Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (35 page)

“Oh, hospitals.” She shrugged. “I don’t do well in hospitals, and my galleys came back on Wednesday. I have to read those. You know that.”

“And no author in the history of mankind has been late with their galleys? You can’t have it both ways, Jill Allyn. Either you are Rose’s friend and you do what Darcy has been doing—you drop everything and move heaven and earth to help her—or you are one of our clients and all we want from you is that you do your job. Pick one—friend or client.”

“But I’m both,” she cried. “That’s how it’s always been.”

“No, that’s how it used to be, but it hasn’t been that way in a very long time.” Then with the lightning-fast, never-look-back decisiveness that had made him who he was, he made up his mind. “You know what, Jill Allyn, you’re not worth it. You aren’t worth it as a client, and you certainly are not worth it as a friend.”

He paid no attention to her gasp. “What does your contract with us say? Thirty days’ notice from either party? This is your notice from me. The Zander-Brown Agency is no longer representing you. Mary Beth will fax you a copy of that on Monday, and she’ll return whatever manuscripts we have.” Then he turned his back to her, moving to the car. “I believe we’re ready, Darcy.”

A minute later we were at the end of the driveway. “Did she call Rose
small
?” he demanded. “Did she actually call
Rose
small?”

Why was this a surprise to him? “Did you mean that, not working with her anymore?”

“I sometimes torture people, but I rarely bluff, and I certainly wasn’t then.” He was drumming his fingers on the console between the two seats, but after a moment he flattened his hand on the padded surface. He was forcing himself to relax. “Okay, we’re done thinking about her. We’re done thinking about anything. We’re going to have a very good time this evening even if we feel like Pip with Miss Haversham ordering him to play.”

I could, in complete honesty, assure him that I would not feel like that.

At the restaurant, I went back to see if anyone had found the shoes I’d left behind yesterday. No one had, but the staff abandoned their chores to cluster around me, eager to hear how Finney was doing, even more eager to praise me for what I’d done. Even the chef came forward to shake my hand.

I pointed out the dark-haired waitress to Guy. He drew her into a corner of the kitchen and spoke to her softly. A minute later, she had her hands over her face. She was crying. Good tears, I assumed.

Word about my willingness to stick a kitchen knife into a little boy’s throat spread among the guests, and I soon found myself as much the center of attention as Cami. In the hospital, grateful families may send fruit baskets to the nurses’ station or write nice letters that go in your personnel file, but you rarely see that family again. I wasn’t used to the personal accolades I was getting that evening, and after a while I ran out of ways to respond. It began to get a little embarrassing.

I appealed to Guy for help. “How can I get people to shut up about this?”

“You can’t,” he said bluntly. “We always told our kids that
they have to accept the consequences of their own actions. Now you’re stuck with the consequences of yours.”

“Just like the waitress—roll up a towel, monitor a pulse, and you’re stuck with years more of schooling.”

“Exactly,” he agreed, “although I’d like to point out that she’s being much more gallant about facing her fate than you are.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t complain. I’m only embarrassed. She has to learn the names for all the bones in the foot.”

And, let’s face it, I did prefer this sort of embarrassment to the one resulting from being seated at the losers’ table.

I parked, found Finney’s room, and eased the door open. He was asleep, curled up on his side, one hand under his cheek. The sheets on his bed were white, and the loosely woven thermal blanket was pale blue. He looked very small. I leaned forward to kiss his forehead. He had a white bandage at the base of his neck.

Rose had been dozing in a recliner. It was a tangle of blankets and pillows. She started to straighten them, but I stopped her. “I can do that.

“And I am going to let you.”

I gave her the car keys and helped her gather up her things. The bookmark between the pages of
Wives and Daughters
suggested that she had read nearly two-thirds of it, and it was probably six hundred pages long. “Do you want me to leave this here for you?” she asked. “It’s really good.”

“Ah . . . no, that’s okay.” I had finally remembered that Pip and Miss Haversham were from Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations.
I had done my duty by the Victorian novelists.

I settled into the recliner. At midnight, the nurse came in to
take Finney’s vitals. His temperature was normal, and he was oriented to his surroundings. He was in the hospital, and I was Darcy, not Mommy. He clearly wanted Rose, but I told him that I worked in a place like this and I liked places like this and as long as I was here, he would like it, and after a bit, he believed me.

He wasn’t sleepy, so I took some things out of my purse—my phone, a tube of ChapStick, a parking stub, a credit card, a coin, about ten items in all. I laid them out on the tray table and had Finney look at them. Then I covered them with a towel and took one away. He did surprisingly well although it was harder when I rearranged the objects. Rose had said that his sense of space was one of his strongest cognitive abilities. We played for nearly twenty minutes.

At six, Guy came in, smelling like fresh soap and shaving cream. I explained the game I’d played with Finney, knowing that Finney would probably want to play it again when he woke up. Guy patted his pockets, verifying that he had enough equipment to stock the tray table.

The house was quiet when I got back to Mecox Road; everything was orderly and peaceful. I went up to my room to shower and change clothes. By the time I came back downstairs, both nieces were in the kitchen, laying out breakfast. A line of trucks was coming up the driveway, and the day had started.

It was a relief to know that nothing could be perfect. At ten o’clock, Rose and I sat down to redo the seating chart. It was a mess. We didn’t know for sure who was coming and who wasn’t. There were going to be empty seats; we just didn’t know which ones. So I suggested that we alert the Title IX bridesmaids, Trish the volleyball captain and Jamie the coxswain, they should get guests to switch seats if any of the tables were too empty.

“You do the best you can,” Rose said, “and send flowers in the morning.”

I looked up from the little escort-card envelopes that I was restuffing. “Where did you hear that?”

“Oh.” She realized what she had said. “The same place you did, of course. Don’t tell me that you haven’t been reading Claudia’s Web site. I won’t believe it for a minute.”

“When did you start?”

“Early enough to be tempted to buy red dishes to use at Thanksgiving. They would have looked awful with amber place-mats. And I also think that you do look better with a bust pad.”

I grimaced, and she laughed—we were two girls giggling in the halls of junior high.

We made mistakes. If we had thought about the cake on Thursday, we might have been able to arrange for a less elaborate one, but we hadn’t. It arrived in all its architectural, camellia-coated glory. Nor had we given the music any thought. Clearly we should have called the woodwinds who were going to play during the ceremony, paid them a cancellation fee, and asked the strings to come an hour or so early. We hadn’t done that either.

So the woodwinds showed up several hours before the event was to start, expecting to play during the wedding ceremony and for a respectful crowd waiting beforehand. Guy and I were outside when they arrived, and he explained what had happened. Could they just play until the strings showed up?

Oh, no. They did not play background for a cocktail party. And they weren’t an opening act for a string quartet. They had accepted this engagement for the exposure. They knew who was on the guest list; they wanted to play. This event had been a career-building move for them. Apparently they too had had an agenda that had nothing to do with Jeremy and Cami.

Their proposal was that people should gather quietly and listen to them. Guy’s proposal was that he would pay them and they would go away. No, they thought that they should be entitled to
more than the original fee because this engagement would have led to others. Not playing would result in their occurring damages, and they should be compensated.

Guy invited them to sue him for these alleged damages. He further said that their suit would stand far more of a chance if he didn’t pay them at all. In fact, if they really were planning on calling in the lawyers, it would be so much better for them if he didn’t pay them. He’d actually be doing them a favor by not paying them.

They decided to take his check.

The bridesmaids had been looking forward to the hair and makeup session, so we didn’t change those arrangements. This time the hair stylist brought two assistants and the makeup artist brought three. I tried to hide from them, but, like everyone else, they had heard about my little adventure as a combat medic, and one of the many assistants was sent to track me down. The makeup lady used a lot less gunk than she had on Thursday, and I actually liked the results. There was something about my eyes, and I don’t know what it was . . . I just looked like a slightly better version of me.

I took another one of the mesh helmets and went up to my third-floor nanny’s room to put on my amethyst Neiman Marcus, muted-print, low-contrast, mottled-leaves mother-of-the-groom dress.

This was a dark spot on my day. I wished that I loved this dress the way Jeremy had loved his first sports uniform. He’d been four years old, and his T-ball team had been issued red T-shirts and red ball caps. Jeremy’s shirt had hung to his knees; the cap fit like a lampshade. But he’d loved them; they’d made him feel like a Hall of Fame athlete. He’d worn the shirt to his pre-K morning classes; he’d slept in it. In fact, the bottom sheet on his bed developed a pinkish cast in the shape of his little torso. When I would wash the
shirt, he’d hover near the washer, listening to the machine thunk and vibrate.

I wanted to feel that way about my dress. I wanted to love it. I wanted to feel transformed in it. I wanted to feel that that dress was worth every penny I had spent on it. I wanted to feel that I was worth every penny I had spent on it.

But I didn’t. I picked up the scissors and slowly, reluctantly, reached under my arm to cut the tags. The great big number made me sick, but I didn’t have a choice. I hadn’t brought any other dress with me.

I had the scissors open, the blades on either side of the tag’s strings when I stopped. I dropped the scissors onto the bed and marched down the back stairs and through the second-floor hall, the tags swinging under my armpit. I knocked on Rose’s door.

She was in bed, propped up against the pillows. Guy was on the other side of the massive room, buttoning his shirt. My father was spending the evening in the hospital so that they wouldn’t have to worry about Finney too much.

“How nice you look,” Guy said immediately. “What a pretty dress.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said, then turned to Rose. “I don’t know much about sisters, but I do know they borrow each other’s clothes. So—”

“In our family,” Guy said, “they steal each other’s clothes. At least Annie does.”

I ignored him. “So, if you want to be all sisterly, lend me something to wear so that I can return this dress, and then I can afford to take a vacation this summer.”

Rose swung her legs off the edge of the bed and went to her closet. “I’ve got more things in Brooklyn, but I think I’ve got something that would work.” She disappeared into the closet.

I saw Guy looking at me. “No,” I said. “No, you don’t.”

He threw up his hands, pretending to be innocent. “What did I do?”

“Nothing yet. But you’re standing there, trying to figure out how to give me a vacation.”

“It wasn’t going to be a
vacation,
” he defended himself. “Just a spa weekend, you and Rose, massages, facials, wheat-germ breakfasts on trays by the pool.”

Oh. That didn’t sound half bad. I had never done anything like that. I needed to work on my heart-to-heart girl-talk skills; a thick white spa robe would be a great practice uniform.

If the world were truly a perfect place, Rose would have come out of the closet carrying the violet-blue dress with magenta and scarlet poppies. But the world is not perfect. She had an armful of turquoise green. Guy had already taken the cue to disappear, so I unzipped the amethyst dress and, half mindful of my hair and makeup, stuck my head through the neckline of the turquoise one.

I looked in the mirror. There was no doubt that the dress would have looked better on Rose. The low neckline needed her curves, and the looseness she needed around the hips made the dress look a bit sacky on me.

“It’s too big. Maybe it would look better with a belt.” Rose bunched up the fabric at the back of my waist and stared at me in the mirror. “Annie could tell us.”