“Still have family here?”
“My mother. I came to see her.”
“Oh, nice.” He poured a glass of water for me.
“Yeah, well…it’s complicated.”
“Mmm,” he said, half under his breath, “isn’t every family?”
Probably so, but I wondered if they were as complicated as mine. I tilted the glass of Riesling to my lips and took another long drink. The wine was having its effect, slowing me down, making me relax. I told him the story—about how I’d ended up back in town, about Carter and Mariel’s upcoming wedding.
“So, back up,” Jerome said. “What happened after the New Year’s Eve party? Didn’t your sister realize the terrible thing she’d done?”
“We didn’t talk after that.”
“You mean she never tried to get in touch with you to say she was sorry? Or anything?”
I stabbed a few pieces of lettuce with my fork. The dressing was beginning to taste a little bitter. “Oh, she called me, she texted me, she wrote me a letter. I basically ignored everything. I mean, there was nothing she could say. I met him first. We were in love. And then she, well…”
“But why would she do that to her own sister?”
Why did Mariel do anything she did? I’d been her sister for thirty-five years and I still didn’t know. Why did she always copy me? Why did she take up everything I was interested in, try to impress my friends, go to college in LA, want my boyfriend? Because she felt she had to compete with me? Or was it just something in her DNA? I didn’t know.
“We’ve never been that close. We’ve had our ups and downs. She was always jealous of my relationship with Dad. But she’s the one who’s close to Mom.”
One of the servers asked Jerome for a dark and stormy and a jackrabbit. He mixed the drinks and set them at the end of the bar.
“My sister doesn’t appreciate Carter,” I said as I took the last pecan from my plate. “I mean, he’s smart. He really cares about people. And he’s a wonderful attorney. He’s honest with his clients and he does what he says he’ll do. He’s also great at dealing with all kinds of personalities. You know, some of the folks in LA can be pretty crazy.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there. I know,” Jerome said.
I remembered Carter handling more than one actor who wouldn’t be in a film with a rival star unless he had more lines, as well as several singers who didn’t want their drivers to start a conversation with them or even look at them in the rearview mirror. Maybe Carter reminded me a little of my dad, who had worked with some challenging people but never got ruffled, always kept things under control.
Carter was good at managing difficult situations. He could solve almost any problem, legal or not. If you had a child who needed to attend a special kind of school, Carter would know the right place and the person who ran it. He’d make the introductory call. If you were looking for a contractor to renovate your home, he’d give you the names of two or three people whose work he’d stake his life on. If you were traveling to Rome for the first time, he’d connect you with a friend who lived there and could tell you everything you needed to know about the city.
I twirled the stem of my wineglass. “Like I said, she doesn’t appreciate Carter. How kind he is and how willing he is to listen to people, to understand them. She’s just interested in being around his celebrity clients.” I could imagine her talking about them, making it sound as though Carter’s clients were her personal friends. Oh, yes, Katy’s starting to work on a new album and Leo’s going to London to shoot that movie.
Jerome wiped the bar in front of me with a towel. “Sounds like you’re still in love with him.”
I looked at my empty salad plate. Of course I was still in love with him. I wished he were sitting next to me at that moment. I could feel my eyes begin to burn. I was grateful when Jerome told me he was going to check on my entrée.
I sliced into my ahi tuna steak and took a bite. Crisp on the outside and rare on the inside, just the way I liked it. The sesame seeds were crunchy; the ginger and lime sauce was tangy.
“How is it?” Jerome asked as he walked by.
I told him it was perfect, and he gave me a thumbs-up and headed to the other end of the bar. When he came back, he asked if I wanted another Riesling. I said yes, and a minute later he brought me a new glass. “So what kind of work do you do that you have to take your notebooks to dinner?”
I laughed. “I don’t have to take my notebooks to dinner. I just thought I’d catch up a little. I’m an event planner.”
“Oh, you do weddings and parties and things?”
“I used to, but now I plan corporate events for a financial services company. Mostly meetings, client outings, company picnics, that kind of thing. But when I lived in LA, I was with a group that did weddings and parties.”
“Weddings and parties in LA. Umm. Sounds like fun. Was it?”
People often assumed my job was fun, and I’d have to explain that, like most other jobs, it basically involved a lot of hard work. Few people knew what went on behind the scenes at a big event. Clients and guests expected everything to go smoothly and according to plan, but it almost never did. “A lot of it was fun. But it’s like any other job. It has its good and bad points. So many things can go wrong with an event, and you have to make it right.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Things people don’t even know about. Not the guests, anyway. You’ve probably seen everything.”
“Well, maybe not everything, but I have survived plenty of near disasters.”
“Oh? Like what?”
Everybody wanted to hear the disaster stories. I rattled off a few, including one involving a sprinkler system and another involving a photobombing guest. “And once, when the bride made her own centerpieces, half the people at the wedding broke out in hives. We had to get bottles of Claritin and hand them out. We put pink ribbons around the bottles to make them look like party favors.”
“Nice touch.”
“I thought so.”
“I was at a wedding once where the groom couldn’t get the ring on the bride’s finger,” Jerome said. “They had a huge argument right there at the altar. She said he got the size wrong. He said she’d gained weight.” He paused to refill my water glass. “You can imagine how the bride took that. I mean, what was the man thinking? She physically attacked the guy. The minister had to pull her off. I thought they were going to call off the wedding.”
“You mean they still got married?” How could a marriage survive that kind of beginning?
He nodded. “Divorced a year later, though.”
That didn’t surprise me. People don’t like to be told they’ve gained weight. “I had a bride who couldn’t fit into her gown on the morning of the wedding. We were lucky because the whole thing was held at a hotel, and the hotel seamstress saved the day. She took some fabric from the train and stitched it into the gown. She literally sewed the bride into it.”
“A good seamstress is worth a lot,” Jerome said, then turned away to fill an order. I watched him pour champagne into a couple of flutes and bourbon into a glass.