Regrets Only (6 page)

“I
love this song,” Chad said, as Rex Harrison’s “I’m an Ordinary Man” resounded
from the TV. “Pretty much sums up my whole philosophy. At least about women.”

 Suzanne
snorted. “Just you wait, Chad Gwynn. Just you wait.”

He
laughed and took a gulp of wine. “I will say that if I were ever going to be
with a woman, Audrey Hepburn would make the cut.”

“Other
than being dead, you mean?”

“Hey,
it’s not like we’re talking reality here anyway.”

“True,”
she said. “I don’t know, though. She seems like she’d be high maintenance.”

“Well,
that wouldn’t change my life much,” Chad sneered.

His
partner, David, who was—Suzanne had learned over time—actually a very sweet
man, was a bit prone to dramatics. More than once Chad had slept on Suzanne’s
couch or at the office after they had an argument, after which David would
invariably whisk Chad away somewhere for a few days to make it up to him.

For
a while, when he first started working for her, Suzanne had worried Chad might
be in an abusive relationship, but then when she spent time with them together,
she decided it was just how they worked. She was pretty sure they’d been
together since early college, which was nearly ten years. That was about a
hundred and twenty times as long as Suzanne’s average relationship, so who was
she to judge?

“I’m
going to open another bottle,” he said, getting up to go to the kitchen. “Need
anything?”

Suzanne
shook her head. She took the opportunity to stretch her back, though. She and
Chad often hung out at her apartment to do last-minute drudgery before a big
event. It was more comfortable than the office, and if Suzanne provided the
wine, Marci could typically be persuaded to lend a hand. But tonight Marci was
too tired to join them. Jake had called at 7:30 to report that she’d fallen
asleep on the couch after dinner and he couldn’t even convince her to move
upstairs to the bedroom.

Suzanne
supposed it was just the beginning. With pregnancy now and children next,
Marci’s time would no longer be her own—or Suzanne’s, for that matter—for a
while to come. She remembered how long it had taken Beth to rejoin them socially
after she and Ray had kids; when she did rejoin them, it still seemed to be on
a limited basis.

She
and Marci had often joked about it, and sworn that they would have children at
the exact same time of life, so neither of them would feel left out. Of course,
that was before Marci had moved to Austin, and certainly long before Jake had
cashed in their college promise to get married at thirty. Even now that they
were having a baby and she saw them so happy together, she still found it hard
to believe sometimes that the old promise had held out for so long. Maybe she
was
missing something.

“Suze?”
Chad was looking at her incredulously. “Are you going to get that?”

The
phone was ringing. She hoisted herself off the floor and checked the caller ID.
Rick Sayers. Damn.
“No, I don’t think I will. The machine can get it.”

Chad
shrugged and went back to labeling. Suzanne, too, returned to her pile of
programs. Soon the voice echoed out into the living room. “Hey Suzanne, it’s
Rick. Look, I wanted to apologize for being rude yesterday. It was kind of a
stressful week at work, and that’s no excuse, but…anyway, I just wanted you to
know that I really like you and when I found your underwear in the hotel room—”

She
sprang for the phone, knocking over her wine in the process and trying to
ignore Chad’s rolling laughter behind her.

“Hi,
Rick…it’s fine. No, really, it is. Thank you. Yep, I appreciate it. Okay, no, I
have to go. I’m sorry, I’m…working. I’ll call you.”

Chad
teased her as she sat back down. “Flavor of the month? Sweetie, you go through
more men than Swinging Richard’s on a Saturday night.”

She
ignored him. “Ugh. That
guy
. He’s nice enough, but he doesn’t seem to
know how to take no for an answer. I can’t shake him.”

“What
is it with you?” Chad asked. “Guys beating down your door, interns calling at
all times of day and night trying to work for you. I’m pretty sure Barry
Consuelo would leave his wife for you if you asked him—that guy talked to me
about you for like fifteen minutes when I picked up the tickets. Just sad. No
offense, but I don’t get it.”

“Maybe
if I looked like Audrey Hepburn, you’d feel the same way,” she teased.

“Honey,
no offense, but you’re no Audrey Hepburn. You’re gorgeous and I love you. But
no Audrey.”

“Fair
enough,” Suzanne said, smiling. They went back to working in companionable
silence, and she resisted the urge to ask Chad exactly what he meant.

Suzanne’s
Day-Before-Event ritual had been the same for years.

She
woke at 4 a.m., did her favorite yoga video, showered, and spent the rest of
the morning at the office running through every possible scenario at the event.
What if the keynote speaker didn’t show? What if the power went out? What if
the big auction item or a key volunteer falls through? Her dad taught her this lawyer’s
trick, back when he had hoped she’d follow his footsteps.
Be brutal when you
cross-examine yourself, sugar. Then nobody can catch you off guard.

By
the time Chad arrived to triple-confirm all the vendors and pack all the large
plastic bins they would take tomorrow, Suzanne had a legal pad list of items
for him to gather or handle, all in response to the imaginary catastrophes she’d
created in her head that morning. They’d go over it, she’d hand things off to
him, and head out for a massage and manicure, so she’d look fresh and rested
the next day.

Chad
looked critically at the pad. “A hundred battery-powered candles?”

“In
case the lighting doesn’t work for the tents.”

“Six
bags of peppermint candy?”

“Registration
tables. Oh, and get three good-sized glass bowls to put them in. Nice bowls. No
acrylic crap. Remember that volunteer at the car show with the horrifying
breath?”

Chad
wrinkled his nose briefly to indicate that he did remember, as he scribbled “3
glass bowls” on the list. “Eight rolls of red and white duct tape?” he asked
incredulously.

“Well,
it fixes everything, doesn’t it?” A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.

“Oh.
My. God,” Chad said, staring at her, working something out in his head. “You
like
him.”

“What?
No,” she said quickly. Then, trying to sound more casual: “No. He’s a little
too Hank, Jr., for me. And not especially nice.”

Chad
closed his mouth but still eyed her suspiciously. Suzanne flicked her hand at
him in dismissal. “Oh, please. Like I need that train wreck in my life right
now. I thought the duct tape might be cute around the centerpieces at the VIP
tables, if I can do something artsy with them.”

Whether
the doubt in his face related to her ability to make duct tape artsy or to
Dylan Burke himself, Suzanne couldn’t tell. But thankfully she had to run to
her spa appointment, and she left Chad to his pile, waving her cell phone at
him as she exited. She called Betsy Fuller-Brown at the High on her way to the
spa, to answer any last-minute concerns. She ignored the call from her mother,
which she knew was going to be whining that Suzanne wasn’t joining her at the
League luncheon.
Catch you on the way back, Mom,
Suzanne thought. Her
mother invariably called her after Junior League events to gossip about who was
there, who was missing, who made what dishes, and who—gasp!—tried to pass
restaurant food off as her own creation.

Massaged,
coiffed, nails painted, and gossip heard, Suzanne returned to the office at
four. She ran down the usual lists with Chad and let him go home early to rest.
She spent the next hour or so cleaning up the office, neatly piling the bins
for the event near the door and then straightening, wiping, and polishing the
rest of the space. There was nothing she hated more than returning after the
excitement of an event had subsided to find that she had to spend the first day
back reclaiming the office, instead of gearing up for the next project. She
found that her nervous energy was better put to the useful task of cleaning
now, so that she and Chad could start refreshed on Tuesday.

As
she wiped the granite counter in the studio’s modern kitchen—which served
primarily as a place for coffee and extra storage—she noticed something hanging
from the blown glass chandelier far above her. The chandelier was one of her
most prized possessions, a smallish but colorful Chihuly piece with violet-red tendrils
and horns escaping every which way, lit from within to display its beautiful
form even while it served the function of lighting part of the room. She had
saved religiously for more than four years to buy it, after seeing a Chihuly
display at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. It still made her cry sometimes with
its beauty.

But
tonight there was something dangling into view on the far side.
A string?
She dropped her sponge and walked around the counter to the other side. It looked
like a stray bit of blue ribbon—one of the pieces she and Chad had recently
spent hours hot-gluing to tiny guitars for the goodie baskets. She debated for
a moment whether she should bother with it, or just do the logical thing and
wait for Chad to get it on Tuesday.
It’ll be the last thing I think about
before I go to sleep tonight,
she thought.

Shaking
her head at her perfectionism, Suzanne went to the storage closet to retrieve
her ladder, wondering how she or Chad had managed to fling a ribbon so far up. She
tried to remember what they’d been talking about while they were hot-gluing.
Chad was not usually one for dramatic gestures and elaborate hand motions,
unlike his partner David, for whom telling a good story was aerobic exercise.
It had just been the two of them working on the baskets this year, though, and
she couldn’t remember anything in particular happening that day.

Suzanne
kicked off her shoes and started to climb toward the warm light of the
chandelier, realizing she should’ve brought the feather duster while she was up
here. She was almost at the top of the six-foot ladder, stretching to reach the
ribbon, when she felt the aluminum step beneath her creak ominously. She had no
time to react, and her feet refused to accept her brain’s panicked signals to
move down to the step below. Yet somehow she was able to take in vivid and
detailed pictures of everything around her—from a small dust-free patch on the
chandelier to the brightly painted industrial pipes running across the ceiling—before
the creak evolved into an unpleasant metal scraping sound and she plummeted
backward toward the hard, painted concrete floor below.

#

One
ambulance ride, four x-rays, and $1,500 later, Suzanne stood in her bedroom
closet with Marci, who had driven her home. It was seven o’clock on Saturday
morning. They had dropped Jake off at the office to drive Suzanne’s car back,
though it would be little use to her for several weeks. Suzanne now wore a
black cast—
it goes with everything
, one nurse had joked—on her left arm,
where she had fractured it in the fall. Other than that, she had only painful
purple bruises on her left side to show for her accident.

Considering
the height and the hard floor, everyone at the hospital had insisted that
Suzanne was lucky not to have been hurt worse. But lucky wasn’t a word Suzanne
felt inclined to use just now. She had been up for twenty-seven hours straight,
with just over twelve hours left before the biggest event of her career, and
had lost the use of one arm. What’s more, the new cast created a wardrobe
problem that had not been outlined in Suzanne’s contingency planning session
the morning before.

 She
and Marci had tried draping every scarf Suzanne owned over the cast in various
ways, but none of them seemed to work. Had it not been for a very useful
painkiller prescription and an all-night pharmacy, Suzanne might have been
tempted to have a nervous breakdown. Whoever had invented those big white pills
was a hero in her book. The severe pain in her arm had dulled to an ache, and she
stared foggily past Marci into the depths of the closet, periodically having to
be reminded to pay attention and give her opinion on the alternatives Marci
suggested. The opinion, invariably, was
ick
.

None
of the scarf or shawl options seemed right for gracefully masking an enormous
plaster arm cast, so they took a break for breakfast when Jake arrived in
Suzanne’s car. “Why don’t you call your mom, babe?” Jake suggested, rubbing
Marci’s shoulder affectionately. “She’s good at this stuff.”

Elaine
Thompson arrived thirty minutes later, hugging all three of them as though she
hadn’t seen them in a year. She embraced Suzanne last and longest, rubbing her
cast gently. “Sorry about your accident, sweetie. The good news is I brought
the Bedazzler!”

Only
Mrs. Thompson would know how to combine a black plaster cast and hundreds of
tiny rhinestones into an enviable accessory. Well, maybe Phylicia Rashad on
The
Cosby Show
. She chattered happily while she worked, refusing to allow
Suzanne to help with her right hand. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart. You have
enough to do to get ready for today, I’m sure.”