Steamed

red from crying, my eyes were puffy, my makeup was shot. What if Noah saw me and knew he was the source of my misery? How humiliating would that be? I called Adrianna again from my cell phone but still got her voice mail, so I just hung up. I fixed myself up the best I could, started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot toward home.
    I peeled into my parking spot at the condo and prayed not to run into the guy with the wandering body parts. I unloaded my purchases and tried to slink inconspicuously to the house. Fortunately, Noah wasn’t around. At a guess, he was still languishing in his apartment, savoring the memory of the previous night.
    But Harmony was outside on the lawn.
    Harmony lived on the first floor of our building and annoyed the hell out of me. She weighed next to nothing but had bought herself enormous silicone breasts that threw her off balance, thus creating the impression she was on the verge of toppling over at any minute. Harmony’s involvement in a car accident a few years back had netted her a good-size settlement that had paid for her massive boobies. The bosomy funding source was no secret; she shared it with everyone she met, usually within a few minutes.
    Her asinine banter always drove me completely bonkers. I was still irritated with her from the previous winter, when she complained at one of our monthly condo meetings about the poor job I’d done of shoveling the walkways around the house. In theory, all the tenants were supposed to take turns shoveling snow. The January condo meeting turned into a massive fight about who had actually met the obligation and who had not.
    Harmony was loudly relating an encounter she’d had with a car salesman that afternoon. As she needlessly pointed to her breasts, she said, “ ‘I’m a big girl,’ I says to him. ‘And I need a lotta seat room,’ but he just wants ta show me this little compact thing, and I keep sayin’, ‘I’m too busty for that little thing,’ and he keeps tellin’ me to move the seat back, but I keep tellin’ him I can’t reach the little bar unda the seat ’cause of the girls up here, and then—”
    At that point, Tyler, an acupuncturist on the first floor, was so desperate to shut her up that he shot to his feet and spat out, “So, there seems to be a dispute about the shoveling?”
    Harmony responded by delivering a speech about how dissatisfied she’d been with the path I’d shoveled after the twenty-four-inch snowfall we’d endured the week before. My path was way too narrow for her, she maintained. Did her breasts need more room? I wondered. I snarled that the path had been perfectly acceptable and that at least I’d waited until the snow had stopped before I’d shoveled. I went on to remind everyone of the time Harmony had shoveled only the first three inches of what had turned into a foot-and-a-half blizzard and had claimed she’d met her shoveling obligations. At the end of a long and irritating discussion, the group agreed that all the tenants would like a wider path next time, so Tyler requested that I add, say, another ten inches to the width of my paths. Easy for him to say. He hired some man named Sergio to do his manual labor.
    So my crummy mood held fast this Saturday morning when I saw Harmony, who was standing over a hot Weber grill. She wore what looked like a teeny nightgown with a pattern of minature flowers but was presumably a dress. As she flipped super-size meat patties, balls of sweat dripped down her face, hit the coals, and sizzled. She and her breasts turned to me as I approached the house. She tilted her head and, with a look of concern, asked how I was doing.
    “Fine,” I replied hesitantly.
    Harmony pursed her lips and gave me the thumbs-up sign. “Hang in there. There’s otha’ fish in the sea.” Sympathy and sisterhood! Harmony must have seen Blondie leaving this morning, too. I felt worse than ever.
    Having failed to shrivel up and perish, I nodded halfheartedly, started up the fire escape steps, rushed past Noah’s door, and finally reached the security of my apartment.
    “Bastard,” I said for the hundredth time that day.
    Gato greeted me as I tumbled into the living room with my painting supplies. He quickly brushed up against my leg before rubbing the gallon of honeyed pecan with his long body and letting out an overly affectionate purr. Gato couldn’t even tell the difference between human beings and paint cans—no wonder my mother described him as