“Six months ago, I didn’t have Mount Everest on my lip.”
There was no point arguing. He wasn’t going on, so I was stuck. Honestly, when Jeremy had called claiming there was a catastrophe and that I had to get over there right away, I’d pictured pipes spouting water. Maybe a sinkhole outside by the pool. Possibly even a guest with a broken limb in the water park.
Jeremy had counted on me thinking that way, of course. If he’d mentioned cameras and zits, he knew I wouldn’t have come. Then he would have had to handle it himself. Now that I was here, though, I knew there was no way he’d leave his office. It was a game of chicken and he was a lot better at it than I was.
I made my way into the bar, where I saw three bored-looking guys with camera equipment and beers, sitting among a bunch of wires and power strips. There was a woman with them, with short red hair, dramatic makeup, and, I could tell thanks to the sleeveless shift she wore, seriously buff arms.
“Hello,” I said, as professionally as I could, given my appearance. “I’m Erin Edwards, events coordinator here at the hotel. Mr. Rambaur told me you’re here to do some establishing shots of the hotel?”
“We got those,” the woman said, extending her hand. “Pippa Tanner,” she said, shaking my hand with an iron grip. “I’m the producer in charge of this mess. What we need”—here she looked me up and down critically—“is to ask a few questions about the planning. Just a little bit of tape on that, because normally the party planner obviously isn’t the money shot.”
“Sure, what do you need to know?”
“Why don’t you have a seat?” she suggested, gesturing at a seat being occupied by one of her crew.
The moment her hand swept in his direction, he sprang into action, picking up the camera while one of his coworkers picked up and turned on a rack of bright lights and the other started assembling what looked like a boom mic to hang over me.
“Oh.” I felt Cindy Brady Syndrome coming on. If the camera started running, I was liable to freeze. I didn’t sit. The camera hovered in my face and I said to the guy, “Can you turn that off for a minute?” To Pippa, I said, “I’m really not up for being filmed right now. I was out running and I got this call and I’m just a mess.”
“How long would it take you to clean up?” She glanced at her watch, then back at me, the implication clear: Time is money and you’re wasting both of mine.
This wasn’t going well at all. Why hadn’t they just looked at me, seen I’d make for awful TV, and let me off the hook? “Well, I’d have to go home and shower and it would really be more time than you’d want to spend—”
“You’re not that big,” Pippa interrupted. She was probably two sizes smaller than I was, but the way she said it you would have thought she was talking to Oprah in 1997. “I can loan you something from my room.” That critical eye wandered over me again. “At least something you can put on as a suitable top and we can film from the shoulders up.”
“I’m not borrowing your clothes.” I didn’t mean to sound snappish. “I mean, surely you can just wait until Jeremy … returns. I have a feeling it will be sooner than he expected,” I added through gritted teeth.
“Fine. What did you think of Miss Tacelli when you first met her?” Pippa asked.
The lights guy swung around in front of me and I felt my pupils shrink. Anything I said now—even begging off and saying I didn’t want to be interviewed—might be used to make me, and the hotel, look bad.
I had no choice but to answer.
I swallowed. “I thought she was delightful. A bright, vivacious young woman looking forward to a great future.” Had they met Roxanne yet? Was there any way they would buy this?
Pippa gave me a smile that said she had and she wasn’t. “Has she had any special requests for the party?”
I feigned ignorance. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, balloons, limos, color-coded invitations”—she raised a knowing eyebrow—“horses?”
I looked her dead in the eye. “Nothing unusual or impossible.” Game on. “We specialize in making dreams come true here.”
My phone rang then, thank God. I didn’t care who it was, I would be glad to talk to them for an hour or so. Salesman? Bill collector? Wrong number? Bring ’em on.
“Erin Edwards,” I said, lifting my index finger to Pippa to indicate I had to take this Very Important Call.
“This is Roxanne,” a weepy voice said.
My heart sank. “Yes, R—” No point in alerting them that their star was on the phone. “Yes?” I stepped away from the crew, lest their mics could pick up the sound. “What can I do for you?”
“Justin and I broke up.”
“O … kay…?” I’m not an idiot. I gathered, quickly, that Justin was her boyfriend and that he’d dumped her. What I didn’t get, and what I was afraid to ask, was what it had to do with me. “Well. I’m … sorry to hear that.…”
She dissolved into sobs and I waited, trying to figure out the answer I’d give to various requests. Wants me to remove him from the guest list? No problem. Wants to cancel the party for time of mourning and/or finding new boyfriend? Really no problem. Wants me to have him killed? Against hotel policy.
“I need you to get him back for me.”
Ah, she’d dialed the wrong number. That had to be it. She meant to call one of her friends, but she’d gotten me instead. “You must have hit the wrong number,” I explained. “This is Erin Edwards, the event coordinator for your birthday party.”
“I know!” she barked. “And you said”—she sniffed, sounding defiant—“that if there was anything I wanted for the party, you would handle it. I want Justin there.”
I felt my brow knit involuntarily. I got stupid requests all the time, but this one took the cake. “But I don’t know what I can possibly do about that. It sounds like you two need to have a talk or something, maybe straighten out a misunderstanding…?”
“What I understand is that he’s an asshole.”
“Oh.” Problem solved. “Then it’s good he’s not coming, right?”
“But I love him!” She took a wavering breath. “And he has to be at my party.”
“Why would you want him there if he’s an a—”
“I just do!”
Inspiration struck me. “You know who you should talk to about this? Jeremy Rambaur. Let me give you his number.”
“He just gave me yours!”
I’d kill him.
This was becoming more of a pain by the second.
“Anyway, a man wouldn’t understand,” she went on, as if she and I had mind-melded. “You get it, don’t you?”
“Well—”
“So let me give you Justin’s number and you can just give him a call and get all the bullshit sorted out. He has to come to my party. He just has to. If he doesn’t, the whole thing will be ruined!”
I looked longingly at the film crew. Five minutes ago, I had thought nothing could be worse than being interviewed on film. Now I’d revised my opinion. This was far, far worse. And it was about to reach new, lower levels of misery.
We specialize in making dreams come true. What a stupid thing for me to say when I knew full well I was dealing with crazy people. Well played, Universe. Well played.
“This isn’t really a good time,” I said to Roxanne. Then, hoping to appeal to her vanity by mentioning the TV stuff, I added, “I’m doing some preproduction stuff for your show.”
Hope dissolved when she said, “Are you ready? It’s two-four-oh—”
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me find a pen.”
I had experience calling estranged boyfriends, obviously, but it wasn’t something I ever wanted to do again.
Particularly for someone like Roxanne.
This was ridiculous.
And yet, in some way, it felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. But whether it was saying I needed to contact Nate and resolve a few things, like Jordan had suggested, or that the whole idea of teenage romanc
e and drama was ridiculous, I didn’t know.
But maybe Jordan was right.
Maybe I needed to find out.
Or maybe—God, I hated thinking about this crap after so long—but maybe I needed to clear up the truth for him once and for all. To let him know, after all these years, that I truly hadn’t done what he thought I’d done to him.
That I’d truly loved him.
Chapter 7
August 1986
They picked their way down the wooded path to the lake, Erin, Nate, Theresa, and Theresa’s latest boy, JP, in the deep golden light of a late summer afternoon. They carried two six-packs of Champale, a drink pretending to be a cross between champagne and beer yet failing miserably on both counts, crossing creeks and stepping over branches to get to the lake in Potomac Falls.
Finally, the bramble cleared and the lake was there, stretching out for two or three acres in front of them, the sun dancing across the surface. There was a bigger stretch of woods across the way and to the right, and manicured lawns rolled out to the left.
“Let’s sit,” Erin suggested as Nate came to her side.
“Um, I think we’re going to keep going a little farther,” Theresa said with a giggle.
“Here.” Erin handed her one of the sixes of Champale. She was glad they’d be alone. She’d been with Theresa and guys before and it always tended to be a make-out fest for them, and a conversation for her and Nate that made her feel like they were as old and prudish as her grandparents.
“Thanks!” Theresa and JP stumbled off down the path, on their way to who-knew-what secretive action.
Erin didn’t care.
She and Nate sat down side by side on the dirt. She brushed some broken twigs aside and moved closer to him. The heat had been oppressive all day but as the sun went down and the wind picked up slightly, it was finally beginning to cool.
“We used to ride horses here when I was little,” she said. “I loved to ride them into the lake and swim, but they were always losing their shoes in the mud right there”—she pointed to the bank—“and my mother got so mad because we had to keep having the blacksmith out to replace them.”
“You swam on horses?”
“Well, we’d ride them into the lake, and they’d start to swim and we’d just sort of float along with them. It was great.”
“I never thought about horses swimming,” he said. “But I guess it makes sense. Like the ponies swimming from Assateague to Chincoteague.”
“Exactly.” She leaned against him. “Their bellies make them float like barrels.” She yawned. “I want a horse again someday.”
“Then you’ll get one.”
“That was easy.” She tossed a rock in the lake while he pulled the tops off of two Champales.
“So is this like Michigan?” she asked, knowing that every summer he went to his widowed grandfather’s house in Michigan and did a bunch of boating and fishing and nature stuff.
He laughed. “No.”
“No?”
“This is a pond.”
“This is a lake!”
“Around here, this is a lake,” he said. “Anywhere else, this is a pond.”
“Oh.” She took the Champale he handed her. “Thanks. So what’s it like at your granddad’s?”
“Isolated.” He took a sip from his bottle. “Quiet. The quiet is nice, though. You can go for a walk at night and if someone is having a party three miles down the shore, you can hear them. Water conducts sound really well.”
“Three miles? There’s that much water?” She looked at the small lake in front of them. No wonder he called it a pond. “That’s almost like an ocean!”
A smile flickered across his face. “It looks like the ocean a little. But no waves. More like the bay.”
“And are there loons?” They’d watched that movie On Golden Pond together, both of them in tears at the end, and decided they would be the old people in that someday. From a distance of fifty years, they could both see it.
“Yes.” He slid his hand into hers. “There are loons.”
“That would be good. I want to go there with you.” She sipped from her bottle and looked contentedly at the muddy water, imagining a much bigger expanse and horizon. She could look into eternity in a place like that, all water and trees and silence. And Nate. Nate there by her side. That would be perfect. That would constitute her perfect day.
Someday they’d do that.
Meanwhile, they were here, and it was about as much peace and nature as they were apt to get in Potomac.
“Maybe this summer,” he said. “In August we could drive up to my granddad’s house.”
His grandfather had a house locally as well, where they’d been many times, but it was all the same terrain to Erin. The idea of going someplace completely different was appealing.
Plus, she was good at fishing and crabbing, at least by Maryland standards, so maybe she could do it right up north as well. Or at least right enough.
“We should,” she said, adjusting her grip on his hand and leaning against him. “We totally should.” For a long moment she was silent, watching the water glimmer in the distance. “I love the light on the water. Remember that time we came here when it was a full moon?”
“Mmm.” He nodded and drank from the bottle.
“That was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” It was like something out of a children’s picture book, all perfect trees and perfect moon, and perfect reflection on both. “I wished on a star that night that I’d see a thousand more full moons like that one.”
He frowned for a moment. “In a best-case scenario, that’s eighty-three years’ worth, without accounting for those times when it’s overcast.”
“That’s what I was thinking!” she said, and laughed at their mutual practicality. “Some months you see nothing, so I thought I was covering my bases by asking for a thousand.”
He smiled at her. “Smart baby.”
“You’ll be there for all of them, right?”
He looked down, but tightened his arm around her. “Of course.”
“So that’s a long time for us.”
He nodded. “I’d be over a hundred.”
“You will be over a hundred.”
He shrugged. “Maybe so.”
“It’s not unrealistic.” She raised her chin. She was certain that would be easily achieved by then. Especially by Nate, who was so healthy it was almost impossible to cut his fingernails because they were so strong. “I can see it.”
“Me too.” He nodded and looked at her in that way that gave her a thrill every time. “Me too.”
She leaned against him and languished in the feeling of being completely safe and completely loved. There wasn’t one thing in this world she wanted or needed right now, and she didn’t care about anyone or anything other than this moment with him.
It was as relaxing as sleeping.
“Will you still love me when I’m a hundred?” she asked.
“I will always love you. No matter what.”
For a long time they sat in silence, watching the setting sun glimmer on the small expanse of water, and listening to the distant sounds of what must have been Theresa and JP in the throes of passion.
“Ouch!” Erin was pretty sure she heard from Theresa at some point. “God, JP. Wrong hole!”
Erin and Nate exchanged glances and laughed.
“I’m so glad I’m not dating new people,” she said to him. “Sounds painful.”
A muscle tightened in his jaw. “You seem to want to date new people sometimes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve heard you talking to your friends about guys you like at school or whatever.”
“I don’t.” But she did, he was right. She just had no idea he had any awareness of it at all. She nestled closer to him. Someone approaching from the back wouldn’t have been sure if it was one person sitting there or two. “Anyway, I’m going to marry you and spend my whole entire life with you. You’r
e stuck.” That was the point. He was forever.
“I hope so.”
“Of course we are! But it doesn’t mean we won’t notice other people now and then.”
“I don’t look at other girls.”
She wasn’t buying that for a second. “Oh, bull!”
“I don’t.”
She drew back and looked at him. He looked like he meant it. And, actually, it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. A pang of guilt stabbed at her. She noticed other guys all the time. Wasn’t that normal? It would be weird to never even see that other people were attractive. She noticed pretty girls too. She was an equal-opportunity noticer. It didn’t mean anything. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because it can’t be true! People notice attractive people. It’s just … the law of attraction.”
“That’s not what the law of attraction is.”
“Whatever. It’s still a fact. There’s no way you can make me believe it’s true that you never notice a pretty girl.”
“It is true.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “Okay. Right. You are never, in any way, aware of other girls. You never notice if someone’s pretty or not. Not even in passing.”
He thought about it for a moment. “I don’t look.”
“Okay, but do you see? Sometimes? I mean, look at Theresa. She’s pretty. Don’t you think?”
“Not my type.”
Erin rolled her eyes. “Come off it, she’s every guy’s type.”
“That’s why she’s not my type. Plus”—he kissed her—“she’s not you.”
“She’s kind of like me. I mean, we do spend a lot of time together.”
He looked at her and laughed. “Are you trying to talk me into Theresa?”
“No, of course not. That would be totally against every rule there is.” She leaned against him again. “I’m just saying it’s normal to notice when a girl’s pretty. Pursuing it would be a whole different thing, but noticing other attractive people is normal. Girls notice attractive girls as well. If guys had any idea what made guys attractive, they’d probably notice them too.”
Always Something There to Remind Me Page 7
