Catch a Falling Star

by Jessica Starre

  But Matthias could picture it so clearly, the woman who would make cookies with him, blonde and beautiful because he was after all Matthias Gustafson, laughing up at him as they measured and stirred. Chocolate chip cookies, he thought. When there were children they would make cut-out cookies, the little ones wielding the cutters and adding sprinkles.

  He hoped he would find her soon, the woman who liked to make cookies. No one had ever baked a cookie in this kitchen. Together, they would change that.

  Chapter Two

  Brianna glanced at the clock. She had made progress on the pile of invitations but not enough. She was supposed to meet Missy Ryerson for drinks at six, to discuss Missy’s upcoming wedding. Missy showed every sign of being a bridezilla, but she would be a coup for Brianna’s fledgling event-planning business. Missy would have many weddings, Brianna guessed, thereby belying the Once in a Lifetime concept, but Brianna knew she would absolutely intend for each of them to be her last.

  Missy had friends, friends with money, and that was what a woman with a fledgling event-planning company needed — referrals to people who needed events planned and who could afford to hire someone to plan them. Which meant Brianna needed to pick up the pace and get these invitations finished and in the mail if she had any hope of getting to her meeting on time.

  She pulled the next envelope toward her, then remembered she hadn’t told Natalie about the after-work drink with Missy. She grabbed her cell and hit the icon for Nat. The phone rang but went to voicemail. What would Natalie be doing this time of day where she couldn’t hear her cell? If she’d turned it off, why? Her classes were over for the day, and she should be studying.

  The familiar tension knotted at Brianna’s stomach. She pictured her little sister passed out on the floor and her heart clutched. She could visualize ambulance lights flashing in the street. She could —

  She closed her eyes. Worst-case scenario thinking wasn’t helpful but when the worst case had come too many times, it was a hard habit to break. She tried to keep her voice steady as she left her message.

  Brianna really really loved her little sister. But sometimes she thought she could hardly wait for someone else to be in charge of her.

  • • •

  Natalie sat on the front step and tried to catch her breath. Mowing lawns was a lot harder than it looked. She wiped sweat from her forehead. Joe was finishing up for her. (“It just takes practice!”) She watched him push the mower, moving at a trot. He had a nice butt. If Brianna were here, Natalie would say, “Don’t you think Joe has a great ass?” and then Brianna would be shocked, shocked, that Natalie would think such a thing.

  Brianna didn’t realize that Natalie was a grown woman, and Natalie understood why. Brianna hadn’t noticed. Brianna didn’t have time to notice anything, not the unmowed lawn, not the peeling paint, not men’s butts — or women’s butts, either, although Natalie didn’t think Brianna went that way. Sometimes she thought the not-noticing was connected to Brianna’s almost-perfect squelching of anything resembling a personal life. She never expressed the desire for anything other than what she already had. Except to pay the damned bills and to make a go of Once in a Lifetime.

  What Natalie guessed was if Brianna started noticing the peeling porch rails, then she would notice she hadn’t had a date in one thousand years, too, and that would be more depressing than she wanted to contemplate. So she just refused to notice anything.

  “Hey!” Joe called out, cutting off the mower. “All done!”

  “Hey,” she responded. “It looks great.”

  He came over and flopped on the front step, smelling like sweat and new-mown grass. Now came the awkward part. She came out with it: “Do I owe you — ” and hoped he said no because she didn’t have a damned dime.

  “Water would be great,” he said. “That’s all I need.”

  He gave her a grin that said he knew about not having a damned dime, but it wasn’t a judgmental, superior grin. It was conspiratorial. Been there, the grin said. Or maybe we’re all in this together.

  She went into the house for the water, thinking he reminded her of someone. Then she had it. Mr. Pendleton’s black Labrador, a very sweet and not terribly bright dog. She giggled. Joe was not a man of great depth. He did not have layers to peel back. He was just open, honest, and cheerful. Brianna would be highly suspicious, but she was highly suspicious about everyone. Brianna was a human Jasmine, right down to the barking at strangers.

  Natalie put some chocolate chip cookies on a plate, made fresh today after class, and brought them out to Joe.

  • • •

  “You should have been done half an hour ago,” said Carl, Joe’s oldest brother and the eponymous owner of Carl’s Lawn and Garden, when Joe checked in on his cell phone.

  “Got hung up at Mrs. Bauer’s,” Joe said briefly and almost truthfully.

  “Uh huh,” said Carl, like he seriously doubted it, but Carl had never been young, so what did he know about pretty girls.

  Natalie had remembered Joe from class, which he hadn’t expected her to do, not in a million years. From the first, he had seen how pretty she was — like an angel. He was going to start reading poetry or something so he could come up with a better analogy. Everyone she knew probably said she reminded them of an angel.

  Now that he had met her, really met her, with a conversation and everything, and discovered how nice she was, and how much he wanted to see her smile, he wanted to be different from everyone else. He wanted to be the one who compared her to a summer’s day instead of an angel. Or maybe not that. Something that would make her smile.

  Oh boy. He was in trouble if he was already thinking about how he might make her smile the next time he saw her.

  “I’m off to do the Selkirks,” Joe said to his brother. “Unless you’ve got something else for me?”

  “That’s fine. Ma wants to know if you’ll pick up some extra parmesan on your way home.”

  Ma had obviously asked Carl to perform this task or she would have called Joe’s cell but Carl was good at delegating.

  “You bet,” Joe said, and hung up. He put the truck in gear and looked in the rearview mirror at the girl sitting on the porch steps with her dog until he was too far away to see her anymore.

  • • •

  Brianna felt like her smile had been superglued to her face. She’d been sitting here with Missy for — she snuck a glance at her watch — forty-five minutes and so far all she’d heard was Missy bitching about the other wedding planners she’d dealt with. There’d been no You’re hired or even Let me see your contract.

  Just a lot of moaning and complaining. Which, Brianna reminded herself, she was going to have to learn to love if she wanted to make a go of this business.

  Her phone was on vibrate, but it hadn’t vibrated, which meant Natalie hadn’t called or texted her back. The anxiety was giving her the familiar queasy feeling in her stomach. She’s fine, Brianna tried to tell herself. I didn’t tell her to call me when she got the message. It’s nothing, she’s fine …

  “I think I see what your problem is, Missy,” Brianna cut in finally, having suffered enough. “You’re dealing with wedding planners. I’m an event planner. And we’re talking about planning an event for you, a Once in a Lifetime event.” She reached into her bag and pulled out the folder she’d been up all night last night preparing and opened it.

  Missy stopped bitching and leaned forward and Brianna thought, I’m good at this and relaxed into the sale.

  • • •

  Natalie kept her nose in the textbook as Brianna pulled her little Ford into the driveway and got out. Brianna gave a theatrical start, which meant she’d noticed the lawn, but Natalie just turned a page and gave Jasmine a pat.

  Jasmine lifted her head, saw who it was, forbore to bark, and put her head back on her paws. Brianna slung her bag over her shoulder and marched up the walk.

  “Did you get my message?” she said, probably thinking she sounded calm.

  �
��Yes,” Natalie said. She realized by Brianna’s gritted teeth that she would have liked Natalie to call back but Natalie refused to feel guilty about failing to do so. It would do Brianna good to lighten up a little.

  Brianna gave a crisp nod. “Fine. Who mowed the lawn?”

  “I did,” Natalie said, not entirely truthfully but Brianna didn’t need to know that.

  “You did?” Brianna rocked back on her heels, clearly not expecting that answer. “You don’t even know how to start the mower.”

  “Yeah, well, Joe showed me how.”

  “Joe.” Brianna sat down on the step, the exact step where Joe had sat, only she looked a lot more belligerent than Joe had. When Brianna looked belligerent, her red curls stood out in agitated poufs and her green eyes flashed. She was tall and statuesque, so it was quite impressive. When Natalie was younger she’d thought that was what an avenging angel would look like, Brianna on a tear.

  “Joe’s a guy from school.”

  Brianna nodded, still belligerent but trying to pretend she wasn’t. “And you asked him to mow the lawn?”

  “No,” Natalie said, as patiently as she could. “He works for a lawn service, and he was mowing Mrs. Bauer’s lawn and I said, ‘Can you teach me how to do that?’ and he did.”

  She picked up her accounting book again, knowing that wasn’t going to stop Brianna.

  “Why?” Brianna ran an agitated hand through her curls, making them go askew in all directions. Now that Natalie was no longer a kid, she thought Brianna looked less like an avenging angel and more like an impatient Raggedy Ann doll, but Natalie would never tell her that.

  “I wanted to learn.”

  “I could have shown you.”

  “Could have,” Natalie muttered, “but haven’t.”

  Brianna sighed. “I know it looked awful but I was planning to do it tomorrow after work. I hate the idea of you overexerting yourself.”

  “Mowing the lawn isn’t going to hurt me, or induce a relapse, or whatever you seem to think will happen,” Natalie said, and now she wasn’t trying to be patient anymore.

  “I worry,” Brianna said, and she said it apologetically, but Natalie was beyond fed up with it. She clapped her book closed and got to her feet, dislodging Jasmine, who gave a protesting bark, and said, “You know what, Brianna? That’s your problem, not mine, and I’m not going to sit on my ass for the rest of my life just because you worry.”

  The door slammed shut behind her. It only felt good for about two seconds.

  • • •

  Well, that went well. Brianna played with Jasmine’s ears and gave the dog’s head a good rub. She knew that she was sometimes overprotective of Natalie, and okay, Natalie was an adult now, but old habits died hard. And Natalie didn’t understand what it was like to watch, helpless, as her sister fought for one more day. She got that Natalie had had it much worse than Brianna ever had, but it was Brianna who had held it all together, wasn’t it? It was Brianna who had always made sure they had a roof over their heads, and food to eat, and decent medical care. It was Brianna who’d given up college so Natalie could go, and Brianna —

  Who had never once spent a day in the hospital as a patient. Who had never once had poison injected into her veins. Who had never once wondered if she would wake up tomorrow. Brianna had had a childhood. She had played tag with the other kids in the neighborhood and skinned her knees falling on the basketball court at the park. She hadn’t been exactly carefree, but she had set up elaborate imaginary quests for her dolls to go on and blown bubbles at the sky and flown kites in the springtime and thought the big wide world was hers for the taking.

  She leaned back on her elbows and sighed. “I’m sorry, Nat,” she said, though she knew Nat couldn’t hear her. The slammed door stood between them. “I’m so damned sorry for both of us.”

  • • •

  Richard Daniels looked at the map of Crestview that was open on the seat next to him. The town ought to be more familiar to him; he had lived here for ages, but that had been a long time ago and the interceding years had made his memory hazy. And the town had grown. You couldn’t properly call it a town anymore. It was a city.

  There were fewer familiar landmarks now. Open fields had turned into housing developments, buildings had been torn down and new ones erected in their place, looking entirely different. None of the houses looked right, or the trees. What had once been saplings had grown tall and shady. Funny how that happened, how time got away from you.

  He folded up the map and stuck it in the pocket of the driver’s side door and started the car, a rental he had picked up from the airport. It was getting late, and he wasn’t even sure she — they — lived there anymore, at the house he and Chrissy had bought in a spasm of delusion about the way things could be.

  He’d go by … on Saturday. He felt like a coward when the relief washed over him. A man ought not be so afraid of facing his own family.

  Chapter Three

  “Look at this,” Anita Trainor was saying, gesturing at her arm, which was in a cast. The cast was in a sling. She looked more mad than anything.

  “What happened?” Brianna asked the curator, putting her pen down. The seemingly never-ending pile of invitations had gone out and she had a bunch of other tasks to catch up on but didn’t mind an interruption. It wasn’t like her job was a thrill a minute.

  “Stupid accident. I fell. I got home late from dinner last night, and the front porch light had burned out, and I missed my step and fell. And broke my wrist.”

  Brianna winced. “That sucks.” She remembered her father stumbling home late at night, too inebriated to even get his key in the lock. More than once he’d broken a bone or chipped a tooth as a result of a drunken fall. Though it was probably unfair of Brianna to speculate on the underlying reasons for Anita’s fall. Sometimes people just missed a step in the dark.

  “Yeah, well, what really sucks is trying to do my job one-handed.” Brianna tried not to be shocked to hear Anita use the word “sucks.” “I’m supposed to go over to to see Mr. G today — ”

  She must have said something else, but once Brianna heard “Mr. G” she seemed incapable of following the rest of the comment. G for Gorgeous, G for Generous. He hadn’t called her yet today —

  “So?” Anita said impatiently, which meant she was waiting for an answer, which meant the rest of the comment must have been a question. If only thoughts of Mr. G didn’t make Brianna’s mind so fuzzy.

  “I’m sorry,” Brianna said. There was nothing to do but own up to her distraction. Not that she intended to reveal the nature of that distraction. “My mind was on something else. What did you ask?”

  “Hmpf,” Anita said. “I asked you if you’d be able to come over to Mr. G’s house with me and help me pack and transport that plate.”

  Brianna tried not to grin at her unexpected good luck. What she ended up with was probably something like an annoying smirk. “Sure,” she said. “I can finish this stuff later.”

  “Fine. You can drive,” Anita said grumpily, but Brianna didn’t even mind. Mr. G had said there would be “someone” at the house, which probably meant a housekeeper, but it was possible he might be there. She knew he was a partner in the prestigious law firm of Burke, Gustafson, and Whitehead, but one of the perks of being a partner was that you didn’t have to report to the office from nine to five. Unlike being a lowly administrative assistant. If nothing else, she could see where he lived — the estate was supposed to be truly spectacular. Brianna had never been there before. For some reason, Mr. G failed to invite her to his parties.

  Brianna scooped up her purse and slung it over her shoulder as she followed Anita back to her lab/office, where she indicated a black metal case that looked, and was, extremely heavy. Anita picked up a box of packing materials with her good arm. Brianna hefted the heavy case and led the way down to the parking lot, puffing a little by the time she got to the battered Ford.

  She heaved the case into the trunk (“Careful!” Anita exc
laimed), put the box of packing materials next to it, and then had to pause to dump all the library books from the passenger seat into the backseat so that Anita could get in. Brianna leaned against the driver’s side door for a minute, trying to get her breath back. That equipment was damned heavy.

  When she climbed in, she saw Anita was wrestling one-handed with the seatbelt but when Brianna opened her mouth to offer to help, she was rewarded with a death glare, so she closed her mouth. While she waited for Anita to subdue the seatbelt she said, “What’s in that case?”

  Anita grunted like she would expect any employee of the Cooper-Renfield Museum to know the answer to that, but Brianna worked in the front office, not down in the dungeons with the actual art objects. Brianna waited patiently. Anita never passed up a chance to lecture, even about something she thought Brianna should know.

  “I have to ascertain to the limited extent I can — under the circumstances — that what Mr. G is offering is in fact a genuine Yuan dynasty plate,” she said in her usual rapid-fire delivery. “So the case contains various pieces of equipment, like a microscope, for me to use to examine the plate. There is no point in bringing it back to the museum if I can tell right away that it’s a fake.”

  There you go. Brianna, who didn’t trust anyone, would have trusted Mr. G just because he was Mr. G. This is what lust does to your brain, Brianna.

  Anita got her seatbelt buckled into place finally and concluded, “We certainly don’t want to discover it’s a fake once it’s in our keeping, because then we potentially create another issue.”

  Brianna could guess what that other issue might be, or in fact, she could guess what several issues might be, proving she hadn’t worked at the museum for eight years for nothing. She nodded and put the car in gear.

  • • •

  Matthias was looking up the historical precedents in a particularly abstruse area of patent law, the lucrative and usually engaging focus of his law practice, but he couldn’t seem to keep his mind on it this morning. It wasn’t that he kept getting interrupted — he was working from his home office today and had all the peace and quiet he needed. And it wasn’t that he was uncomfortable, or hungry, or anything of that nature. His office was quite well-appointed — luxurious, even — and the house held anything a man needed in the way of food or drink.