I did that,” I say.
“You would not! Stop it,” she says. “You look...”
She stops and gives me a onceover.
“Very professional.”
I look down at myself.
“I had an early morning meeting with an account rep from HarperCollins,” I say. “I couldn’t show up for it in a halter top. And I was in such a rush to leave, I forgot my overnight bag in the store.”
“Well, we need to get you changed out of that blazer, honey,” Holly says. “It’s a hundred degrees. You look like you’re here to sue summer.”
She grabs my hand and escorts me toward the glass elevator. As we walk, I notice a table stacked with books and a Sleigh By the Bay banner across it, Leah and Noah perched behind it. I slow and look at Holly.
“People want to buy summer reads,” Holly explains. “Beach reads. I brought the store to them today.”
“You think of everything,” I say.
It’s then I notice that the entire crowd at the party seems to turn as one to watch me, cell phones in the air, the entire rooftop swaying to one side in slow motion like a field of Illinois corn in a windstorm.
“Is it my imagination, or is everyone staring at me?” I ask on the way to Holly’s condo. “I haven’t been judged this harshly since the first day of sorority rush when I wore sneakers.”
“And I had to tell them you’d just had foot surgery,” she says.
Holly ushers me inside her condo, and the cold from the air-conditioning whooshes over me. Holly leads me directly to her closet and starts shuffling through her clothes, hangers banging this way and that.
“I’m a good foot taller than you,” I say. “Your clothes are like doll outfits on me.”
She turns and inspects me, not seeming to hear me.
I grab her shoulders. “Okay, stop!” I say. “What’s going on? You’re acting stranger than normal.”
“Promise you won’t get mad.”
I step back and take a seat in the chair adjacent from her bed. Whenever Holly asks me to promise not to get mad, it’s bad. Like the time she didn’t tell me she’d booked us in a hostel—not a hotel—until we’d arrived in Portugal, or when we were high over the ocean parasailing in Mexico and Holly said, This turned out way better than I imagined considering I found these guys on a flyer in a bar.
I don’t answer.
She takes a seat on the end of the bed across from me.
“Jamie, Micah and Tristan are all here,” she says.
“What?”
She jumps at the decibel level of my voice.
“Hear me out,” Holly says. “You’ve been dating these three guys for a few months now, and keeping everyone—including not only them but also me and those who love you and helped make this happen—in the dark. They want to know—we all want to know—do you like one? Are any of them the one?”
“Perhaps I don’t know,” I say, looking down.
“And that’s okay, Susan. But at least communicate your feelings to someone about what’s going on. Anyone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I really am trying to sort things out. It’s been a long year between my fortieth-year funk, my grampa and all of this craziness.”
“I know,” Holly says. “They actually all reached out to me about coming. They wanted to meet each other, sort of like the guys did at the end of The Dating Game. I just felt like it might make everything less secretive. I thought maybe if you saw them all together it might help you put things into perspective and make a decision.”
“Like kicking the tires at a used car lot?”
She laughs. “Good point. The timing just seemed right, especially considering the bookstore’s annual Christmas in July party next week. Maybe seeing your Santas in the summer will be like seeing yourself in a changing room mirror.”
“Horrifying?”
“Clarifying. It will lead you to make the right decision.”
“This all just feels like too much pressure all of a sudden.”
“Think about those three guys you’ve been seeing,” Holly says. “They each know you’re dating all of them. They post pictures on their social media, and then those are shared, and then people speculate.” Holly jostles my knee anew. “They all like you, Susan. Really like you. You know why? Because you’re an amazing, smart, resilient, fierce woman and friend. And if you don’t want to be with any of them, so be it. You’ll just be as fierce as you’ve always been, and we’ll continue dancing to ‘Single Ladies’ whenever it comes on.”
I smile.
Holly continues. “But I’m your best friend in the world, and I know there’s something deeper going on with you. I don’t know if you’re just biding time, trying to make everyone happy, or if you really like all of them, or none of them, but I know that once Susan gets stuck in a routine, it can last forever, and that’s often not healthy for you or for anyone.”
My mind whirs to Jordan.
“So I’m sorry to push you, and I’m sorry I’ve made your life a social media spectacle, but when we became friends you signed up for this roller coaster ride, and I’m not ever letting you off.” Holly looks into my eyes. “I love you, Susan. I only want the best for you.”
“You have an odd way of showing it,” I say.
She laughs.
“Let’s get you dressed so you can chat with the Jonas Brothers, okay?”
We emerge on the rooftop a few minutes later, and the cell phones again fly into the Chicago sky. Holly has dressed me oh so subtly in an off-the-shoulder bandana-print romper, green top, red skirt, which feels uncomfortably short on my long legs, and tossed a Santa cap on top of my head.
Noah rushes over, applauding.
“Diva!” he says. “You look hot!”
“Holly already told me everything,” I say. “Thank you for actually keeping a secret for the first time in your life.”
He mimes that he’s locking his lips with a key, which he then tosses into the pool. “Loose lips sink ships,” Noah says. “And I’m Captain Stubing from The Love Boat.”
I scan the crowd. Jamie is chatting with Leah and Luka, Micah is in the pool, and Tristan is stationed in the corner talking to a few people.
“A woman walks into a bar,” I say, “and takes a seat between a minister, an attorney and a financial planner.” I look at my friends. “And—surprise—the punch line is me.”
“You already got the joke wrong,” Noah says, fixing my hair. “It’s ‘a very tall woman walks into a bar.’”
I laugh.
“You got this, boo,” he says. “And your safe word today is Maureen O’Hara.”
I think how I’d rather be at home right now watching Miracle on 34th Street.
My feet feel as if they’re made of concrete until Noah gives me a big push, and I stumble across the rooftop.
“Go get ’em, girl!” he yells.
“Hi,” I say when I reach Jamie. “Funny meeting you here.”
He laughs and then leans in and gives me a kiss. “It’s good to see you.”
I turn to see if Micah and Tristan are watching. They are.
“You, too,” I say.
“This is awkward,” he says. “More so than our first date.”
“I promise you I didn’t plan for this to happen. I didn’t even know you—all of you—were coming.”
He smiles. “Well, Holly is full of surprises.”
“That’s a polite way of saying it.” I stop and really look at him. He is so all-American handsome, standing here wearing a Cubs hat and tank top on a hot summer day, that my heart skips a beat.
“Hi! I’m Micah.”
“I’m Tristan. Nice to meet you.”
I turn, and the world moves in slow motion. Micah extends his hand to Jamie, and then Jamie extends his hand to Tristan. I am surrounded.
“It seemed silly to ignore one another any longer,” Tristan shrugs. “It’s the minister in me.”
Tristan kisses my cheek, and then Micah does the same on my other cheek.
Tristan is wearing a very tight Christmas Vacation T-shirt with Chevy Chase’s face on it that shows every muscle. And Micah is standing shirtless, gold drops of water running down his torso.
Every single person at the party now has their phones trained on the four of us. I see Noah racing over with a cocktail.
“Drink this, diva,” he whispers. “Straight vodka with a whisper of cranberry.”
I take a sip and wince at its strength. “Where’s the whisper?”
“Don’t judge, Judy. You need it. And smile. You look like a deer in the headlights. No! You actually look like the girl from the poster of Jaws, all innocent while a great white shark circles without her knowing. Except there’s three sharks this time. Have fun!”
My three men are chatting now as if they’re old friends. I’m amazed at how men can either be all testosterone-fueled rage or completely chill and at ease in a situation like this. They all recognize Micah from the sports pages, and Jamie and Tristan are quizzing him about his star clients.
“Man, that one-handed touchdown catch Booker made against the Packers was amazing!” Tristan says.
“He’s a human highlight reel,” Jamie adds. “How much the Bears gotta pay to keep him?”
I watch them talk, looking from one to the other. The three are so different, and yet so alike: they are kind men. Good men. They each look similar to the memory of the man I talked to at the race.
I should be doing cartwheels into the pool that, after years of worry about getting hurt again and years of horrible dates, my friends, family and community loved me enough to find three men who any woman would dream of meeting.
Micah.
Jamie.
Tristan.
My head pivots from one to another.
“Now that was a catch!” Tristan says.
“I agree. They need him on the team,” Jamie says. “They’re just not complete without him.”
Not complete without him.
The humid Chicago air grips my body, and I suddenly feel claustrophobic and woozy. I take a sip of my cocktail and a step back from the three men to get some air and clarity. I take another sip and another step and then another...
It’s too late to stop myself from falling backward into the pool.
I yelp, tossing my cocktail over my head, and make a monstrous splash. I can immediately feel the skin on my back burn from my reverse belly flop. The entire crowd yells, “Ooooh! Owww!”
When I come up, my Santa cap is draped around my face like a wet otter. I spew water and open my eyes. Everyone at the party is standing around the pool, capturing the moment on their phones.
As if on cue, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” begins to play.
Jamie, Micah and Tristan are all leaning into the pool, trying to offer their assistance.
The lyrics to the song echo across the rooftop.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe
The last thing I hear before I sink back underwater is Noah saying, “You didn’t use your safe word!”