“Not at all. A free meal, minus some prep work? Still nice. And you got the Birdys out of the house on a non-Sunday. That’s a fucking miracle.”
“It’ll be a miracle if I can pull it off. It doesn’t just have to go well. It has to photograph well.”
Flo frowned at her. “Of course. The photographs. How else will strangers online know you’re perfect?”
“It’s not about perfect,” she said, prickling in defense. “It’s about proficiency. Besides, this is my parents’ business. I want the organic advertising to look as good as possible. Which involves some editing of the decor.”
7. UNPACK KELLY FAMILY HEIRLOOMS
“Henrietta Casserole!” Florencio cried as he withdrew the Dutch oven from a tote. The ceramic chicken clinked as Flo hugged it to his chest, the beak peeking out from the curve of his bicep. “Did you find this at Main Street?”
“No, Autumn dropped it by my house before she went to Bianca’s for their family dinner.”
“It’s just ‘family dinner.’ On Sundays, Bee does a weekly dinner for whoever wants to come by. Like this”—he gestured at the dining area—“only not for internet strangers.”
“It’s not for the strangers,” Jo stressed. “It’s for us. The strangers will just appreciate the authenticity.”
Underneath a heap of doilies made from fishing net, Jo’s phone rang and vibrated across the table. She hauled it out gingerly and saw the caller ID: Gia Nicotera, Quandt Co.
“I have to take this,” she told Flo.
“Go ahead. Pretty sure Henrietta and I can handle unpacking wineglasses. I am a bartender.”
“There is no wine on the Days menu.”
“No, but the new cotton-candy milk shake comes in a wineglass. The cotton-candy milk is too expensive for the normal-size pour.”
“Remind me to order that.”
Flo shot her a wink before she stepped out onto the boardwalk.
Answering the phone on an exhale, she said, “Gia, thank you so much for calling me back.”
“Jojo, girl!” Gia squawked in her ear. “I am so so glad to hear from you! I swear I have been so salty about the way things went down for you here.”
Gia was the sort of well-meaning white girl who only talked to Jo in a sassy you’re my only Black friend clip. It’s what kept them work friends and not real-world friends. They’d never seen each other farther than the wine bar across from Q-Co HQ. Always in view of the Q. Just like the slogan Jo introduced last spring. She wondered if it had been deleted yet.
“You’re sweet,” she said into the phone. “Hey, I wanted to give you a heads-up that I used you as a reference for a job interview I had this morning. I couldn’t trust Devo would be coherent.”
“Good call. Anything for you, honey. It breaks my heart seeing you wasted in Goonies boonies,” Gia continued, popping gum in Jo’s ear. She must have quit smoking again. She had quit two summers ago, and all the pencils in the office had turned up chewed to splinters. The woman’s oral fixation was a menace. “I’m obsessed with your new project! The Throwback List! I can’t believe no one else had snatched up that hashtag! And that sundae was total food torture porn.”
Jo gazed down the boardwalk, toward the anchor in front of Frosty’s. “You have no idea. How’s the office?”
“Changing fast,” Gia said in a cryptic whisper. “I’ll let you know if I pull my parachute.”
Gia’s parachute was working for her family’s liquor company. Her sisters were both brand representatives. They had the same hungry eyes and sharp ankles of pharmaceutical reps but spoke with a learned faux-Southern drawl for when bourbon sales were down. Once, on a visit to Palo Alto, they tag-teamed a sale at the wine bar across from Q-Co, a case of copper-distilled gin that smelled a bit like Wren Vos’s cologne. Jo had been impressed with the pitch, less so with the gin.
“I’ll continue my liquor research just in case. I could be your best employee, one cocktail at a time.” Jo snorted, imagining drinking a cotton-candy milk shake as a tax write-off. “In the meantime, please hype me hard to whoever calls?”
“You know it, Jojo. Talk soon. Byezers.”
Jo hadn’t missed people saying byezers. She hung up.
Confession: I’ve never had a dinner party. Jo started composing the caption to the evening in her head as soon as people started arriving. She couldn’t help it; the narrative was building with each photo she took. Living far from home, I’ve even spent the last few holidays eating instant mashed potatoes, alone and working. I haven’t been great at slowing down or keeping in touch. Tonight was about both.
So that everyone could chill and be present, we put our phones away. But first, I took these mostly unstaged photos of obliging friends.
“Bianca Boria! How are you? It’s been ages,” Wren said pleasantly, reaching out to shake Bee’s hand as the Birdys came into the Surf & Saucer.
“It’s Bianca Boria-Birdy now,” Bee corrected.
“Autumn told me you still live next door to Jo’s parents.”
Bee hugged her coat closer to her chest. “Oh, I moved and came back after college—”
Wren nodded. “Business school, right? You got your MBA?”
“No, I had to defer my acceptance when my grandmother got sick.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Wren reached out, briefly clasping the shorter woman’s shoulder. “I hope you find an online program that suits your needs.”
“Um…thank you,” Bee said awkwardly. Birdy cleared his throat. “Wren, this is my husband, Dr. Bobby—”
“Call me Birdy,” Birdy said, shaking Wren’s hand. “We’re a real flock tonight. I hope Jo’s not serving wings.”
Wren’s brows went up. “Bird pun. Funny. Can I get anyone a glass of wine? I brought a beautiful high-acidity Beaujolais.”
“Sure,” Bee said. “Hit us with some sour wine, Wren.”
With music on and all the guests present, Jo took more pictures than she normally would. The Surf & Saucer speaker system was surprisingly decent, leaving Jo to wonder what her parents were playing all day in Bose surround sound. Probably nothing like the Solange-heavy sensibilities of their firstborn.
Wren poured the first glass of wine. Jo took extra care to aim her camera at Wren’s eyes sliding to hers. When she caught the image in the display, it felt like evidence. Heat she could revisit.
With prodding, Autumn sat on top of the counter next to the dessert cheese plate. Knowing there’d be photos involved tonight, she had arrived in fake lashes. The tartan wool of her blanket scarf blended in nicely with the sprigs of rosemary Flo had used to keep the jams from running into the almonds. Jo hoped her parents wouldn’t miss the herbs.
“One more,” she lied to the crowd, shooing everyone to the seats they’d claimed with jackets folded over chair backs. “I’m gonna run around to different parts of the table and take a picture standing next to each of you.”
“How long is the interval on the camera?” Autumn asked with a Tigger bounce in her chair.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Perfect. Built for a game!” Autumn surveyed everyone at the table with a glint in her eye, the same look she used to get when it was her turn to tell the ghost story at a sleepover. “The name of the game is Ding. When you hear the buzzer, you have to change positions.”
“Keep them classy and relatively believable!” Jo implored.
The buzzer dinged. Jo stood next to Autumn, bent down low, cheek to cheek. Eyes squeezed to only lashes and laugh lines.
The flash went off.
“Ding!” Autumn called.
Jo moved as briskly as her pencil skirt would allow. She already regretted not stopping by home to change out of her interview clothes. Silk seemed so stuffy in a group of wool and cotton. Plus, her booties made her tower over everyone except for Birdy.
Bee’s Diet Industry Dropout shirt felt like it was daring Jo to crop it out of the shot. If she were working for Q-Co, she would have had to. It would offend investors
and alienate influencers. Keeping it in frame could lose Jo old fitness followers, but it would underline her independence from the Q. Jo stood for the photo while Bee sat, so she could make the choice to crop or not to crop later.
The oven dinged. “That’s for the bacon-wrapped dates I brought,” Birdy said. “It’s okay. They’re on pretty low.”
“You can photograph us together and then we’ll get them out,” Bee said, smoothing the red plaid of her suspender skirt with one hand and lifting a wineglass with the other. “We’ve had more than our share of Throwback List screen time.”
“Speak for yourself, woman,” Birdy said, adjusting his tie just before the flash went off. He leaped out of his seat and disappeared into the prep kitchen.
“New pose!” Autumn reminded everyone. “Ding!”
Jo posed with one hand on Florencio’s shoulder. He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue to make her laugh but managed to conjure a smolder for the camera before the flash, leaving Jo alone in looking goofy. As she clattered around to the other side of the table, she flicked his ear and he pinched her elbow.
Chirrup-chirrup, Bianca’s watch rang, faking everyone out. The camera flashed as they all were looking at the noise.
Bee coughed into her wine and waved her hands in the air. “Sorry, Lita’s nighttime meds. It’s fine. My mom has it. It’s fine.”
“New pose!” Autumn stressed. “Quickly, or we’ll have two of everyone looking at Bee’s watch.”
“Sorry!” Bee said again, tapping her watch like she was signaling in Morse code.
Jo froze like an antelope in headlights as she turned to pose with Wren. Around her, she heard the scrape of chairs as everyone else changed positions. Birdy reappeared with a tray that smelled like caramelized sugar and pork.
“If you get to stand…” Wren said. She kicked her chair back. Having come from casual Friday, her Point High staff polo was tucked and belted into olive-green pants. She wrapped an arm around Jo’s waist and tugged her close.
Jo felt dip-dyed in heat. She could have ascribed it to expensive wine on an empty stomach or stress, but staring at the dark flecks in Wren’s blue eyes, she knew it was just plain hot-round-the-collar lust.
Oh, right, she thought, vision closing to a depth of field as far as Wren’s unpierced ears. Decisiveness was at the top of the Wren pro-list.
Bianca moaned, “These dates are amazing.”
Wren let go of Jo and reached across the table for a date. “Bacon wrapping is an overused fad now—like putting a fried egg on burgers, everyone in Portland was doing that for years—but it does taste good!”
“Thanks?” Birdy said.
With the clock ticking—literally, above the register and horrifically made of seashells—Jo hustled into the kitchen. Autumn trailed her.
“I’ll help carry!” Autumn said, theatrically loud. Autumn loud. Once they’d cleared the corner into the prep kitchen, she squeezed Jo’s forearms. “Um, sparks fly much?”
“God, is it that obvious?” Jo hissed, dipping into the fridge to cool her jets and grab the salad course.
“That you’re having cheer sex?”
Jo lowered her voice, hoping that Autumn would get the hint and whisper. Shushing her could draw attention from the front room. “Is that a Bring It On reference?”
“Would you rather I say ‘eye fucking’? Because it is sort of too blue for me.”
“No, you’re right. Cheer sex it is. I feel like I’m sixteen and have no chill at all right now.” Safely out of view of everyone but Autumn, she adjusted her skirt hem, shirt hem, and cleavage. “Thank you for suggesting this,” Jo said. She felt like she was smiling hard enough to leave permanent creases in her cheeks. “I really didn’t think I’d be able to get it all done. But Flo is a prep machine. The pictures look good, Wren looks good, and if Bee’s happy noises are to be believed, we have at least one edible dish.”
“I’m sure everything will taste great,” Autumn said, picking up two salads. “On with the show!”
Each dish set down in the center of the table was an item crossed off the second-to-last to-do list and a weight off Jo’s shoulders. Chilled spinach salads prepped by her dad, Bianca’s recipe for sweet and spicy meatballs, and premade mashed potatoes in crystal bowls, Safeway mac and cheese in a floral casserole dish, and pressure-cooker coq au vin served in Henrietta.
She took the last pictures of the food while people served themselves. Untouched food wasn’t as homey looking as something with a spoon divot or missing slice.
“Sit down and enjoy yourself, Jo,” Autumn chided her. “You have enough pictures to prove that you threw a dinner party.”
“And no photography while we’re eating, please,” Bianca said.
“Sorry, sorry,” Jo said, tucking the camera bag into its case and sliding it under her chair. “I’m putting it away! Everyone is safe to eat.”
They all clinked glasses of wine or water. Jo hadn’t eaten a full meal since before her job interview in another state, so she tamped down any urge to toast and dug into her food.
Bianca’s watch went off again, this time with a bing-bong, a sound Jo had never heard it make before. How many plates did Bianca have spinning at the same time?
“All the food is great, Jo,” Autumn said, casting the reel for compliments so that Jo wouldn’t have to go fishing on her own. Jo had forgotten how natural it was for Autumn to gas up everyone in a room. Every other theater kid Jo had ever known, her own sister included, preferred to hold on to the spotlight rather than share it.
“These meatballs are incredible,” Birdy said, his attention on Bee typing into her wrist.
“Thank you,” Florencio said, toasting his water. “I dumped the jelly on them myself.”
“My parents have this amazing pressure cooker in the back,” Jo said, hoping to pull Bee back to the dinner. “It cooked most of dinner in, like, half an hour. When I have my own place again, I gotta buy one. Now, someone pass me those bacon-wrapped dates, because the smell is making me actually drool.”
“That’s what an appetizer is supposed to do,” Birdy said proudly as he passed her the platter. “It gets your salivary glands ready to feast!”
“Sounds like science to me.” Autumn giggled.
“Is this the spinach salad from the Surf & Saucer menu?” Bianca asked.
“Probably. I’ve never actually eaten here before,” Jo said, examining the spinach and dried cranberry on the chilled glass plate next to her water cup. “My dad prepped them while I was in Seattle.”
“I think it’s the spinach salad from the Phil plate,” Bianca said. She coughed a nervous laugh. “Did you say you’ve never eaten here before?”
“Most of my meals in town have been Days comps,” Jo said with a shrug.
“Have you seen that there’s a lunch named after you?” Bianca asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know how to feel about being cast as a mushroom-and-onion tart,” Jo said. She had transcribed the menu when she built the website. “It’s aggressively fungal.”
“Think how Eden feels as curry cashew chicken salad,” Bee said.
“Oh my God! Someone’s a fan!” Wren laughed. “You have the menu memorized?”
“I work four doors down?” Bee said.
“It will make my whole life if I tell my mom that someone other than her thinks about the menu,” Jo said. “She keeps threatening to get rid of the scones.”
“Don’t let her!” Florencio protested. “They’re the only sweet non-ice-cream breakfast on the boardwalk!”
“This town needs donuts,” Birdy said.
“And decent coffee,” Wren said.
“But here, have some surfboards and tea,” Jo said, gesturing around them with a shake of her head. She’d never understand her parents’ business decisions.
Dinner never got as loud as the Kelly family meals that had inspired it, but there were fewer people and far less sugar in the drinks. They weren’t little kids anymore, so perhaps it wasn’t a
problem that they were better listeners.
Between mmm-mmm, good noises and questions about how dishes were prepared, conversation kept up enough that Jo only had to deploy two of her emergency icebreakers—If you could travel anywhere, where would you go? and What’s everyone watching on TV?
The first one was interesting as Autumn was detailing her dream Canadian vacation—the Green Gables museum and a famous theater company in Stratford, Ontario—but then Bianca said, “I hope to see Hawaii before I die,” and conversation ground to a halt.
When the cheese-plate dessert was presented, Jo explained that it was an apology for forcing the Sunday Sundae Surprise on them.
“You guys tried to take down the Frosty’s sundae?” Wren asked, wiggling her pinkie nail between her molars. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you there’s a pie at the bottom?”
“No,” Bee said tightly. “It’s a surprise.”
“My parents bought us one whenever they had a new baby.” Wren shuddered and pushed her plate away. “From October to December, the pie on the bottom is pumpkin. You guys went late March, so my guess is that you found rhubarb?”
“By the power of Grayskull,” Birdy whispered, awed. “She’s Sherlock bloody Holmes.”
“Nothing is as predictable as life in this fucking town,” Wren said, swirling the wine in her glass. “As dull and reliable as the tides washing in and out, day after day.”
“‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’” quoted Autumn with a titter. She clapped her hands together twice, a cheerleader getting the crowd to adjust their focus. “Okay, friends—”
“Oh no.” Florencio tipped his head back and groaned at the dusty ceiling fans. “We’ve finished dinner and now she’s gonna try to sell us leggings again.”
“Or nail stickers,” Wren intoned.
“You aren’t pyramid scheming again, are you?” Bianca whirled on Autumn, upsetting her wineglass. She clamped down on the top of the cup, catching it just after a single drop flew at her wrist.
“No! Geez, guys. Calm down,” Autumn said, handing Bee an extra napkin. “I’m not selling anything. Except for local phenomenon the Throwback List! Did you guys see it on BuzzFeed?”
The Throwback List Page 15
