Goodbye To All That (41 page)

“It’s not that we need the money,” Brooke had hastened to assure her. “We don’t. But he thinks I’m bored. And you know what? He’s right.”

“Bored.” Why had Jill kept echoing Brooke? Why had she had such difficulty imagining Brooke being bored? Brooke had twins; surely that couldn’t be boring. And Brooke was beautiful. Jill had always assumed that beautiful women, especially beautiful women whose rich husbands pampered them, couldn’t possibly be bored.

“I wouldn’t charge you, of course. This is just an experiment. If you’d be willing, of course.”

“Willing to what?” Jill had sounded mentally challenged to herself.

“Willing to let me discuss your situation with the Old Rockford Inn. Let me see what I can do.”

Jill had figured she’d have nothing to lose by letting Brooke intervene—she did have a contract with the place, after all, so even if Gloria didn’t like Brooke’s attitude, she couldn’t unilaterally erase the Abigail Sackler reception from the inn’s calendar. And given that Jill hadn’t done particularly well dealing with Gloria on her own, she’d seen no downside to letting Brooke conquer her boredom by toiling on Abbie’s behalf.

Brooke had arrived at Jill’s house the next morning at ten, dressed like a Junior Leaguer in a stylish sweater set and tailored tweedy trousers that made her look slimmer than any woman who’d given birth to twins had a right to be. Jill had felt profoundly dowdy in her Red Sox sweatshirt and jeans. But Brooke didn’t order her to change into a less disreputable outfit, and today Brooke was in charge. She was the party planner, the unpaid pro.

“What’s the theme of Abbie’s bat mitzvah?” she asked as Jill drove her through town to the inn.

“The theme? ‘Happy bat mitzvah,’ I guess.”

“It needs to be something more than that,” Brooke suggested. “Just like the theme of your parents’ fortieth anniversary party wasn’t ‘Happy Anniversary.’”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t have worked,” Jill agreed. “Two years later and they’re kaput.” Stopped at a red light, she reflected on the party Brooke had hosted for her parents. A juke box filled with sixties rock, she recalled. Psychedelic wall posters illuminated by black lights. A peace sign on the powder room door. A couple of strategically placed lava lamps.

“Summer Of Love,” Brooke said, answering Jill’s unvoiced question. “So what’s Abbie’s theme?”

Jill panicked. She’d signed Abbie up for Hebrew school, booked a venue for the party and sent out “Save the Date” postcards, but she hadn’t come up with a theme. “Maybe you ought to ask Abbie,” she said, evading the question with a twinge of shame. “She might know what the theme is.”

“I’ll do that.” Brooke reached into her massive red-leather purse, pulled out a matching red leather folder, opened it and jotted a note to herself. “So, the inn. What are you gripes? What are we fighting for?”

“The price per plate, for one thing. They increased the price they quoted us. They said rising fuel prices are responsible for the hike. And there’s some disagreement about how long the DJ will be allowed to play.”

“You’ve already booked a DJ,” Brooke said.

Jill suffered a moment’s panic. Had that been a mistake? Should she have waited until she’d decided on a theme before hiring the DJ? He’d been recommended by Emma Tovick’s mother, and she’d wanted to lock him in before someone else hired him for that evening.

But then she glanced at Brooke, who was merely jotting another note into her red leather folder, and her panic abated. Brooke was asking for information, not sitting in judgment. At least Jill hoped so.

“I’ve hired a photographer, too,” she said, figuring that while Brooke had her red leather folder out, she should jot that down as well. “You have to get them under contract way in advance.”

“Okay.” Brooke snapped her pen shut with a decisive click as Jill steered into the inn’s parking lot. “Anything else?”

Jill sighed. Her biggest worry was her parents. What if they were still separated by next spring, when the affair was scheduled? What if they were divorced? What if they were so bitter and hostile they wouldn’t talk to each other?

She doubted Brooke and her little red notebook could solve that problem.

“It looks pretty,” Brooke said, gazing out at the charming structure, classic New England white clapboard with black shingles and a sloping slate roof.

“It’s even prettier in the spring, when all the flowers are in bloom,” Jill told her. Now the driveway and front walk were lined with the shriveled brown remnants of the chrysanthemums that had been blooming the last time she’d visited—which had been when Gloria had informed her of the price increase. “I didn’t want to go to one of those affair factories, with four bar mitzvahs going on at the same time.”

Brooke crinkled her pretty nose. “So you’ll be the only affair here on that night?”

“Other than whatever might be going on in the bedrooms upstairs,” Jill joked.

Brooke gave her an indulgent smile. “Let’s go slay the dragon,” she said calmly. She didn’t have to rev herself up with an adrenaline-producing pep talk. She was the sort of woman who could slay dragons without chipping a nail.

They emerged from the car, and Jill noticed, in the glow of the late autumn sun, that Brooke’s hair was darker. She’d sensed as much when Brooke had arrived at her house, but Brooke had been standing beneath the porch’s overhang then, and they’d left through the garage, and Jill hadn’t gotten a good look at her hair in natural light. Definitely darker, and shaped into layers and stray wisps. The cut was actually pretty similar to Melissa’s. Jill wondered whether Luc Brondo cut every woman’s hair the same way, or only Bendel women’s hair. If she drove down to New York, would he do her hair that way, too? No doubt it would look better than it did right now, gathered at the nape of her neck in a pale blue scrunchy.

The hairstyle looked gorgeous on Brooke. Naturally—everything about Brooke was gorgeous. But it didn’t really look like
her
.

“You’ve changed your hair,” Jill commented.

Brooke gave her an eye roll that rivaled Abbie’s. Jill hadn’t realized she’d said anything exasperating, but as soon as Brooke spoke she realized Brooke’s irritation wasn’t directed at her. “Doug hates it.”

“It looks good,” Jill lied. Well, no, that wasn’t a lie. It did look good. It just didn’t look right.

“What he hates about it is that Melissa’s boyfriend cut it. Her ex-boyfriend, I guess.”

Jill wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be surprised by this revelation. She decided not to bother pretending. She wasn’t a particularly good actress. “Melissa mentioned that Luc had done your hair. And that things weren’t working out between her and Luc.”

“I think Doug was jealous,” Brooke admitted.

“Of your hair?”

“Of my going to New York and having Luc do it. I can’t imagine what he’d be jealous about, though. I mean, Luc—he’s a
hair stylist
. Not to criticize your sister’s taste in men, but
 . . .
a
hair stylist
? What would I ever want with a
hair stylist
? Other than to let him do my hair, of course.”

Jill was surprised that Brooke would reveal anything so personal about her relationship with Doug. She never talked about things like that. She was so reserved, so contained, so goddamn perfect. She didn’t have difficulties, with Doug or anyone else.

Except, apparently, she did. Jill slowed to a stop next to her car’s front bumper and stared at Brooke. Maybe she wasn’t so perfect, after all. Jill noticed a weariness in Brooke’s exquisite features, the first microscopically faint lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes and a hint of tension in her pink-glossed lips.

Maybe she
was
bored. Maybe she needed to be a party planner more than she knew.

“Doug isn’t a jealous-type person,” Jill argued. “He’s so
 . . .
” She was going to say full of himself, but she chose a more positive phrase instead. “Self-assured. I can’t imagine he’d ever feel threatened by a hair stylist.” She hoped she didn’t sound as snobby as Brooke when she mentioned Luc’s profession.

“I couldn’t imagine it, either,” Brooke said, starting up the walk and forcing Jill to follow, even though she’d rather have remained out in the parking lot until they’d finished their discussion. She and Brooke had never spoken like this before, as if they were confidantes.

But Brooke was ready to slay the Gloria dragon, and Jill took a couple of skipping steps to keep up with her. “It’s my parents,” she said as they reached the porch.

That brought Brooke to an abrupt halt. “Your parents?”

“Doug is feeling insecure because my parents have split.”

“He implied something about that.”

“We’re all feeling it,” Jill explained. “It’s like an earthquake. The ground has stopped trembling, but we’re still, I don’t know. Shaky. Waiting for the next tremor.”

“Hmm.” Brooke pondered Jill’s explanation. “Doug never said he felt shaky. Mostly he was worried about who would take care of the girls while we were in Nevis. Thank God you agreed. We’re very grateful.”

“It’s no problem, really.” Okay, that was a lie. But if Brooke could get Gloria to honor the original price she’d quoted for catering Abbie’s bat mitzvah, Jill would consider baby-sitting Madison and Mackenzie for a week a fair trade.

“I really don’t think when your mother moved out on your father she thought about the impact that would have on everyone.” Brooke sounded more than a little judgmental.

“I’m sure she didn’t.” That had been the point, of course. Jill’s mother had decided to stop worrying about the impact of her every act on the rest of the family.

“But to tell the truth, sometimes things work out for the best. The girls adore Abbie, and they love horsing around with Noah. It’ll be fun for them, even if you don’t spoil them as much as their grandparents do.” Brooke smiled, turned and opened the inn’s door.

Once they’d strolled through the understated lobby, past the stairway leading up, past the colonial-tavern style lounge, down the hallway and beyond the main dining room to the offices at the rear of the building, Brooke seemed to have eliminated all thoughts of Doug from her mind. She walked with the posture of a ballerina, her spine straight, her delicate chin raised to display her long, slender neck, her steps graceful but purposeful. Marching along behind her, Jill felt like a schlub, a pitiful bag lady Brooke had adopted out of charity.

“Jill, hi,” Gloria said, her tone unctuous as she waved them into her office. “What’s up?”

“I’m Brooke Bendel,” Brooke said, stepping forward and extending her hand. “I’m a party planner Jill has hired for Abbie’s bat mitzvah. Here’s my card.” She plucked a sterling silver card holder from a side pocket of her purse and produced a crisp cream-colored rectangle, which she presented to Gloria. “As I understand it, we’ve got some issues to resolve. May I?” She gestured toward one of the visitor’s chairs facing Gloria’s desk and sat without waiting for permission. Dumbfounded by Brooke’s poise, Jill dropped onto the other chair and resolved to keep her mouth shut.

It occurred to her that, for once in her life, she wouldn’t have to fix everything. Brooke, with her
savoir faire
and her beauty and her business cards, had stepped into the role of the fixer.

Jill felt as if she’d just dropped the boulder she’d been hauling around all her life. Being the family fixer wasn’t a job she’d volunteered for. Some unnamed force of family dynamics had assigned it to her. Doug had been busy with the demands of being the golden boy, the Phi Beta Kappa pre-med, the superlative medical student, the businessman establishing his laser surgery eye clinic, the husband, the father, the success. Melissa had been equally busy being the baby, the brilliant ditz, the legal scholar who could reduce a thirty-page contract crammed with jargon into a single English sentence but spent forty minutes every morning dithering over what to wear. Jill’s mother phoned Jill constantly with crises big and small—or she used to, when she was home and had free time to make all those phone calls. Jill’s father depended on her to solve her mother’s crises.

But now
 . . .
now she had a crisis with the inn’s unexpected hike in catering costs. A small crisis, to be sure. Given the wretched state of the world, a three-dollar-a-plate price increase fell safely within the trivial range on the crisis scale. Jill and Gordon could afford the higher price if they had to. It wasn’t as if she’d have to raid her non-existent France-trip fund to cover the added expense.