However, my mom, who’d been divorced from my dad for less than two years and had to watch him move on to a younger woman, was in a fragile place right now. So I could be mad at Aunt Julia for allowing my vulnerable, postdivorce mom to get recorded at the bachelorette party giving a male stripper a lap dance while sucking the banana he held in his hand.
Yup.
My mother, ladies and gentleman.
I shuddered.
Noticing all the shares on the video, I came out of the app and slammed my phone down on my desk. Part of me wanted to race out of my apartment, jump in a cab, find my mom, and drag her out of whatever strip club in Newark they were in.
Yet there were only so many times that I could rescue my mom and dad from themselves. This was their new reality postdivorce, and I needed to let go. Maybe if I didn’t have a pile of work to get through, I might run after my mom.
Who would undoubtedly find the online video mortifying once she sobered up.
Sighing, I grabbed my phone and called my aunt. To my shock, she answered. The pounding music from the club they were in slammed down the line.
“Hey, doll face!” Aunt Julia yelled. “I’ve changed my mind and you’re allowed to come! Do you want the address?”
Aunt Julia had decided she wanted a bachelorette party that allowed her to do whatever the hell she liked without feeling weird in front of me or any of her friends’ grown kids. I was relieved to be left out of the invitation.
“No,” I replied loudly, “I’m calling because that video of Mom is all over social media!”
“What video?”
“The lap dance! The banana!”
“Oh shit,” she cackled. “You’re kidding? Okay,” she yelled even louder, “Who put the video of Maggie online?”
Realizing she was talking to her friends, I stayed silent.
“Jenna, you creep!” Aunt Julia yelled good-naturedly. “Take it down!”
“It’s not funny, AJ!” I called her by the nickname I’d given her as a child.
“Oh, it’s kind of funny, honey, if you’re anyone but her daughter!”
“Just make sure she doesn’t do anything else lewd that ends up online. Have a good night!” I ended the call before she could reply.
It was clear they were all drunk. Aunt Julia was usually on my side when it came to calming Mom in any postdivorce antics—I’d never had to worry about my mother in any way until her marriage fell apart and she started acting unpredictably.
However, there was no reasoning with drunk bachelorettes.
“Shake it off,” I whispered to myself, willing my pulse to slow. “You cannot undo what has already been done, but you can focus on your work so you don’t lose your job.”
I was an event organizer. I worked for one of the best event-management companies in Manhattan: Lia Zhang Events, owned by my boss, Lia Zhang. After college, I’d planned to go backpacking across Asia, a lifelong dream of mine, but the reality was I needed money to pay for that. So I’d gotten a job as a manager at a large Manhattan hotel, and when the event planner quit three weeks before a big wedding, I’d stepped in to take over. I’d met Lia at the fourth wedding I planned for the hotel, and she was so impressed by my work she offered me a job. The pay was hard to resist because it would take me closer to my backpacking dream.
Four years later, I was still working for Lia, had been promoted to senior event manager, and almost everyone I knew had talked me out of my backpacking trip.
My latest project was planning Darcy Hawthorne’s engagement party. She was a true-blue New York socialite. If we got this right, Darcy would more than likely hire us to plan the wedding.
The issue was that Darcy, an environmental lawyer and elegance personified, was marrying her complete opposite. Her fiancé, Matthias, was a French artist and musician. He wanted a “modern, stripped back, yet artistic party with a rock band” while Darcy was all about traditional opulence. She was a flowers-and-string-quartet kind of woman. It was my job as their planner to find a compromise, so I’d asked Darcy and Matthias to email me images and music for inspiration.
I’d been busy at work finalizing plans for another client’s spring wedding, so I hadn’t had time to look over their emails. I had a lunch meeting with them tomorrow. Hence the late night.
Slamming back coffee, I opened my email and found the couples’ separate replies.
Matthias had sent me a helpful Pinterest board. It had to be the artist in him. Most guys I worked with either didn’t care about the minute details of the event or didn’t know how to communicate what it was they visualized. Clients who were creative, however, were always a godsend because they usually knew how to tell me what they wanted.
While Matthias’s board was straight to the point, I discovered Darcy had sent me a link to an online cloud account where she had several digital folders for me to look at. To my confusion, some folders were named with numbers that read like dates. I opened a folder from a year ago to see it contained a video.
Huh?
Had she sent me YouTube videos for inspiration?
I double-clicked and the video started.
A somewhat familiar man’s face took up most of the screen, but behind him I could see a strange, organized jumble of pipes and wires on a white wall. I could hear a loud hum of machine noise in the background.
“Well, here I am, Darce.” The man grinned into the camera, a glamorous white-toothed smile that caught my attention as if he’d reached out of the screen to curl his hand around my wrist. “I’m on the International Space Station. I still can’t believe it.”
TWO
Chris
ONE YEAR AGO
Staring into the camera on my laptop, I tried to picture Darcy at the other end, and it was more difficult than I’d ever expected. Maybe I was still on sensory overload. I’d been on the International Space Station for six weeks, and my excitement still hadn’t worn off. I didn’t know if it could. All I had to do was look out the window, and I felt a sense of amazement and wonder, like a kid who believed in Santa Claus all over again. My big brother’s boyhood dream of being an astronaut had amazingly come true for me. If he was really watching over me from the surrounding stars, I hoped he knew that this was for him. I hoped he was proud.
“I’ve tried calling,” I said into the camera with a little smirk. “But we keep missing each other. Guess that’s what happens when your girlfriend is an amazing lawyer. I got your emails though.”
Tom, the commander of the Soyuz, and my crew had given me this look the last time I tried to get Darcy on the phone and couldn’t. Tom was the kind of man who could say a thousand things with just one look. Anton, a cosmonaut and our right-seater on the Soyuz had given me a similar look when he’d joined us for dinner the other night. But unlike Tom, who just let a person make up their own mind about things unless their way of thinking would lead to a disaster in space, Anton had said in his thick Russian accent, “You should send a video. Like a letter. People act strange when their loved ones are in a situation they do not understand. Show her what you do here.”