by Julia Kent
The bell on the door jingles as Raul finishes up with the horde of teenagers at the counter. I can’t see whoever came in, even though I’m facing the door.
“Let's stop worrying about people who 'matter' and start to worry about the people who really matter,” Fiona declares, her words carrying the authority of a preschool teacher ending a kids' squabble.
My eyes are on my water bottle, as I unscrew the cap. When I lift it to my mouth to take a sip, my eyes lock on Ian McCrory’s.
Ian?
“Speaking of people who matter,” Perky says under her breath. “Is that Ian McCrory?
“Dammit,” I hiss as he walks toward us. “What is he doing here?”
Perky’s eyes cut between me and Ian. “You know him?”
“Hastings,” he says, stopping at the table. “You changed your hair. I like it.”
“Now it's dark, like her soul,” Perky mutters.
His gaze narrows as he looks at Perky. “Persephone Tsongas,” he says.
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Do you know me? Have you arrested me before? Maybe we met at that protest in San Diego back in 2015?”
He laughs. “Not quite my line of business. I know you from photos with Parker Campbell.”
“You know Parker?”
“We go back a long way.”
“See?” I hiss at her. “People who matter.”
He looks down at me. “I matter to you?”
I ignore that. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re an impossible woman to get a hold of.”
“That’s the point. That’s why I blocked you on my phone.”
Perky, Fiona, and Mallory all set their coffees down. They look like they need giant bags of popcorn.
“You blocked me?” he says.
“I did. You were annoying.”
“No one’s called me annoying in a long time.”
“How about condescending? Or egotistical? Or—”
“Your vocabulary is impressive. No need to keep going. I see you scored well on the verbal SAT.”
“Actually,” Mallory chimes in, “her scores weren't that great. Mom and Dad had to hire tutors for–”
I give her a look designed to set her hair on fire. She shuts up.
“Why are you here?” I demand of him.
“May we talk in private?” he asks.
“No.”
“Fine. Then I’ll speak in front of everyone here. I want to offer you a job.”
“A job?”
“Is the position horizontal, or vertical?” Perky interjects, quirking one eyebrow. Is she coming to my defense? It’s hard to tell.
Ian doesn't suffer fools gladly, which is terrible for Perky, but great entertainment for me.
“The position is none of your business,” he says to her, turning back to me, big, strong body filling his clothes so nicely, his body language easy to read.
Yes, it says. Say yes.
What am I saying yes to, though?
“You came all the way to Anderhill in person to hunt me down so you could offer me a job?”
“Like I said, you're very hard to reach.”
“Yes, because I blocked you!”
“We’re not getting anywhere. But at least I have an explanation now.”
“Why, Ian? Why do you want me to work for you?”
“It's an option,” he says to me as Perky whispers in Fiona's ear, the two of them shamelessly gossiping about me to my face.
“I have plenty of options,” I huff. That's not a lie. They just aren't good options.
“Not good ones,” he says.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Read my mind.”
A slow predator's grin covers his face, lips twitching. “I'll take that as a yes.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don't do pity fucks, Ian.”
“Excuse me?”
“This is the career equivalent, and I won't do it.”
I stand to leave. Ian moves to follow me, but Perky, Mallory, and Fiona all rise, making a wall between us.
“Thank you,” I call back. “But the answer's no.”
His hands go up in the air, like my sister and her friends are shaking him down.
“Good to see you, Hastings.”
I look back.
“And for the record, nothing's about pity with you.”
His last words carry along through the tears as I make my way home, running. I'm halfway there before I realize I've abandoned the bachelorette planning.
I pause in front of a fire hydrant with doggie-doo bags sprinkled around it, the green plastic tied off neatly at the ends. Yet another metaphor for my life.
I text Mallory.
I'm sorry. I'll help plan later.
We got rid of Ian, she says. It's safe to come back.
Sounds lethal. What did Perky do to him?
I wouldn't put it past her to know people who know people who can take care of a body.
Nothing. I talked to him. He listened to reason.
That's it? That's all it took? I type back.
He's a guy. A lot like Will. That's all it took. Turns out they know each other.
Of course they do. Of course.
You told him something you're not telling me, I double-thumb back, a wave of anger rising up inside me, a familiar feeling when it comes to my sister. It's so easy to let the misplaced fury land on her.
I told him you need time. And space. That what Burke did to you was devastating, and that while his offer is nice, it's too much. He's helping you too much. It will overwhelm you and make you say no just to make the issue go away because you hate needing people's help, she types in three different texts.
Gaping, I look at my screen. How the hell does Mallory know me that well?
Every word of that is wrong, I reply.
She sends a laughing emoji.
Come back, she types. Perky's treating us all to Mongolian.
When did Anderhill get a good Mongolian restaurant?
I said Mongolian. I never claimed it was good Mongolian, Hasty.
OMW, I reply, starting to jog as I hit Send.
On my way.
6
Wedding showers are for people who love Instagram.
And, for the record, I’m one of them. I looove Instagram. The color palettes. The grids. The razor-sharp alignment. The careful placement of objects with color, with lighting, with balance, that makes everything look optimized and perfect. My shoulders drop when I look at a grid, because the grid looks back at me and says, beauty.
Weddings were made for Instagram, and Instagram was made for weddings.
You know what wasn’t made for weddings? People like me.
People who find out we’re not really married and never were, and that it was all a sham. It’s a small group, but I'm in it. I'm smack dab in the center of it. Queen of the Suckers.
Mercifully, Mallory’s wedding shower is fairly small, at least by Bay Area standards. This one’s a Jack-and-Jill. Everyone is a couple.
Except for me, of course.
Will’s cousin Chaz, the one who keeps being unable to attend anything wedding related, isn’t here, either. Some guy named Paul, who'll be matched up with me or Raye at the actual wedding ceremony, is also absent. I’m the odd one out. It’s Mom and Dad, Will’s parents, Will and Mallory, Parker and Perky, Fiona and Fletch, Raye and her wife Sanni, Will's sister Veronica and Justin, her husband.
And… me.
“You okay, honey?” Dad asks, giving me pity eyes. “I know this must be hard on you, with everything with Burke. Watching Mallory move on to a happy phase of her life at the same time that you, you know....”
“Am an abject failure and a laughingstock?”
“What? No!”
“Yeah, Dad. I get it. I get it. I’m fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” I grab myself a glass of wine from one of the trays. “This makes it finer.”
He pats me on the cheek. “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m not okay, Dad. Nothing that’s happened to me is okay. But I’m here, I’m happy for Mallory, and I promise I won’t make a scene.”
As he walks away, Will’s sister, Veronica, comes over, a look of not-quite pity flashing through her eyes as she gives me a huge hug.
“Hastings! I haven’t seen you in forever!”
“Since high school graduation,” I point out.
“No, I think we ran into each other one summer while we were both in college. I kept calling your name, and you just kept walking.”
“Oh! Sorry,” I whisper, as the hug continues. She’s an over-hugger. Mallory’s like that, too. Overhuggers have a deep-seated need to inject themselves into other people's space. From a networking standpoint, I see the appeal.
But overhuggers are driven by emotion that is unattached to professional performance.
What a waste of a good hug.
“Oh, it’s fine,” she says, wiggling our bodies side to side before finally letting me go. “I’m so sorry about what’s happened with you and your husband and the whole mess that’s all over television.”
In San Francisco, if someone said that to me, I would know it was a dig. Here, though, she seems sincere. Who’s sincere about someone else’s problems?
“Thank you?” I respond, voice tipping up with a question.
“Good for you for getting past it,” she says. “Coming back home, hitting the reset button, and seeing what life really means. I admire that. I know what it’s like.”
“You got screwed over in the biggest financial scandal in American history and found out that you’re not really married to the man you thought was your husband?”
“No,” she admits. “But I did have to get over the death of my fiancé, ten years ago.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” I say, feeling like an asshole.
“It’s okay. Not everyone knows.”
“Mallory never mentioned it to me.”
“I told her a while ago.”
An awkward silence passes between us as it sinks in. The reason Mallory never told me about Veronica’s dead fiancé is because Mallory and I don’t talk to each other.
Or didn’t until I came home.
“So what’re you doing with this new chapter of your life?” she asks. “Job hunting?”
“Do you know anyone in the finance industry who’s looking for a scandal-ridden person charged with RICO violations whose husband is a fugitive, only it turns out he’s not her husband? Because I’ve cornered the market on being that applicant. I'm one of a kind.”
She looks mortified. At least we got this far before that happened.
“Oh, no. I’m really sorry I don’t—”
I reach out and touch her wrist. “That was a joke,” I whisper. “I know nobody will hire me.”
Veronica's pity eyes look just like her brother's. I see the resemblance to Will.
“You do have one job offer,” Mallory says as she comes over, Will’s arm around her. “Remember?”
“I am not taking a job with Ian McCrory.”
Veronica looks impressed. “You have a job offer from him?”
“Yes.”
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
Mallory turns to me. “But do you…” she clears her throat “...know him?”
“Stop, Mallory! How many glasses of wine have you had?”
Will squeezes her waist and nuzzles her ear. “Yeah, how many have you had?” he asks, innuendo radiating off him like aftershave.
Veronica playfully smacks his arm. “The shower hasn’t even begun. Keep it in your pants.”
He looks like he wants to say more, but doesn’t.
This is what the next three hours of my life are going to be. People will tell me how sorry they are for me. They're paired up in cute, affectionate dyads, clearly getting some action tonight.
The only thing that’s going to make love to me is a bottle of good pinot grigio.
Which is pretty much what the last year of my life was like anyhow.
Given Burke’s nonstop absence as he “built his empire,” our sex life came to a grinding halt. More like a not-grinding halt.
Even when he was home, he wasn’t really there. And he certainly wasn’t there in our bed.
Now I know why. Was he saving all his orgasms for his real wife?
“Sharon, this manchego is amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like it,” Will’s mom, Helen, says, startling me out of my pity party.
I overhear the conversation, and before I can turn around and claim credit, Mom does it for me.
“That was Hastings!”
Helen turns to me and asks, “Where did you buy this? At the little fromagerie in Stoneleigh?”
“I made it.”
“You made the manchego?”
“I did. It’s only three months aged, a batch I made around Christmas, but it’s one of the few things I was allowed to keep.”
“Keep?”
“After losing everything.”
“The Feds took everything away?” Will asks.
“Except for that sheep’s cheese. They said it didn’t hold any value.”
“They were wrong!” His mother nibbles and sips a glass of red wine. “This is extraordinary! How do you do this? Where do you get sheep’s milk?”
“I had to go up to Petaluma to find an organic farmer who had enough to make it worth my while.”
“And you just … make cheese?”
“She’s done it since middle school,” Mom interrupts. “Back then, it wasn’t sheep’s milk. You mostly did goat’s milk, didn’t you?”
I shrug. “No one really had much in the way of sheep’s milk back then. Now it’s gaining some traction here.”
“Everyone I know adores manchego, especially the sixth-month aged,” Helen says. “It's the perfect blend of creamy and crystallized.”
I'm impressed. She knows her cheese.
“Do you have any more? Can I buy some from you?” she asks.
“If I had more I’d give it to you,” I say, “but I'm saving some for the wedding.” I look at Mom. “She insisted.”
“Well, good for you, Sharon! And good for you, Hastings. Find a source of sheep’s milk in the area and make some more. I would certainly buy it.”
“Thank you. But I’m not exactly planning to spend the rest of my life making cheese.”
“Why not?” Mallory asks.
“Because that’s not the kind of thing someone does.”
“Of course they do. Someone has to make the cheese,” Helen says. “Why can’t it be you?”
“Because I have an MBA from UC Berkeley. I’m capable of more than making cheese for a living.”
“Don’t knock it. Seriously.” Helen tilts her head, Veronica mirroring her mother’s gesture as she joins us. “You’re good at this.”
“Just because I’m good at something doesn’t mean I should do it. People are good at plenty of things that don’t matter.”
“Maybe you can make manchego matter.” Helen pops another bite in her mouth and grins.
She looks just like Will, when he smiles at Mallory and doesn't know anyone else sees.
One of the first genuine laughs out of me in months pours forth at the idea. “Make manchego matter,” I repeat, smiling. “I love it. There’s my new company motto, Helen.”
When Burke and I got married, we didn’t do a Jack-and-Jill shower. He thought it was gauche. Even when I tried to convince him that it would be a great opportunity to network, he pointed out the weakness of my local peer group.
Those were his words.
The weakness of your local peer group.
As I look around the room at Mallory’s shower, I laugh silently at the irony of his comment. What a difference six years makes. Mallory has a sitting U.S. congressman as part of her wedding party. She's marrying an international real estate investor. Who ha
s the weak network now, Burke?
You know the craziest part about this whole mess? I still worry about him.
Not actively. But you don’t spend that many years with someone, no matter how awful they turn out to be, no matter how many secrets they have or lies they tell you, without them becoming a part of you. We intertwine ourselves with the people we fall in love with. You live with another human being, you give pieces of yourself to them.
He’s walking around somewhere, in a country that has no extradition treaty with the United States, carrying pieces of me. Years of accumulated pieces of me.
And I’ve got pieces of him.
Given all his lies, probably not as many, and certainly not as high quality, but they’re there.
I have to emotionally extradite Burke from my heart, my habits, my psyche. I have to take the holes left over from the pieces I gave him and fill them with something else.
At least I don’t have to stare at our mutual possessions or fight with him over money. I literally have none of that left. Until a month or two ago, I would have been at the top of the heap at this wedding shower, right alongside Parker Campbell.
Congressman Campbell.
Now? I objectively have the worst life of anyone in here.
And just when I think that this wedding shower can’t get any worse, in walks Dorian Buonacelli. She’s wearing a crisp white shirt, black pants, modest heels, and no jewelry of any kind. Her hair is pulled back in a tight, low ponytail. Her face is perfect, brows arched with delicate precision, her makeup something to marvel at.
Her eyes meet mine. They flare, then calm down, her face a mask.
In high school, we were rivals. I was a bigger bitch, but she came damn close.
“Hastings!” she says, in a tone of uncertainty that is completely out of character for her. Her eyes catch Veronica’s. Will’s sister gives a half shrug and moves on, the movement confusing.
“Dorian!”
Dorian clasps her hands in front of her and approaches me. “I heard about what happened,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
There isn’t the kind of pity in her voice that I expect. She almost seems genuine.
“Thank you,” I say, instantly on the defensive, shifting my stance. My wariness about how I fit into the social hierarchy makes every part of my body feel out of alignment.
“Can I get you a drink?” she asks.
