Always Something There to Remind Me (3 page)

“What else do you want, honey?” her father asked, speaking for the first time in about forty-five minutes (the last time being when he asked how much to write the deposit check for, after which he had then, without flinching, written it).

“Horses.”

“
Horses?
” I echoed.

She nodded. “I want pure white horses at the party. Just, you know, standing around. Decoratively.”

“That’s not possible—” I began.

“Wonderful idea, honey!” her mother exclaimed, like she’d just disproven one of Einstein’s theories.

This was ridiculous. “But the party is in the water park.” One of the big draws of the resort is that it has a large indoor water park, themed like a huge, sprawling shipwreck. It’s Gilligan’s Island on steroids. And the entire thing is constructed from painted cement, plastic trees, and corridors of chlorinated water, churning through the fake foliage and down elaborate, and sometimes hidden, slides.

I couldn’t even imagine putting horses in that environment. It would be dangerous for absolutely
everyone
involved. Especially the horses. Why couldn’t everyone here see that?

“Surely you could make it work,” Roxanne’s father blustered, and I could sense he was ready to pay to make it work, even though it was patently
impossible.

“What about…” I thought quickly, trying to come up with something even more fun than horses. Something, perhaps, not actually
alive
. “Balloons?” If my daughter were just a little older I might have been better at coming up with age-appropriate suggestions, but nevertheless I was certain Roxanne, like every kid, could be distracted from anything as long as you presented another, shinier thing.

That wasn’t going to do it, though.

Roxanne looked at me like … well, like I’d just suggested balloons. Let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly an ace at thinking quick.

“I want horses!” she cried, and turned her suddenly tearful eyes to her father.

I want an Oompa Loompa NOW, Daddy!

“Then you will have them,” her father said, patting her arm awkwardly.

“And…” She bit her thumb, thinking—I was sure—of new ways to torture me. “I want to arrive in a helicopter.”

I sighed. “Again, not compatible with the indoor pool idea.”

“Take the roof off!” she cried.

“You know that’s not possible, right?” I looked at her father. A man with that much money had to have at least a
little
sense about that kind of thing.

“What would it take to remove the enclosure and put it back after the party?” he asked, his hand jerking reflexively toward his checkbook.

I gaped at him in stunned silence for a fraction of a second before saying, “You saw the pool area, right? Enclosed or not enclosed, and it
is
enclosed, there’s no way to land a helicopter in there.” I imagine they pictured it teetering atop the volcano slide or maybe hovering over the whole works while Roxanne slid, fireman-style, down a rope into the middle of her party.

“What if you have your guests leave the party area and congregate outside to see you arrive?” I saw her objection form first in her brows. “Or,” I added quickly, “maybe not even come into the party area until you’re there.”

She clapped her hands together. “That’s perfect! Then they can all follow me in! Like a bride or something.”

God help her future wedding coordinator.

And divorce lawyer.

“Maybe we could just shut the pool area and turn the lights out until Roxy arrives,” her mother suggested. “Then she could arrive in the helicopter and lead the way in. It will be like a surprise party, only the guests will be the ones surprised.”

All right, that could work. I jotted
helicopter
and
unhappy guests
on my list. “No problem.”

“On horseback!”

I was about to voice another strong objection to livestock when my boss, Jeremy Rambaur, walked up. Jeremy was in his mid-forties, and as tidy as you can imagine, from his perfectly slicked hair to his pencil-thin mustache. I think he imagined he looked like a modern-day Errol Flynn, but to me he looked a lot more like John Waters. He was so firmly in the closet that I’m not even sure he knew he was gay, though once, after a couple of peach daiquiris, he had confessed to me that he thought Paolo at the front desk was “pretty delish.”

If we were in a seventies sitcom, he could have been played by Paul Lynde.

“How are we doing?” Jeremy asked, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on Roxanne’s. “How’s our little star?” He was asking her, but I knew that Jeremy himself was totally ready for his close-up. He might even have been more invested in this VTV thing going well than the girl and her parents were.

Roxanne pressed her lips together and somehow managed to shrug with her eyebrows. “Well,
she
says I can’t have horses at my party.” She nodded in my direction.

“What?” He looked at me, puzzled.

“In the water park,” I clarified, fully expecting an understanding to come into his eyes. “I said we can’t have horses
in the water park
.”

“Oooh.”

I nodded and waited for him to turn those lemons into lemonade for her.

“That”—Jeremy looked at her sympathetically—“
could
be a problem. Consider what would happen if, erm, nature called for one of them. You wouldn’t want to be the girl remembered as having a sixteenth birthday that smelled of horse dung, now, would you?”

That was good. I had to hand it to him. He knew damn well how stupid it was to even suggest putting horses in that area, but the only way he could get through to this girl was to appeal to her vanity.

How had I missed such an obvious trick?

“Eeeew!” was Roxanne’s predictable reaction. “No! Forget the horses.” She looked at me, like it had been
my
unforgivably stupid idea in the first place.

“Okay.” I pretended to scratch the item off my list.

When I’d turned sixteen, my best friends Theresa and Jordan had thrown me a surprise party in Theresa’s living room. My boyfriend had lied badly about us needing to go by her house on the way out to dinner, so I knew something was up, but pretended to be surprised. It was a small party, my two best friends, their boyfriends, and the two of us—and it was one of the best nights of my life.

Roxanne would never have understood that.

For her it had to be huge, glamorous, and completely about everyone watching and admiring her. You could just tell she was already thinking this party had to outdo any subsequent efforts by her friends to top it.

I made a mental note to suggest to my daughter that maybe her sixteenth birthday would be most gratifyingly spent if we did it while building houses in a disaster area or perhaps in an Appalachian outpost.

I didn’t ever want Camilla to be as wretched and ungrateful as Roxanne was.

“Is everything else going well?” Jeremy asked, his voice overly solicitous. “Everybody happy?” He was desperate to keep this party—and the TV show—here. And already Roxanne had threatened to “just forget the whole thing” three times, a threat that apparently only I recognized as a total bluff. If she just forgot the whole thing now, even her parents and their bank account wouldn’t be able to coordinate it all in another place half as nice with four weeks’ notice. And there would be no guarantee it would be telecast.

“I guess.” Roxanne pouted.

“The production company is going to start shooting tomorrow,” Jeremy went on, a little lilt of glee in his voice. “It should be a
lot
of fun!” He didn’t say it, but his voice held the words,
Oodles and oodles of fun!

I saw my exit. “Well, with that in mind, I really better get back to my office—”

“What about those white birds?” Roxanne interrupted, leveling a challenging gaze on me.

I stopped. Oh, no. “I’m sorry?”

“You know, those white birds they let fly into the air on special occasions? What are they? Eagles or something.”

“Doves?” I asked, picturing them lifting into the air in glorious celebration of Roxanne’s birth, and then pelting, one by one, into the glass roof, only to fall down into the pool, broken necks contorting their bodies into little curved and feathered knots.

Where, if Roxanne had her way, they could then be trampled by drowning horses.

“Doves!” she said, looking into the distance and nodding. “I think so.”

“Let’s hold off on living creatures altogether for a moment,” I said, then, feeling a warning look from Jeremy, added, “just long enough for me to get an idea of what kind of food you want.”

That launched Roxanne into a long list of her favorite foods, everything ranging from Almas caviar (the mention of which made her father stand up a little straighter and clear his throat—a little telekinetic power, and his checkbook probably would have spontaneously combusted) to Cinnabon.

I jotted it all down, trying to figure out how a caterer was going to deal with this, but that wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t take it all on myself. It wasn’t like I was going to be up in my kitchen for the next four weeks baking cinnamon buns for her.

When Roxanne finally stopped for a breath, I said, “You know, I want to get right on top of this so we can make sure we have the best caterer possible for your party.” I gave her a quick smile. “You have my card, right? You let me know if you think of anything else you need or want.” I turned to leave, but Roxanne caught me.

“I don’t have your card.”

I knew that, of course. As surely as I knew if she
did
have my card, I’d be hearing from her day and night. What could I do? It was my job. I stopped and was reaching into my pocket for one when Jeremy handed one over to Roxanne and each of her parents, shooting me a look in the meantime.

“I got these from your office just in case,” he explained pointedly. “Something told me you might forget them.”

I held up my hand with the card in it. “I didn’t.”

“I’ll take that one too.” Roxanne snatched it from me. “I’m always losing things and I want to make sure I can call you. Is your cell number on here?” She scanned it quickly. “Good.”

“Good,” I echoed. “So we’ll talk.”

“Fine.”

This was going to be a long, long month.

*   *   *

Cam and I lived in a condo in McLean Gardens in Northwest D.C. Her father, Jake, had lived in Friendship Heights, about a mile away, which had made for easy handoffs between him and me when Cam was little, but Jake had been killed in a motorcycle accident when Cam was three.

She didn’t even remember him now.

It broke my heart because he had loved her so much and would have gotten so much out of seeing her grow up, and she would have gotten so much from having a dad like him. He’d been handsome, quick-witted, fearless, and, unfortunately, reckless. The very thing that had attracted me to him in the first place—me, the typical goody-goody—had ended up killing him and depriving Cam of a father.

So it had just been the two of us for twelve years now. We’d done everything together. To tell the truth, I’d gotten quite used to having her as my constant companion and the adjustment when she’d gotten old enough to want her own social life had been embarrassingly difficult for me.

Of course, I did have a tendency toward the maudlin. On more than one occasion when she was in elementary school, I had found myself in her bedroom, holding her increasingly threadbare teddy bear and sobbing at the prospect of her getting older and going away to college and then on to her own life.

This, like many things, was a problem I had bought for myself unnecessarily. As it turned out, as Cam had grown up, so had I, albeit on a slightly slower curve. I’d learned to let go more and more with every passing year, to be flexible as her social life expanded into sleepovers at other houses, overnight camp, and so on.

Tonight Cam was staying at her grandmother’s (Jake’s mom’s) and I had plans with Rick Samuels, a guy I’d been seeing for about a year now. Rick was a widower with a fifteen-year-old daughter named Amy, who went to Camilla’s school. They were friends even before Rick and I met, but now they were as close as sisters. The whole situation was very comfortable.

I’d always worried that Camilla’s untraditional upbringing had come at a cost to her. Yes, she knew she was loved—she would remember and understand that her mother had worked very hard to raise her and be an active part of her life. My jobs in her youngest years had included working as a housecleaner—so Cam could come with me—and as a private cook, which took me away from her only two or three hours five nights a week since I did all the prep work at home. But those jobs didn’t pay much and eventually I’d had to bite the bullet and put her into a day-care center near our house and go to work full-time. Still, I was glad to have at least spent so much of her first three years with her almost constantly, glad I was the one to nurse her through the madness of chicken pox and to sleep with her burning, fevered body during a particularly frightening bout with strep when she was only two and a half.

So I knew
I
had done the best I could, and I was fairly confident that Cam knew that too. But knowing your frenzied mother
tried
isn’t the same as growing up in a security blanket composed of two stable parents and maybe even a sibling or two. An ideal that few people achieve? Maybe. But I’d had it and I wanted no less for my own child.

But we don’t always get what we want.

As I got into the car after spending the afternoon dealing with Roxanne, I pushed her number on speed dial.

“Thank you,” I said to her as soon as she answered.

“What for?” she asked.

“For being the perfect daughter.” I didn’t know how Roxanne’s parents could stand dealing with her all the time. They must have wanted to tear their hair out.

Camilla didn’t even ask for an explanation. “Sure! Now can I get an iPhone?”

“No.”

“Mom—”

“
No.
”

“It was worth a shot,” she said on a sigh.

I had to laugh. “Hey, I wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t at least try. Twenty times a day.”