Between You and Me (19 page)

“Okay, well, the dress is definitely the thing we should do last, but I brought you some more sketches. I’ve spoken to the designers personally, so there are no middlemen,” I say as I lay my suitcase flat. Ignoring me, she drops to her knees to pull out the tablecloth samples, silverware designs, floral portfolios.

“Kel, focus.” Andy leans over the couch and tugs her up by the elbow. “Can everyone just sit please?” Andy brings over the suite’s black phone, its long cord snaking across the room from the jack, as if drawing a line between Aaron and the rest of us.

“Let’s bang this out,” Kelsey says, bringing her velour knees up as
Andy sits next to me, his girth shifting my thigh into him. I inch away. “Then I want to see lace samples. I want to see that video of Brad and Jen’s fireworks.”

“Not sure we’re going to be needing all that,” Michelle says, licking a glob of sour cream off her thumb.

The phone rings, and Andy looks firmly to everyone before answering. “Hello, Terrance,” he says, angling forward. “Thanks for taking the time tonight. We’re, uh, we’re real sorry for this.” I am in trouble. I’m in trouble, and they were just waiting for Terrance.

“Hey, Andy. Everyone there?”

“Yep.”

“Terrance, I am just so sorry.” I lean over the phone.

“Hey, Terrance!” Kelsey greets him playfully.

“Kelsey, it’s one in the damn morning in New York.” His voice cuts into the room. “I do not want to be working right now.” My mouth goes dry.

Kelsey reaches her arm to Aaron, arching her back over the couch. “If you can just tell everyone here to chill—”

“First,”
Terrence says firmly, “I need to hear shit straight up,
then
I’m gonna make a call on what level of chill-ness we’re at. Cheryl’s on the line.”

“Hi, guys,” Cheryl, Kelsey’s publicist, says in her nasal tone that manages to be simultaneously imperious and flat. A woman so strategically devoid of personality that everyone who talks to her prostrates themselves just to earn an inflection.

“Let’s cut to it. Aaron, you there?” Terrance asks.

“Yes, sir.” He clears his throat stepping forward. “Good evening, sir.”

“Did you, or did you not, serve time for dealing?”

What?
I notice Andy’s battered laptop sitting on the dining table. Another of TMZ’s pitchfork-toting headlines. A picture of a teenage Aaron—a mug shot: “KELSEY’S EX-CON.”

For a hundredth of a second, I allow myself to be relieved that this isn’t about my being fired.

“I did, sir. It’s a juvie record—it shoulda been wiped. I don’t even know how they found it.”

“If you took a shit in Antarctica, they gonna find it. Busted for selling to kids?”

Andy exhales like a bull. Kelsey tugs the elastic out of her hair and runs it between her teeth. “They’re making it sound like I was selling crack to kindergartners,” Aaron says.

“Were you?”

“No, sir. No way. I was sixteen selling pot to other sixteen-year-olds. I’m not proud, but it was part of a big bust, and there was a new mayor with this zero-tolerance policy. I did some time. Show me a guy from my hood who didn’t.”

“Fair,” Terrance concedes. Andy glances up.

“But it scared me straight, and I got out. I’m a singer, sir, and that’s my whole story, hand to God.”

“You don’t have a story,” Cheryl corrects him. “There’s just Kelsey’s, and this taints it . . . ” Cheryl trails off in a way that makes the situation feel hopeless.

“I do not want to be filling my time with this,” Terrance says. Michelle looks witheringly at Kelsey, who twists the rubber band around her wrist like a tourniquet. “Cher, fix it. I gotta bounce. Later.”

Aaron circles the couch to lean over the phone. “Cheryl?” he says hesitantly. “I will tell anything to whoever you want. I’ll do whatever I have to do to make this right.”

“Oh, we’re not there yet,” Cheryl scoffs as if he’s independently taken this to melodrama, as if he hadn’t just been told he was tainting his fiancée.

“Or Cheryl?” Michelle asks. “I’ve been thinking we could do the mother-daughter thing again. It’s family-oriented—”

“As of this moment, Kelsey is the grown woman.” Cheryl cuts her off. “Any soundbites or images linking her to childhood are only going to unconsciously make people think of Aaron selling
her
drugs. No, nonono.” Cheryl lets out a dry laugh. “As of tonight, Michelle, you’re benched.”

“O-kay,” Michelle says, the last syllable lifting as her cheeks redden. Kelsey’s eyes flit to her. “I’m . . . ” Michelle stands. “I’m going to take a tub.” She walks quickly out of the living room.

“Aaron, make a list of everything that could possibly be dug up on
you. Have you raped anyone, stolen anything. Aaannything. I need that pronto. Aaron, big picture. There is no ‘you,’ there’s only the brand, the idea of Kelsey people fall asleep with at night, what keeps music downloading and perfume flying off the shelves.” Aaron’s eyebrows rise. “Let’s reconvene first thing in the morning while I get a read on how this is playing, ’kay? Get some rest. Not you, Aaron. You have work to do. ’Night.”

“ ’Night,” we say as Andy hits the receiver and the dial tone fills the room. Aaron walks to their bedroom.

“You’re fucking this up. You have
everything,
and you wanna piss it away on some . . . ”

“Say it.” His eyes narrow at her challenge. “Say it, Daddy.”

“Don’t mess with me tonight.”

“You’re the last person who can judge him.”

Andy swipes the potpourri dish off the table, smashes it into the wall and stalks out. We stare at their door as the running water shuts off, and Michelle’s voice comes through cajoling and light. “. . . wanted this over, and now it almost is! She blew it with Eric—she’ll blow it with this guy. We both know she’s too wrapped up in herself for a real relationship.”

Kelsey crumples into Aaron, who shuts the door behind them.

Sometime in the night, I
move to the floor to escape the couch buttons that seem designed to dig at all angles, then try to cover my nose to block the lingering scent of vomit and carpet cleaner that only someone sober and attempting to sleep down here would notice, and
then
, unable to stop staring at the glass shards and dusty petals, I give up and go out to the wrap-around balcony.

Aaron startles. “Hey,” he says, putting out his cigarette and folding the hotel stationery he’s writing on.

“Hey.” I untuck my crossed arm to give him a little wave.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

I lean against the metal balustrade, staring at the lights of downtown Little Rock. “I need a mattress—and even then, it’s touch and go. Runs in the family.”

“I’ve noticed,” he says.

“You know where I slept well? On the bus.”

“Maybe you need a vibrating bed,” he suggests drily.

“They still make those?”

“I bet somewhere in Asia.”

I smile. “How’s Kelsey?”

He nods, considering. “It’s tough. This is tough.” He looks down between his knees, where he dangles his pen. “I’m not what they’re saying,” he says quietly.

“I know—”

“When I got out of juvie with forty-two bucks in my pocket, I was nothing. But I’ve got a solid career, a nice apartment in the Valley.”

“I know.”

“I love her,” he says to the concrete.

“I know,” I say again, because it just seems like what he really needs to hear right now—that someone in there sees him.

“How come you get that?”

“Because I find her incredibly lovable, too. Just, you know, being a goofball in her T-shirt. Especially being a goofball in her T-shirt.”

“Yeah.” He holds up his list. “I’m trying to think of anyone who might have shit to say to the press. I started with my parents.”

“Oh.”

The light turns on behind the curtains of their room, and Kelsey comes out in her robe, lifting lips for him to kiss as he goes inside.

“Hey, chicky,” I say.

“Hey.”

“I’m excited about the wedding,” I offer as she leans over the balcony, the wind lifting her hair. She tugs a pack of American Spirits from her pocket and lights one. I watch as she inhales deeply. “We can pick a new venue tomorrow—I totally hear you about not wanting to do it at the house—the copters drowning out the vows. What about reconsidering the Pantheon?”

“Is she right?”

“What?”

“Am I too wrapped up in myself?” she asks, her voice deep and damp.

“You’re a bride. Brides are supposed to—”

“Is that why you gave up on me?” She looks down over the railing.

“What? No—”

“Tour break is in two weeks.” She stubs out the cigarette and takes my hand. “I want to do it May twentieth, on my birthday. Wherever. Let’s just do it. Understand?”

I nod. Her fingers squeeze mine, and then she turns to go back inside. “Happily ever after?” she asks as she touches the glass, and in the reflection I see her looking up at me, so many ages at once, holding a broken sippy cup, hair band, tap shoe, the expression the same, my need to solve this for both of us the same.

“It’ll be beautiful.”

After hitting the LAX tarmac, I case the city, reassessing potential venues for vulnerabilities to aerial, land, and oceanic telephoto assault. Having exhausted the options, I pull into a parking lot to snarf a hot dog and find myself staring with caffeine-dilated eyes at a windowless single-story building. “City of Angels Bowling Alley,” I sarcastically update Kelsey on the speakerphone. To my surprise, she goes nuts.

“Aaron loves to bowl! Make it home, Lo, on its most perfect day. And make it us. I lovelove
love
it. Whatever it takes!”

Translation:
no
budget. And I don’t mean like it wasn’t drawn up. I mean, like, get the greenhouse in Holland that can flash-harvest whatever we want. The type of no budget of which bridal dreams are made and wedding planners’ spines broken. “Whatever” spiraled into an amount that, while not quite enough to restore democracy to a medium-size dictatorship, could plausibly fund an attempt at ousting the dictator. Price became weirdly meaningless. Five thousand to get it here by Tuesday? Ten thousand to have it rush-engraved? The courier is leaving for the South of France to get centerpiece pebbles, and they only have first-class tickets left? Done, done, and done. I have actually worn out the strip on an American Express Black card.

In the last fourteen days, I have located an unopened bottle of the perfume our Grandma Ruth wore that was discontinued eleven years ago, had nail polish made in the exact shade of Kelsey’s Madrid hotel-room sheets, and reunited the band whose song was playing when Kelsey and Aaron first locked lips on the dance floor. And at every exchange, every transaction, every pickup and dropoff with
the assistant of an assistant of an assistant, I’ve overseen the signing of a nondisclosure form in triplicate. It states that the signer will never mention that he or she has participated in the preparations for Kelsey Wade’s “birthday party” or risk the loss of home, family, and pets. My hotel room has become a warren of boxes overflowing with these things that I continue to think would make a striking art installation.

But as I stand at the entrance to the transformed bowling alley, I have to say, it’s really something. The fireproof ceiling tiles are hidden beneath yellow and white ticking, like our grandmother’s porch-swing cushions, making it feel as if we’re in a tent on a sunny day. The fluorescents have been swapped out for milk-painted wagon-wheel chandeliers. The walls are made of perfectly symmetrical blooms of yellow roses like Ruth grew in her backyard. I don’t mean dotted, I mean packed, a full perfect bloom for every square inch. A wide plank floor has been laid over the lanes and gutters. It originates from an old barn I located outside Portland that we had deconstructed and shipped down, which was cheaper than paying the go-to faux painter guy to make a new floor look old. P.S., I’m coming back as that dude.

The piped-in smell of freshly cut hay, the Mason jars of gin fizzes, and the faint soundtrack of crickets make me think of, well, honestly . . . it’s what Vegas’s Venetian is to Venice.

“Only things missing are the mosquitoes,” Michelle snipes before turning to greet the next round of baffled family. Hoping to keep Kelsey out of target range as long as possible, I hover near Michelle as our relatives arrive to discover they’re not here for her daughter’s twenty-fifth but for the event that Michelle was convinced had been averted. “That’s right, it’s a wedding, isn’t that a riot? Now, go make yourselves at home at the bar.” Michelle pivots them to the transformed shoe rental.

Her sister appears at the draped inner entrance, her youngest daughter, Caroline, in tow. “We’re just so sorry Delia couldn’t make it. My sister’s such a workaholic,” Caroline says. “Kelsey’s wedding! She’ll be heartbroken to miss it.”

But she wasn’t invited.

Michelle jumps in. “Oh, that’s sweet. Now, let me look at you! Holy crap, Caroline, that Atkins has made you into a supermodel.”

Through the crowd, I see Finn’s profile emerge, here at Kelsey’s urging that we “find our princes” in tandem. I step around my congregating relatives and see that, unlike everyone else in their jeans and khakis, he’s dressed for the actual event.