One Good Friend Deserves Another (3 page)

“It was fantastically chaotic,” she admitted, as she stepped into the high-ceilinged lobby, where natural light spread down from a skylight in the cupola. “And, as unbelievable as this sounds, the marriage really
has
been arranged by her parents.”

Then Wendy stiffened as she saw a tennis foursome blocking the path between the lobby and the yellow parlor. As they turned with pleasant smiles, she braced herself for the battering of small talk, curious questions, and embarrassing advice that her and Parker’s presence always seemed to elicit.

But then Parker—perceptive Parker—gently took her arm and propelled her forward, smiling at everyone but not slowing their pace, nodding and making excuses until they’d passed through the gauntlet.

“You know,” he said, his voice rippling with amusement once they were out of earshot. “You and I could always just skip out of here and get married on the sly.” He leaned into her. “We’d tell them we were going out on a date. No one would know we were missing for days.”

“Yes, but as soon as we got back, my mother would continue with the wedding plans as if nothing had occurred.”

“Your mother is a force of nature. But you’ll sail through the storm.”

“Well, brace yourself tonight.” Wendy heard her mother’s voice, drifting from the open doors of the yellow parlor. “I’m going to talk about Birdie.”

“Right now?” Parker stopped a few paces from the door and gave her an odd look. “Sure you want to do that?”

“I can’t put it off much longer or the seating arrangements will be written in stone. I’m just glad you’re here—”

“
Here
are the lovebirds.”

Wendy started. Bitsy appeared at the door of the parlor, striding forcefully toward them.

“We’ve been waiting for you, my dear.” Bitsy brushed her smooth cheek against Wendy’s. Her hair, a mix of blond and white, was drawn back in a sleek ponytail. “Traffic bad?”

“Terrible.” Wendy loosened her grip on Parker’s arm and gave him a
here we go
look. “We sat on the Whitestone Bridge for half an hour.”

Her mother’s gaze lingered for a moment on Wendy’s right ear, and Wendy realized she’d forgotten to remove the pewter stud in her cartilage piercing. It was only the second piercing in that ear, the other four having closed up long ago. Her mother liked to call that piercing Wendy’s “last little eccentricity.” Wendy remembered well her mother’s reaction when she came home with it.

Honestly, my dear, I’m a little relieved. Every Livingston has an eccentricity. At least you didn’t run off to join a polygamous cult in Utah like your cousin Beth.

Bitsy raised a brow but said nothing aloud. Instead, she led Wendy into the parlor. “You remember Terry, of course?”

Wendy thrust her hand at the wedding planner. “Terry, so good of you to make the trip up here again.”

“There is
so
much to be done.” Terry slipped her reading glasses onto her nose as she settled down to consult her binder. “If you all don’t mind, I’d like to skip the pleasantries for now and get right down to work.”

Bitsy gave Wendy a wide-eyed look.
You know how these New Yorkers are.
“Very well then. Wendy, Terry was just showing me some fabulous ideas for the wedding favors…”

Wendy sat with her eyes glazing over as Terry flipped through a book of suggestions, elaborating on each one. Wendy couldn’t help compare these engraved silver vases and cigar holders with the handcuffs she’d received at an artist friend’s wedding last year, held in the basement of an East Village pub. The dress code for the ceremony was leather. The guest book was black canvas stretched across the back wall, finger-painted in red.

Nope, no painted miniatures of copulating stick figures for her wedding. It would probably be Tuscan candy dishes, if her mother’s keen attention was any indication. They all talked about the candy dishes for a good fifteen minutes, until Parker finally quipped that they should definitely do the pottery—but keep it far from Uncle Tad. Everyone laughed, because Uncle Tad was a notorious imbiber and was best remembered for breaking a seventeenth-century Chinese vase at the Livingston-Randall wedding thirteen years ago.

Wendy joined the laughter, because if she smiled along with everyone else, then the first issue of the evening would finally be resolved.

Her mother moved quickly to another topic—what to do with the children invited to the wedding. Wendy’s smile froze. She and her mother had already “discussed” this issue, and Wendy had made her intentions quite clear. Many of her and Parker’s friends had beaten them to the altar, and several already had babies and toddlers. Wendy wanted
all
of them there, milling about in their joyous chaos, just like the swarm of dark-haired young Pitalias and Boharas at Dhara’s engagement party, racing around the hotel ballroom like pods of mackerel, weaving and changing direction in silvery unison.

Parker squeezed her hand. She jumped a little and realized she must have grunted.

“Mother,” she said, feeling like an actress who’d just been prompted for her line. “As we discussed, we can ask the club for the use of one of the parlors. We can hire a few babysitters, have some games. The children can join us for the meal. It’s as simple as that.”

“I suppose that would work.” Bitsy gave her a high-browed look. “If you continue to insist, that is.”

“I
do
insist.”

There, she’d violated the unwritten WASP code of expressing strong feelings, and in the parlor, there descended a moment of acute discomfort. The wedding planner must have sensed the sudden stillness, for she lifted her face from the ink-splattered page of her planning book and her gaze traveled between the two women, her pen poised above the page.

Well, my little Birdie, Wendy thought, it’s now or never.

“While we’re on the subject,” Wendy said, corralling her courage, “there’s something else—”

“Excuse me, ladies.”

Parker squeezed her hand painfully. Startled, she glanced at him as he rose from the chair.

“I’m going to leave you to your plotting and scheming.” He gestured vaguely to the parlor door and beyond, to the smoking room. “My future brother-in-law is saving me a stool at the bar.”

Before Wendy could react, Parker dropped a quick kiss on her head and strode toward the door. She sat stunned, watching him leave the room. Then, ignoring her mother’s elevated brows and the planner’s curious look, Wendy stood up to follow him.

She ran into him just outside the door.

“I’ve been thinking about this, Wendy,” Parker said, shoving his hands into his pockets. “And I disagree with you about Birdie.”

She shook her head, not understanding. Parker knew how much this meant to her. She could do without the sex-toy wedding favors, the black strobe lights, and the techno-punk band.

But there was no way she was getting married without Birdie.

“Your sister,” he said, “just doesn’t belong at our wedding.”

Marta ushered Kelly into the cab and then squeezed in after her, addressing the cabbie before Kelly could.

“Take the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge,” Marta said, pressing the screen on the back of the seat to mute the voice urging her to buckle up. “Then go to Fifty-sixth and Eighth.”

“No, no, your apartment is closer.” Kelly sat in the corner of the cab, her hands white on her clutch. “Have him drop you off at Tudor City first.”

“I’m not going home yet.” Marta slipped her oversize bag off her lap and let it jangle on the seat between them. “I’m visiting Carlos at the restaurant, so it just makes sense to drop you off first.”

It was a little white lie, but it worked, and Marta watched Kelly succumb to the edgy silence in which Marta had found her, toying with the ribbon of a balloon in the corner of the ballroom. Kelly had been flushed and sweaty. Marta had done a quick scan of the hall, hoping some hunky Bohara might be responsible for Kelly’s disheveled state, but Kelly was most definitely alone.

Marta nudged her shoulder, trying physically to knock her out of her mood. “Stop thinking about Dhara, Kelly. We’ll drag her out for lunch next week.”
If I can squeeze that in, with that IPO looming.
“We’ll slip some gin into her ginger ale, and she’ll spill the whole story. We’ve got some time. The wedding date isn’t set yet. Her sister said something about the astrologer looking at dates in the fall, so the family can fly over some relatives from India.”

Kelly glanced at her, blankly, and it was as if the girl were waking from a deep sleep.

“Isn’t it weird, though, how happy she seemed?” Marta glanced out the window. Under the elevated railway, the storefronts changed from Hindu newsstands to Greek diners to Spanish bodegas. “Maybe Dhara knows something we don’t. In some ways, this arranged marriage idea is smart. It’s efficient. You make the decision, and boom, it’s done.”

Kelly blew out an exasperated sigh. “Marta, she’s not shopping for the perfect sweater. She’s choosing her
husband.
And you don’t agree to an arranged marriage because you’re thirty-seven and you think it’s time.”

“We’ve all got biological clocks, and they’re tick-tick-ticking.”

“You marry for love. Period.”

At the look on her friend’s determined face, Marta felt a familiar stab of worry. It was charming, in a way, that a woman Kelly’s age could still believe in something as slippery and romantic as true love. The problem was that the belief seemed to keep Kelly from getting involved with
anyone
. Kelly—always waiting for the Big Thing—might miss the love boat altogether if she didn’t open herself up to possibilities.

“Hey,” Marta said, “what ever happened to that guy you work with, the one who keeps bugging you to go out for coffee?”

Kelly frowned. “Lee?”

“Yeah, that Chinese guy, the one with the fabulous hair.”

“Marta,” Kelly said, in full you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me mode, “I
work
with him every day.”

“I know. That’s the point.” Sometimes trying to get Kelly to pick up on social cues was like trying to explain intellectual property law to a thirteen-year-old hacker. “I mean, he’s a computer genius too. That raises the chances that he’ll have a collection of Lego action figures like yours, you know what I’m saying?”

“He’s a
Star Trek: The Next Generation
fan.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a fan of the original series.” She stared at Marta, waiting for her to make some connection. “Oil…water?”

“Oh, please.”

“Hey, in the geek world, this stuff matters.”

“C’mon, Kelly. Take Lee up on that invitation. For me, okay? Believe me, you never know what can happen over coffee.”

It was over a cup of sweet, foamy
café Cubano
that Marta had first met Carlos. He’d been serving it to her, all six-foot-three-inches of him, while she was dining with clients at a chic little restaurant in the Village. The look he gave her with those black eyes was hotter than the sweet espresso. Her thighs had reacted instantly, going quivery and warm—oh, she’d been working so hard, and it had been so very
long
since she’d had a sweaty bout of sex—but she’d promised the girls and swore to herself to guard her heart carefully and never to get involved in meaningless and unhealthy hookups with baristas, waiters, and struggling actors.

And anything with Carlos would have been meaningless, because she’d already passed the point in her Life Plan—first written when she was nine years old—when it was time to find an appropriate husband. For a law associate on her last chance for partnership in a white-shoe law firm, waiters were definitely
not
husband material.

It was a week later, when Carlos served her another
café Cubano
—this time buck naked among the sweaty sheets of her king-size bed—when he boasted he was about to quit waiting tables at Cuba Libre to open a restaurant of his own. Wrapped in satin sheets, Marta had felt a moment of triumphant relief. Now she didn’t have to put on the mantilla and slink off to confess to the girls that she’d sheepishly slept with a hot waiter. She could tell them she’d started a
relationship
with an
entrepreneur.

“So?” Marta prompted, digging an elbow into Kelly’s arm. “Are you going to take Lee up on the coffee date or what?”

“No promises, Marta.” Kelly gazed at the Manhattan skyline as the cab rumbled over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. “He’s just…Lee Zhao. There’s nothing there.”

“Sometimes with guys, it’s a slow burn, you know what I’m saying? You never know, really, until you give them a try.”

Kelly turned sullen eyes upon her. “Is that what it is for you and Carlos? You guys have been living together for what—a year and a half?”

“Sixteen months,” she corrected. “Why? You going all Catholic on me?”

Instantly, an image rose in Marta’s mind of her grandmother grasping the large gold medallion of the
Sagrado Corazón
, praying loudly to a legion of saints for intercession in the matter of her thirty-seven-year-old unmarried granddaughter, living in sin in Manhattan.

“Marta, don’t you think something should have happened by now? Like meeting his mother in Miami?”

Marta stifled the urge to swear in Spanish. She was tired of having to explain that she worked at least sixty-five-hour weeks at Sachs, Offsyn & Reed. Her ambitious, sexy, entrepreneur boyfriend also spent seventy-hour weeks at his restaurant. By living together, they had a chance to see each other for a few hours before they both fell, exhausted, into bed. A trip to Miami to meet Carlos’s family? Not so easy to arrange around the time bombs of her corporate calendar and Carlos’s need to be on-site, all the time.