Perfect on Paper (3 page)

“Shane Kennedy, the NBA star?” McKenna said.

I nodded and blew hot air into my fists. “Yep, that’s him.”

“Hunter’s going to love that one,” she said. It killed her boyfriend that I didn’t really like sports but got paid to work with professional athletes, even though most of them treated me like, well, paid help.

It was early on a cold morning in November, and McKenna and I were on one of our semiregular walks before work. We’d been doing them for years, and our route was always the same. We met in front of Peet’s Coffee on the corner of Fillmore and Sacramento in Pacific Heights, then walked down the steep slope of Fillmore to the Marina Green yacht harbor, over to the Palace of Fine Arts, and back up the steep steps of Lyon Street. It took about an hour, and getting up early was brutal (we’d long given up trying to get Andie to join us), but it was well worth it. As we walked we talked about everything under the sun, which had been very cost-effective (i.e., free) therapy for me since the breakup.

“Well, if this guy’s like most of the professional athletes we deal with, I can only hope he’s not a total nightmare,” I said. The next day I was off to Atlanta for the Super Show, the largest trade show in the sporting goods industry. Shane Kennedy was flying in to launch a new basketball shoe, and the whole world wanted to interview him.

“Hunter’s going to be so jealous. He’s still talking about that time he got to treat Barry Zito in the ER,” she said.

“Who?” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “So how are you doing today?”

“I’m fine.”

“No, I mean, how are you
doing
?”

I looked at the sky. “What are you talking about?”

She pushed my arm. “I know why you turned off your phone yesterday, and don’t pretend you didn’t get my message.”

“Yesterday? What was yesterday?” I said, looking at the ground.

“You are such a bad liar.”

“What?” I said, looking at the sky.

“C’mon, Wave.”

“Okay, okay. It sucks.” The day before had been the one-year anniversary of what would have been my wedding. I’d spent it at the movies and then on the couch, alone.

“Have you talked to him lately?” she said.

I shook my head. “The last time I saw him was months ago, when I picked up the rest of my stuff from his house.”

“He wasn’t that cute, you know,” she said.

“
Now
who’s the bad liar?” I said, smiling.

She laughed. “Okay, you’re right. He was extremely cute. But it doesn’t matter. Your year of mourning is over, right?”

I looked at her. “Year of mourning? What am I, a black-clad widow in Italy?” Although I
was
wearing a black fleece and sweatpants and was seriously wishing I had on my black gloves.

“Just trying to help,” she said.

I glanced at my watch. “I know you are, and I love you for it. Hey, let’s step it up, okay? I’ve got a ton of work to do before I leave tomorrow.”

We sped through the rest of our walk, and by eight fifteen I was in the lobby of K.A. Marketing. The two hundred employees who staffed our San Francisco office took up all four floors of a bright white building with high ceilings, dark hardwood floors, brick walls, and funky exposed piping. We had moved in two years earlier and renovated the whole place, so while the architecture was actually really modern, the design was sort of a retro warehouse theme.

I stopped by the coffee cart in the lobby to pick up a carton of chocolate milk and a chocolate chip bagel. My department, which managed publicity for the sports and entertainment division, had a staff meeting every Monday morning, and they were less painful when I had a sizeable amount of chocolate in front of me. And ever since Mandy Edwards had transferred from our Chicago office a few weeks earlier,
painful
was the unfortunate standard.

I walked upstairs and weaved my way through the cubicles to my office. People were slowly trickling in, everyone chatting about their weekends. I put my milk and bagel down on my desk, hung my coat on the back of my door, and walked over to the window to look at the view. Sometimes I think I secretly liked that view more than I liked my job.

“Hi, Waverly, how was your weekend?”

I turned around to see Kent Tanner standing in my doorway. “Oh, hey, Kent. It was good, thanks, nothing too exciting. Yours?”

He shrugged. “The usual. Once you have kids, your weekends are pretty much a blur of cartoons, toys all over the house, barf, and dirty diapers.”

I smiled. “Mr. Tanner, somehow you always know when I need a nice dose of reality to start my day. Now, are you ready for your first Super Show? It’s a lot different than the technology trade shows. Think you can handle the chaos?” Kent had joined our department a couple months earlier.

“Are you kidding? Compared to pitching enterprise software, this will be a vacation.”

“Cool. Let me just check to see if there’s anything important I need to know before the staff meeting.” I sat down at my desk and logged into my e-mail account. “Ahhh, there’s a message from Mandy Edwards to the entire department. Sent on Sunday afternoon, of course.”

“Of course,” he said.

I shook my head slowly. “What is wrong with her? Doesn’t she see how transparent the constant ‘from home’ e-mailing is?” A lot of people at our company had BlackBerrys, but our company culture was hardly one of sending work e-mail around the clock, especially on Sunday afternoons.

“She’s new. She’ll learn.”

“Learn what? That being a suck-up doesn’t work in this department?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Want to tell me how you really feel?”

I looked back at my computer screen. I was sure Mandy would reiterate whatever her weekend epiphany was at the meeting. “Byebye, you suck-up.”

Delete.

Kent laughed and walked out of my office. “C’mon, the meeting’s about to start.”

“Just a second, I’m right behind you.” I had just noticed an e-mail from Andie that said to call her as soon as I got to the office. It was written IN ALL CAPS, very un-Andie.

I shut my office door and dialed her work number.

“Andie Barnett,” she said.

“Hey, it’s me. What’s up?”

“Are you sitting down?” she said.

“Yes.” I wasn’t.

“Seriously, are you sitting down?” she said.

“How do you always know?” I sat down and slouched in my chair.

“Okay, I’m sitting down now. What’s the big news?” I said.

“Well … don’t shoot the messenger, but …”

“But what?” I said.

“Waverly, I hate to tell you this, but Aaron is getting married.”

I sat up straight.

“WHAT? To who?”

“To some girl named Stacy Long. It’s in today’s
Nob Hill Gazette.
I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else.”

Aaron was getting married? Already? In the year since we’d broken up, I’d been on exactly three dates, all setups who never called me again.

Before I could speak, Kent knocked on my door and poked his head in.

“C’mon, Waverly, everyone’s waiting for you.”

I nodded at him and took a deep breath. “I gotta go, Andie. I’ll call you later.” I put the phone down and closed my eyes. It took all my willpower not to lock the door and google Stacy Long right there. I tried to put my work face back on as I stood up to go to the meeting, but I didn’t think anyone was going to buy it.

Jess Richards, the VP in charge of our department, walked into the conference room holding a cup of coffee and a manila folder.

“Good morning, people. Let’s have a quick run around the room to see what’s on everyone’s plate for the week. Waverly, you and Kent leave for the Super Show tomorrow, right?” he said.

I tried to smile. “Yes, sir. Atlanta here we come.”

“So I hear JAG is flying in Shane Kennedy?” JAG was short for Jammin’ Athletic Gear, my biggest account.

I nodded. “Yep.”

“And I assume the press is lining up to talk to him?” Shane Kennedy was the reigning MVP of the NBA and had just signed a $150 million contract with the New York Knicks. I couldn’t even begin to think about how much money that was per month. Per week. Per game. Per trash-talking incident. Per out-of-wedlock child.

I took a sip of my chocolate milk and nodded again. “It should be quite a week. We already have more than thirty interviews set up for him, plus dozens of others on the waiting list. Davey’s really pleased.” David Mason was the director of marketing at JAG, i.e., the guy who paid our invoices.

Kent rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be fun.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Because Waverly Bryson doesn’t know if she can sit through three days of interviews with a guy who talks about himself in the third person.”

Jess laughed. “Well, he can sure sink a three, no doubt about that. Nice work lining up all those interviews.”

“Thanks, Jess. It’s been a real team effort,” I said.

“I imagine it’s pretty easy getting interviews for a celebrity like that?” Mandy Edwards said.

I looked at her.

“Easy?” I said.

“I mean, did you have to do much to get the press interested?”

“What’s your point, Mandy?” The press was definitely interested, but that didn’t mean we hadn’t worked hard to put together a great schedule.

She smiled. “No point. Since I’m new to this department, I’m just trying to learn how things work around here. In foods, the teams I managed never had celebrities to rely on, so we had to be really creative to get the press to pay any attention to our products.”

I glanced at Kent, who slyly rolled his eyes. Then I looked back at her.

“We’ll let you know how it went when we’re back in the office next week, okay, Mandy?” I knew I was being a bit short, maybe even a bit rude, but I just couldn’t deal with her, especially not then.

“Okay, thanks, Waverly. That would be great.” She smiled again.

Ugh.

When I got home that night I went straight to my mailbox. I hadn’t checked it in a few days, so of course it was packed with a bunch of crap that wasn’t even for me. I still received a ridiculous amount of junk mail for my old roommate, Whitney, whose bedroom I’d turned into an office after she’d moved out to get married. I had no idea how to stop the deluge, and it drove me crazy. Once I even wrote
deceased
on the envelope of a credit card application addressed to her and put it in the mailbox on the corner. It didn’t help.

I sat down on the couch and flipped through the monster stack of mail. Junk, bill, junk, Pottery Barn catalog, bill, Pottery Barn catalog, bill, more junk. Finally, there it was, the
Nob Hill Gazette.
I just had to see it for myself.

I took a deep breath and slowly turned the pages one by one.

And then I saw it, on page eleven, right above the horoscopes:

Aaron Christopher Vaughn III and Stacy Elizabeth Long, both partners at Vaughn, Miller and Hyde, will marry at Grace Cathedral at 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. The ceremony will be followed by a black-tie reception at the Fairmont Hotel….

Suddenly feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach, I leaned back into my couch and looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. Aaron was getting married. Married. Hitched.
Casado.
And he hadn’t even called to tell me. I knew a year was a long time, but part of me still felt like it had all happened yesterday.

And while part of me had gotten over the pain, a bigger part of me hadn’t.

Slowly I put the newspaper down on the couch. Then I put my head down on top of it and cried.