Dear Emmie Blue

by Lia Louis

  “This smells amazing,” I say to Amanda, tearing off the end of the warm croissant.

  “Doesn’t it? I’m just glad you’re not on some silly regime, like this one,” she says, her eyes sliding toward Lucas. “There’s nothing to him, and he lives at that gym.”

  “It’s called keeping fit, Mum,” Lucas says with a smile, sitting back in his chair, coffee cup in his tanned hand, his other arm across his chest, hand on his bicep. “It’s called keeping healthy.”

  “Yes,” says Jean simply, in approval.

  “He doesn’t eat anything I make anymore, Emmie,” she carries on, cutting a muffin in half. “Did I tell you we did bain-marie in my class, and he refused to try my crème brûlée?”

  “It was super high in sugar—”

  “A tiny bit, is all I asked. A bite. Not like our Luke, is it, Emmie, to turn down something sweet?”

  “No—”

  “And I said to him, I said, when have you ever met someone who got heart disease from one—”

  “I have a suit to fit into, Mum.” Lucas sits forward then, cocks his head, smiles at his mum, who stops talking and looks at him. Her eyes widen to full circles.

  “Did you…” Her face breaks into a smile, then she looks at me. “He’s told you?” I stare at her, but Lucas nods proudly beside me. Even Jean looks up from his plate, eyes unblinking.

  “Oh, Emmie!” Amanda whoops, a hand flying across the table to land on mine, her mouth stretching into a watery smile. “Can you believe it? Can you actually believe it? Married! Oh, tell me, what did you say?”

  Ah. They thought I didn’t know yet. I swallow, a chunk of pastry disintegrating in my mouth. I look up at them, my gullible, on-the-edge-of-their-seats audience, and force a smile. “I couldn’t believe it,” I tell them. “I really couldn’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t know you knew! I’ve been dying for him to tell you. Haven’t I, Jean?” Amanda beams, looking around the table to her calmly nodding husband, then to Lucas, then to me. She’s wide and glittery-eyed, squirming in her seat like an impatient toddler.

  “I told her last night.” Lucas smiles at me, his hand reaching out to touch my arm. “She was so shocked, she went and had a migraine. Didn’t you, Em?”

  Even Jean laughs at that, and says in his deep, broken English, “She is not the only one. My migraine of shock has only just dispersed.”

  Amanda is not listening, though; she’s gazing at Lucas, freckly, gold-ringed hand at her chest, the nails painted pink. “Oh, I’m so glad you told her,” she sighs dreamily, then she looks at me. “I hate having secrets, especially from family. You can help us plan now, Emmie. Talk him out of wearing those horrible tight trousers all the youngsters are wearing these days—”

  “Actually,” says Lucas, setting down his coffee cup, elbow on the table. “There’s one more secret.”

  Then he looks at me and smiles. And then I realize, they don’t know. They don’t know what he asked me. “Last night,” says Lucas, “I asked Emmie…”

  Amanda gasps, puts down the jar of lemon curd she had just picked up. It thumps on the tablecloth.

  Lucas looks at me, nods his head encouragingly. I clear my throat, my smile unwavering.

  “Luke asked me to be his best woman,” I say.

  Amanda brings her hands to her mouth. “Oh!” she squeals. “Oh! Oh, Jean!”

  Jean smiles, closed mouth, ever sensible, ever rock-steady. “And?” he says. “And did you say yes?”

  Lucas laughs at that, as if the thought of me saying anything else is hilarious.

  “Of course,” I say, and Amanda yelps again, standing up and gesturing for me to stand too, so she can wrap her arms around me, the chiffon of her blouse swooping over the plate of muffins on the table. “Oh, my darling,” she says into my ear, squeezing me close, all warmth and soft skin and floral perfume. “Nobody deserves the job more than you. He loves you,” she says. “He loves you so much. We all do.” And I don’t let her go. I hold on to her, this woman, the closest thing I’ve had in the last few years to a mother, as if she’s the only thing keeping me upright. My nostrils tingle, a prologue to the tears that are desperate to come now, but I sniff, blink them away, plaster back on that smile.

  “Oh, it’s enough to make you weep, isn’t it?” chuckles Amanda as we pull away. She sits back down, draping the napkin across her lap. She busies herself with her breakfast, and Lucas reaches for a bowl of berries, still smiling over at his mum. Jean, opposite, sips his coffee silently, but his eyes are on me, serious and watchful. I’m glad when he looks away. It’s just in time to miss my smile slip.

  “What?”

  “He’s getting married. Lucas is getting married.”

  Rosie stares at me, deep-red hair wild, coffee cup in hand. “What? To who?” And before I can reply, her glossy red mouth breaks into a huge grin. “Oh my shit, it’s you, isn’t it? Oh my God, it’s—”

  “It’s not me.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s Marie,” I tell her. Rosie looks at me blankly. “Ex-girlfriend Marie.”

  “Avocado Marie?” Rosie’s mouth is open, her top lip in a confused snarl. “As in organic-deli-owner Marie? I thought she dumped him after she thought he was texting that girl. The Aussie.”

  “Ivy.” I nod. “And Lucas didn’t text her. She texted him. But yeah. That Marie. They patched stuff up a couple of months ago, apparently. I didn’t even know. He said it was all really quick.”

  “And what, then they got engaged immediately?” says Rosie, face crumpling. “Who does that?”

  I shrug. “Happy people?” I offer. “In love people.”

  Rosie’s brow furrows under her blunt, red fringe and she shakes her head. “So why the desperate need to talk to you? To summon you—”

  “Rosie, he didn’t summon me; I was already going—”

  “But he made it a big thing, didn’t he? That he had to ask you something and it had to be face-to-face. Then there’s the thing he said on New Year’s…”

  I was waiting for this—braced for it. And as much as I wish I hadn’t told her about Lucas’s text, telling me he had something to ask me, or about that drunken comment he made about us being meant to be together, it’s not like not telling Rosie was even an option. I can’t keep anything from her. She sees right through me; through anyone.

  “I can always sniff out the little shits before I’ve even handed over their room keys,” she’d told me on my first day here, at the Clarice, two years ago. “The ones cheating on their wives, the ones filming porn in the rooms, the ones who’re so leaving with a cleaning bill because they eat shellfish from that dodgy bloke on the pier and can’t make it to the loo in time. Yup. Can’t hide jack from me.”

  “So, when you say engaged,” Rosie carries on now, “do you mean he and Avocado Marie just talked about it? Because anyone can make big, bold promises. I dated that bloke from Slough, you remember, the one with the eyebrows, and he promised me he’d take me to Montenegro, to Bali, to—”

  “He proposed.”

  “What, actually?”

  “Actually.”

  “Hm.” Rosie pulls her mouth into a grimace, as if she’s considering the validity of what I’ve just said; as if at any moment she’s going to stroke her chin and say “interesting.” A stark comparison to the Rosie of last week, who was squealing, rosy-cheeked, and dancing about so much that she sent two confit duck legs flying off the kitchen pass and skittering to the floor out of excitement. And that’s why I’d told her, I suppose. I was excited, and I knew she would feel the same. Fox was excited, too, in his own weird, measured Fox way, listening as he always does, quietly in the background, before appearing and delivering the sort of calm, timely, fatherly advice or opinion you’d expect from someone double his age. “Don’t overthink it,” he’d said this time. “Yield and breathe and hold no expectations.” And Rosie had tutted and said, “I’ve got expectations, all right. He’s gonna be bomb in the sack, that’s what I expect. All
those years of unrequited love, all that repressed sexual energy…”

  Rosie is staring at me now across the shiny, freshly scrubbed kitchen counter as I fill tiny, fancy butter dishes from a giant pot of cheap margarine for the lunch service.

  “So, what was it all about, then, Em? That’s what I wanna know,” she says. “What did he need to ask you?”

  I look up at her, spoon hovering over the margarine tub. “He asked me if I would be best woman, for the wedding. That was the question.”

  “Fuck me, you are kidding?” breathes Rosie. “You didn’t say yes, did you?”

  I say nothing.

  “God. You did. You said yes.”

  “Yes I did,” I tell her as Rosie makes a groaning noise into her coffee mug and downs the last drop, throwing her head right back, as if it’s vodka and she needs it to numb the agony. “Then, of course, I threw up. Puked.”

  Rosie drops the mug from her face. “On him?”

  “No,” I laugh. “After he asked me. Immediately after. I couldn’t help it; I felt sick to my stomach. I panicked, I think.”

  “Poor you, of course you did.”

  “And I made my excuses, ran to the loo, and chundered it all. My appetizer. My wine. My dinner. My dignity. Well, most of it. I have a small shred left, I think, if I look hard enough.”

  “Oh, Emmie.”

  “It was the way he was looking at me, Rosie. It—I thought he was going to ask me to—well, you know what I thought he was going to ask me.”

  Rosie reaches across the counter and touches my hand; the one holding a spoon loaded with yellow marg. She looks at me with huge brown eyes. “So, what happens now?”

  I give a theatrical shrug. “I guess I’m going to be the best best woman to be found this side of the universe,” I say with a sigh. “That’s what happens now. Because what else am I supposed to do? Say no? Pull out? Risk ruining the only long-standing relationship of any kind in my entire life?”

  “Er, yeah?” Rosie cocks a perfect, auburn-penciled eyebrow. Her makeup is always incredible. Porcelain-smooth cheeks, dewy skin shimmering gold every time the light catches the tip of her pixie-like nose or the Cupid’s bow of her mouth. “You love the bloke, Emmie. Nobody in their right mind would put themselves through this. Jack it in.”

  “But I can’t,” I say. “He’ll know if I pull out.”

  “Good,” says Rosie, folding her arms. “Maybe he needs to.”

  “Maybe who needs to what?” Fox, immaculate in shining suit and hideous paisley shirt, appears from the tiny office off the kitchen and squashes himself next to Rosie. Fox is the Clarice’s hospitality manager, and perhaps the poshest person I think I have ever met. He went to boarding school; some private establishment he’d said all the politicians went to, and who hoped photographic evidence of their drunk days there miraculously disappeared before they gained a seat in Parliament. But then his dad went bankrupt. “I think it was the happiest day of my life when he told me I had to drop out,” Fox told me once. He’d moved out of London the second he could and has been here for nine years. He lives on-site, upstairs, in one of the suites. “Like the bloke in The Shining,” Rosie says at least once a day. “Just a matter of time before he bludgeons us all.”

  Fox leans across the counter now, clean, slim hands clasped together. “So, how did he ask? Are you going steady?” He laughs and leans closer to me. “I admit, I have absolutely no idea what that means.”

  “Oh, yet you knew that other word,” tuts Rosie. “Whatever it was. Fust—fast… fastidious, that’s it! That’s what he called me, Emmie. Fastidious. I had to google it. I thought he’d made it up. Pulled it out his arsehole.”

  I burst out laughing, bringing the cuff of my blouse to my mouth. “Well, that’s a compliment, isn’t it?”

  “Actually,” Fox says with a smile, “I said she could try and be more fastidious. The reception desk is like the bottom of a swamp. Mugs with dregs of coffee inside so old, they have pensions. Disgusting.”

  Rosie nudges Fox in the side with her elbow.

  “Ow.”

  “I hate cleaning. It’s for bores. Anyway, shut up, Fox, we’ve got a crisis here.”

  “It isn’t so much a crisis…,” I start, but Rosie butts in.

  “That knob-end in France took her to that restaurant and asked her to be his best woman.” I love how Rosie makes “asked” sound like “arsed.”

  Fox screws up his pale face, his nose wrinkling. “Sorry, what?”

  “That’s what I said,” says Rosie.

  I shrug, unable to bear to look up from the lines and lines of butter dishes. “He’s getting married,” I say again. “I—I got it wrong.”

  “Married to whom, for Christ’s sake?”

  “That’s what I said,” says Rosie again. “Well, without the posh whom bit, obviously.”

  “Marie.”

  “His ex,” cuts in Rosie. “On-off girlfriend. Patched stuff up. Emmie didn’t even know.”

  Fox makes a sound; a loud inward draw of breath; a cross between a gasp and a growl. “Gosh,” he says, wincing. “And he took you to a restaurant to ask you this?”

  “Yep,” says Rosie. “Their restaurant. The one they always go to. It’s on the beach. The beach he found Emmie’s balloon on when they were sixteen.”

  I look at Rosie and a smile blooms across my face. “Thank you, Wikipedia page,” I say, and she laughs, reaching to touch the side of my face. “Sorry, Emmie,” she says sweetly. “I’m just absolutely fuming on your behalf.”

  “But he hasn’t really done anything wrong, has he?” I tell them. “We’re best friends. He asked me to be his best woman, over his brother, over all his mates, even his friend Tom, who he’s known since nursery. That isn’t nasty behavior. It’s… nice behavior. It’s—”

  “Knob-end behavior,” Rosie stampedes in, leaning forward and mirroring Fox, lacing her fingers together and budging up next to him. Her long nails are silver and yellow this week, the index ones with tiny painted daisies on them. “You forget what he said to you New Year’s Eve. He can’t say that shit, then take you to a restaurant and ask you to be his best woman without being branded a raging knob—”

  “Do you think we could use another word?” Fox asks. “Like—”

  “Oh God, what, I suppose you want me to say nincompoop? Well, this isn’t the sixties, Fox,” says Rosie, looking at her watch, then standing up straight and reaching over for a bread roll from one of the baskets beside me. “So knob-end is staying.”

  Fox smirks as Rosie bites into the roll and walks backward, slowly, to the kitchen exit. “Coming out your wages, then, is it, this stolen granary roll?”

  “Emmie.” She chews, ignoring Fox. “Come and see me on your break, yeah? Mum made honey cake and I’ve got you some.”

  “Deal,” I say, and she gives a smile and blows a kiss before sashaying out of the kitchen. I know of nobody else on this earth who moves as sexily and as confidently as Rosie does. It’s as if there isn’t a space on this earth that’s out of bounds to her. Even on my third ever shift here, she’d come galloping toward me on my lunch break in a bright green sundress, lips the color of mahogany, her receptionist uniform nowhere to be seen, and said breathlessly, “I’ve got ten minutes. How are you with a camera? Any good?” Before I could reply, I was clicking away on a digital camera I had no idea how to use, while she sprawled across the sandstone steps of the hotel, posing like the models on the pages of Vogue, saying, “Hurry up, Emmie. They’ll string us up if they catch us. I’m supposed to be a dedicated hotel receptionist, remember, not a plus-sized blogger.”

  Fox straightens. “Right, let’s give you a hand.” He pulls a spoon from the drawer beneath the counter and starts scooping up perfect ovals of butter. Fox knows every inch of this hotel. From knowing the exact amount of butter needed to fill one dish in one drag of a spoon, to knowing the time Sol, the chef, prefers the mint to be added to the home-churned ice cream, to how to operate the ancient, round-the-houses rec
eption system on Rosie’s computer. I long to be as at home, somewhere, as Fox is at the Clarice. To feel like yes, this is exactly where I belong.

  “Thanks, Fox,” I say.

  He looks up at me and smiles. “So, are you still needing to leave at five today?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “if that’s okay.”

  “Sure.” Fox nods. “Off anywhere nice?”

  “Meeting a friend. She travels a lot and she’s local.”

  “Ah. Sounds grand.”

  It’s easier to lie, I’ve found. If I’d said that I was going to visit my mum, someone I have barely mentioned the entire time I’ve worked here, in the many coffee and lunch breaks I’ve spent with Fox, questions would have come, and I’m never comfortable answering them. Plus, the dread I feel before seeing her, that breaks out of my stomach now, like weighted butterflies, as I stand here, hours from it, can usually be read on my face. I’m not sure what I dread exactly, but I always make my way to see Mum with a churning stomach and stiff shoulders. “What happened, love? World that terrible and ugly, is it?” a passing man had chuckled the last time I stood at the bus stop on my way to meet her, and when I’d texted Lucas and told him, he’d said, “You should have said, ‘It is with you in it, mate, yeah.’ ”

  “You seem all right, you know, about this wedding business,” Fox says now. “Considering.”

  “I’m not,” I say. “I wish I could say I was, but I’m not.”

  Fox nods wordlessly, hands all the time spooning and pressing. “Anyone would find something like this tough, Emmie. And everything else aside: your best friend is getting married. It’s hard enough when there are no feelings like yours, believe me.”

  “Really?”

  Fox’s eyes widen and he nods rapidly. “God, yes. Nobody says it, of course, it’s all ‘I’m so excited; I’m so happy for you!’ But deep down, every friend is thinking ‘Shit. Everything’s changing. I’m going to lose my mate to this person who could absolutely be a total and utter bastard. And I’ve got to smile throughout it while I let them go into the arms of a potential monster. And what does that mean for us?’ Poke writing a speech, I would actually like to spend my time having an existential crisis in peace, thank you very much.”