Read Online How to Look Happy by Stacey Wiedower - Free Book Online Page B

on. Customers are milling about, perusing the wine machines and inserting cards into the card readers when they decide on a pour. There’s a table a few feet away from us with a woman’s bag slung over the back of one chair, and I’m guessing it belongs to Brad’s date. Sure enough, a tall, leggy brunette makes her way to it, and I watch as she scans the restaurant, her eyes finally landing on us.
    “My wife and I just had dinner at Tsunami,” he says. “We have another hour before we have to relieve the sitter, so we’re taking full advantage.”
    “Ah, that’s nice,” I say, my eyes flashing to his left hand, where, sure enough, a white-gold band flashes from his ring finger. I had no idea Brad Pepper was married. In fact, I seem to recall him feeding me a line or two when we were working together. I wrack my brain, trying to remember what it was he said. Dawson, you have legs for weeks. That’s what it was. It made me uncomfortable at the time since we were working in close proximity, and I was engaged. He must have a thing for legs, I think, glancing at the brunette again.
    Brad drags over a chair from the bistro table nearest my seat and plunks down on it, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone. “So, give it to me straight,” he says, and my eyes widen. “Is Candace really cheating on Dan with Emory Brewster?”
    I nearly choke on my sip of pinot. “Holy shit, Brad,” I say before I can help myself. We really aren’t that close, and I’m shocked that he’s come right out with this. It hits me, not for the first time, that men are worse gossips than women, even though we get all the bad rap for it.
    Not that he’s the first person to call me out on my stupid, idiotic Facebook “fuck up,” as Jeremy so nicely put it. I’ve gotten questions from at least two or three past clients or colleagues, and my sister-in-law Jane even called me from across the Atlantic after seeing my status update.
    It’s bothered me before how, in this day and age, our private lives are no longer private. I’ve had a couple of strange moments where I’ve run into somebody in, say, Target that I haven’t seen in five years, and they say something like, “I saw that you were just in New York. Your trip looked like fun.”
    What? Oh yeah, Facebook. It’s completely changed small talk.
    Or how about those moments when you meet someone for the first time, but you forget you haven’t met because you already know so much about each other’s lives? Like Ellie Kate’s husband, Matt. When I finally met him in person at an awards banquet after two years of seeing him in photos with their adorable daughter, Chloe, we skipped the handshake and went straight for the hug.
    That’s all fine and good. But how about this: Certain relationships from the past belong in the past. We leave them behind for a reason. Now, thanks to Facebook, the high school hierarchy follows us around in a way people have never had to deal with outside of a class reunion.
    I don’t want to know that the homecoming queen is still as popular as ever and rich now or that the cheerleader who modeled that one time in Seventeen magazine is now overweight. I don’t want to have to decide what to do with a friend request from my tenth-grade boyfriend— If I decline, will he think I never got over him? If I accept, will he think I never got over him? —and I don’t want all of these people to know what I did last weekend, what I think about the latest episode of Real Housewives , or how I just screwed up monumentally at work.
    I know we all choose to be on social media, and if I absolutely did not want to make any portion of my private life public, I could just avoid Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and live like people did in, like, 1992. But seriously, anybody without a Facebook profile in this day and age is either weirdly paranoid or antisocial, and I’m neither. Usually.
    Right now I feel that deep urge to crawl into bed and put my pillow over