casual bangs. It did seem that he was studiously ignoring me. Not that I gave a slice of salami about that, either…at least until I could prove or disprove that he was the one who’d attacked me.
Anyway, I certainly wasn’t going to confront him. Not here. Not now.
“We need to focus on gratitude!” Dr. V. shouted. He opened his long, thin arms to their full width, like one of those hang gliders you’re always seeing taking off from Colorado peaks.
Okay, I could focus on gratitude. Clutching a glass of water, I backed into one of the Roundhouse’s dark corners and swallowed four more ibuprofen. I believed that I was more thankful than Ted Vikarios. If I hadn’t been choking on the pills, I would have been giving fervent praise to the Almighty that Julian, Liz, and I had somehow, somehow, pulled this lunch together after all.
“We miss Albert!” Dr. V. moaned, and the mourners groaned in response.
I swallowed hard and wondered if I missed Albert Kerr. Before Albert’s wife, Holly, had returned to Aspen Meadow with Albert’s ashes the previous month, I hadn’t seen either one of them for over fourteen years. But they had doted on Arch when he was a newborn. It hurt not to see someone for a long time. I had liked the Kerrs, and had felt a pang to hear Albert had died of cancer while serving as the priest for a small Anglican congregation in Qatar, of all places. Still, Albert’s lovely wife—widow—Holly had called me to do this event.
We had been close to both the Kerrs and Vikarioses when Albert, Ted, and the Jerk had worked together, Holly had reminded me.
I had gritted my teeth and promised Holly we would have a lovely lunch. And whether we had an anonymous attacker, a herd of mice, or a four-figure cost overrun, I was going to finish this luncheon, by golly. I took a deep breath, which was not a good idea.
Had anyone else noticed that the Roundhouse smelled like a pine forest? I stepped out from the corner and tried to avoid looking at the Jerk, who had put his arm around his new girlfriend. Girlfriend, schmirlfriend, my main question was whether anyone was sniffing the air and making faces. The scent, Organic Pine, could have been called The Woods You’ll Never Get Out Of. It certainly smelled like a denser forest than anything Hansel and Gretel had dealt with. Okay, Liz and Arch had gone too wild with their enthusiastic spraying. They’d coated the kitchen with the stuff, emptied a can each into the refrigerators, and squirted the fragrance into every corner of the old restaurant.
I blinked at Cecelia Brisbane, who was seated close by. Her wide body spilled over the chair seat as she hunched over the table, her thick glasses perched on the edge of her bulbous nose. She was taking notes, for God’s sake! If she made fun of the Roundhouse’s pine odor in her next column, I’d tell her to be grateful the folks hadn’t inhaled what had preceded it.
I focused on the rest of the guests. Gray-haired, squirrel-faced Nan Watkins, a longtime ob-gyn nurse at Southwest Hospital, nodded to me and gave a thumbs-up. I was doing her retirement party this week, so it was a good thing she was enjoying the lunch. In fact, all of the guests looked satisfied—at least with the food, if not with Ted Vikarios’s droning on. I’d been gratified by the way they’d slurped down Julian’s herb-topped chilled asparagus soup. After that, the mourners had dug into our quickly assembled assiettes de charcuterie. Amazing how a long church service can stimulate the appetite.
And speaking of church, God, and things we were thankful for, I’d also been grateful to the Almighty that Liz had been able to muster Arch out earlier than I’d requested. Looking over at Arch, now quietly filling water glasses at a far table, I was filled with pride. At fifteen, my son was finally getting taller. His shoulders were broadening, he’d cut his toast-brown hair short, and he’d traded in his thick tortoiseshell glasses for thin wire-rimmed specs.
But there was another change in Arch. Toward the end of the school year, I’d finally had enough of my son’s self-centeredness and obsession with having stuff. I’d barely been able to deal with a stream of demands for an electric guitar, a high-tech cell phone, a new computer, and other paraphernalia. Worse, his annoying behavior was increasingly expressing itself as verbal abuse directed at yours truly. I’d lived in denial for all those years with the Jerk, I said to myself one particularly sleepless night, was I going to do the same with Arch?
I was not. No matter whose “fault” his behavior was—I blamed the brats at Elk Park Preparatory School, Arch blamed me—I decided to pull him out of EPP. Unfortunately, there was no Episcopal high school in the Denver area. So I told Arch he could go away to military school (I was bluffing) or he could attend the Christian Brothers Catholic High School, not far from the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. After much yelling and door slamming, he chose the Brothers.
Once Arch had been admitted, the school had phoned and invited him on a class retreat. Arch had had a fantastic time. He had made a slew of new friends who now invited him to skate, play guitar, or just hang out, something he had never, ever been asked to do by any student at Elk Park Prep.
And then my son had started required community work in a Catholic Workers’ soup kitchen. Chopping fifteen pounds of onions on Saturday mornings to go into stew he then helped serve to two-hundred-plus homeless people—this had changed his materialism, but quick. Now he put away half his allowance for the Catholic Workers and begged me for paid work so he could help more people eat.
Well, I was all for helping people eat. I mean, just look at this lunch! It might be costing me a mint, but it was happening. Right from the start, Liz and Julian had commandeered Arch into an assembly line that would have left Henry Ford in the dust. They’d zipped around the kitchen prep table, placing slabs of creamy Port Salut cheese beside delicate rosettes of spicy imported salami. Because I was hurting, they’d given me the meager job of rolling the delicately smoked Westphalian ham into thin cylinders. They’d placed these next to slices of a heavenly homemade goat cheese Liz had nabbed at the farmers’ market. We’d all pitched in to pile Liz’s salad—crisp, tender field greens mixed with crunchy slices of hearts of palm and coated with her scrumptious vinaigrette—into pyramids in the middle of each assiette just as the first cars wheeled into the gravel driveway. Right before the lunch had commenced, when we’d been finishing the last of the plates, Dr. Ted Vikarios had burst into the kitchen. Apparently, Arch wasn’t the only one with matters religious on his mind.
“Jesus God Almighty!” Ted Vikarios yelled.
The four of us had jumped. After recovering, I’d reminded him of who I was. Goldy, from the old days, remember? Limping along, I’d led him back out to the dining room and asked him what I could do to help him. When he’d mumbled microphone and podium, I’d carefully shown him where he’d be giving his speech after the meal. Seeming preoccupied, he’d wandered off.
After that inauspicious kickoff, however, the lunch itself had been stupendous. The guests had devoured every morsel of food, right down to the baguettes, the butter—even the gherkins. Moving through the tables, I’d noticed a few members of the crowd making sandwiches from leftovers and tucking them into purses and sacks—a sure sign of success, if not good manners.
And now the guests were devouring the swoon-inducing slices of the flourless chocolate cakes I’d made for Marla. We’d topped them with Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, quickly purchased by Julian, as our homemade batch had melted when the compressors were shut off. Julian had handed the portable mike—at least I’d set that up the previous day—to Albert’s widow, Holly. Short, gray-haired, as vibrant and energetic at fifty-five as she had been at forty, she’d given an enthusiastic thanks to everyone who’d come. She’d added that there would be one tribute only, from Albert’s old friend Ted Vikarios.
As Ted now proclaimed into the microphone, his wife, Ginger Vikarios, smiled nervously at the crowd. Like her husband, Ginger, slender and overly made up, had taken unsuccessful steps to look as if she had not aged. She’d dyed her hair orange, the lipstick on her downturned mouth was orange, and she had bright spots of orange bl
ush on each cheek. She looked fragile and unhappy, like a sad clown. I certainly hoped Ginger had not heard the insensitive comments on the way her curly orange hair matched her unfashionable orange taffeta dress. Whatever had happened to people wearing black to funerals? they wanted to know. I hadn’t the foggiest.
John Richard Korman’s late arrival with his blond, nubile new girlfriend, Sandee Blue, had caused a ripple in the crowd. Sandee, her platinum curls swept forward in a sexy do, ignored Ted Vikarios as she giggled and nuzzled John Richard’s ear. Smiling, John Richard pulled away, ran his fingers through his long hair, and winked knowingly at Sandee. I wondered if he was technically old enough to be her father.
Marla and I had met Sandee two weeks before, when we’d delivered Arch to John Richard’s house prior to a golf lesson. Clad in a bikini (to the best of my knowledge, the Jerk had not installed an indoor pool in his country-club rental house), she’d opened the heavy door, looked us up and down, and introduced herself.
“I’m Sandee Blue. That’s Sandee with two e s.”
Arch had done his best not to gawk. I’d shuddered and, for once, been tongue-tied.
Confused, Sandee had asked, “Are you here with money?”
Without missing a beat, Marla had said, “No, but we’d be blue, too, if we didn’t have any.” Sandee had retreated, looking even more perplexed. Then we’d heard the Jerk yelling at her from inside the house, and finally he’d appeared and wordlessly taken Arch. What was that French saying—plus ça change? Well, anyway, stuff doesn’t change and neither do jerks.
According to Marla, Sandee worked in the country-club golf shop, and that was where John Richard had decided he had to have her. Also according to Marla, once John Richard met Sandee, he’d dumped his willowy, wealthy, gorgeous, brunette girlfriend, Courtney MacEwan. Courtney was a highly competitive tennis-playing socialite. She was known for throwing her racket and her fluorescent pink tennis balls at opponents who beat her—and hitting them. This was not the kind of woman I’d want to have as an enemy, but John Richard was an expert in—Marla’s term—the Art of Bedding Dangerously.
Now, watching John Richard lean over and whisper in Sandee’s ear, my gaze traveled over to lovely, brown-haired Courtney MacEwan, standing on the far side of the French doors. Unlike Ginger Vikarios’s orange gown, Courtney’s dress was black, but it was so low cut and tight—showing muscles I wasn’t even sure I had—that it made Ginger’s pouffery look tame. I racked my gray cells to figure out why Courtney was here, and then remembered that her former husband—he had died of a heart attack when Courtney had surprised him in bed with a flight attendant—had been a top executive at Southwest Hospital.
Courtney had been John Richard’s squeeze in—what, April, the beginning of May? Then the Jerk had moved on to the greener Sandee pasture, and they’d split. Now Courtney stared in his direction. The bitterness of her expression shrieked, If I can’t have this man, no one will! I wondered if her copious Louis Vuitton bag held a couple of tennis balls.
The crowd scooped up the last of their cake and ice cream, glanced at their watches, and rustled in their seats. Oblivious, Ted Vikarios rumbled on about the good deeds Albert Kerr had done. Albert had sold his possessions and taken Holly to England, where he’d gone to seminary. He’d accepted a call to a small Christian mission in Qatar—he really hadn’t liked the cold English weather—and served there for twelve years. He’d fought valiantly against the disease that had finally claimed him, etc., etc.
Again waves of fatigue and pain washed over me. The places where my attacker had hit were killing me. When I’d signaled to Julian and Liz to stop clearing, I’d had no idea Ted Vikarios would talk until mold grew on cheese. On and on he went, about how the Lord had done this in Albert’s life and the Lord had done that. The agnostics among the country-club set were stirring in their seats. To them, a conversion experience was changing dollars into euros.
When a couple of people scraped back their chairs and got up to leave, Dr. V. cleared his throat into the mike. It came out like a thunderclap, and a spontaneous titter swept through the Roundhouse dining room. More people began to stand up and move about. I glanced at Holly Kerr. She kept her chin up and her back straight as she spoke to well-wishers.
If I could just finish the cleaning without losing my temper with the Jerk and accusing him of beating me up, I could count this event as a salvaged success. I scanned the crowd again. Ted Vikarios was still talking. I had to clear away the dirty dishes, whether it made noise or not.
Holly Kerr caught my eye, nodded, and smiled. Then she handed an envelope to a young man and indicated that he was to give it to me. My eyes snagged on Courtney MacEwan, whose rage-filled stare at John Richard—who was again cozying up to Sandee—had not quit. Courtney folded her arms, which made a whole bunch more muscles pop out. Now John Richard and Sandee-with-two-es were exchanging a not-so-
surreptitious kiss. I turned quickly, picked up a tray of dirty glasses beside one of the tables, and only vaguely registered footsteps clicking up to my side.
“Ever noticed,” Courtney MacEwan hissed in my ear, “how people can’t wait to have sex after funerals?”
I lost my grip on the tray. Unbalanced, one of the glasses popped upward and spiraled toward the floor. An alert guest, a bodybuilder-type guy with thick, dry blond-brown hair that resembled a lion’s mane, dove for it with an outfielder’s extended reach. Grinning hugely, he held it high. The guests at the table applauded.
“Courtney,” I said through clenched teeth—and a false smile—“get into the kitchen if you want to talk about sex.”
Courtney fluttered sparkly eyelids and mauve-toned fingernails and slithered ahead of me. It was a good thing, too, because the crowd parted like the Red Sea for that low-cut dress.
“And dearest, loveliest Holly,” Ted droned on.
“Was that a trick play with the glass?” an older woman asked me. Her broad face lit up with an admiring smile. “If you toss two glasses into the air, Dannyboy here will be able to catch both of those, too.” The table giggled and leaned forward. I noticed several bottles of wine between the plates, not served by yours truly. In fact, I was willing to bet that the folks at this table had never worked at Southwest Hospital. There were two guys (including Dannyboy, he of the lion mane) who looked like thugs, and three women, two pretty younger ones and the one who’d first spoken to me. Her thick makeup and dyed black hair screamed Aging Hooker. Still, she looked familiar. But I was distracted from trying to place her by Dannyboy, whose drunk, raised voice announced: “If you toss three glasses in the air, I can juggle those, too!”
“And dearest, loveliest Holly,” Ted Vikarios shouted into the microphone, “was a nurturing presence all along.” Registering the disturbance—Dannyboy, the joker who wouldn’t let me pass—Ted glared in our direction. “She even nursed Albert, whom we are remembering today, whom we are trying to remember today”—more glaring—“beginning when he was sick and missed school as a teenager…”
“So did John Richard cheat on you, too?” Courtney stage-whispered over her shoulder. “And what did you do to his girlfriends?” I kept a white-knuckled grip on the tray and refused to answer.
“Hey, caterer,” Dannyboy was saying as he tugged on my apron. Behind him, his table laughed wildly. “C’mon, let’s have some fun. With the glasses, I mean.”
I tore myself away and limped painfully toward the kitchen. When I finally made it, I placed the tray next to the sink, then walked over and carefully closed the door to the dining room. I took a deep breath before facing Courtney, who had almost screwed up this already-almost-screwed-up event.
“Doggone it, Courtney, what is the matter with you? I’ve been divorced from John Richard for over a decade! Of course he cheated on me. I didn’t do anything to any girlfriends of his except feel sorry for her, whoever she was. And as to the sex-after-funerals question, how should I know? When I’m catering a funeral lunch, what I do afterward is dishes.”
S
he looked over at me, then pressed her lips together. But it was no-go. Tears slid down her cheeks. In an effort to look stronger than she apparently was feeling, she rolled her shoulders and flexed those arm muscles.
“God damn him,” she said. “He owes me.” She slapped tears away. I plucked a clean tissue from my apron pocket and handed it to her. “I just hate him so much now.” She honked into the tissue. “We were going to get married. We’d been together for less than a month, and he sent back my stuff from his house in boxes from the golf shop, for crying out loud. Why the golf shop?”
She started to cry. I rinsed dishes, wondering how long this would last. The golf shop, she kept repeating. Why the golf shop?
“Maybe Sandee gave him the boxes,” I offered. “I mean, she’s some kind of golf expert, isn’t she?”
To my great surprise, Courtney burst out laughing. “Oh, yeah, Sandee’s a golf expert, all right! Puts the ball right in the hole!”
Her facial muscles jumped and twitched. Oh boy, she had it bad. This was unfortunate. John Richard never went back to a woman he’d abandoned.
“What is going on in here?” Marla demanded as she banged through the kitchen door. She was holding an envelope, which she handed to me. “This is from Holly Kerr. Some guy was waiting to give it to you, but was afraid to come into the kitchen because the door was closed. Ooh, yummy, leftover cake.” She daintily helped herself to a corner of chocolate, then noticed Courtney MacEwan. “For crying out loud, Courtney, what are you so bent out of shape about? I mean, besides being dumped for a twenty-one-year-old?”
Courtney glared at Marla, who shook her head at Courtney’s décolleté dress.
“Very sexy, C. You ought to be able to pick up somebody new, right here at this funeral.”
Courtney lifted her chin and appraised Marla’s black linen dress. “You look pretty inviting yourself, Marla. Did you have a hot date before the funeral?”
“Oh, darling, did I!” Marla replied, rolling her eyes.
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