by Jill Barnett
There was a knock at the bedroom door. “Laurel?”
Her mother stood in the open doorway, her robe tied tightly around her waist, making her look smaller, older, and more frail than Laurel could ever remember. The florist’s card was in her hand. “This was on the kitchen counter.”
“Thanks.” Laurel took the card.
“What’s going on, Laurel?”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. ‘One flower for every year. Thirty years is too long,’ signed Jud.”
“I’m not seventeen, Mother.”
“You’re forty-eight and I would think you’d have learned by now not to go backward in life.”
“Well, I guess I could just live my entire life in the past like you.” Slapping her mother in the face would have been kinder, but the words spilled out and she couldn’t stop. Everything she was feeling took over. “Look at what we’ve become. With all that vitriol, there’s no room for me, Mother. There was never any room for me because you wrapped yourself in grief and anger and pain, locked yourself away in your studio and inside your work. You know why I love that vase? I love that vase because there’s joy in it. It’s not some twisted piece representing the dark side in life. It is simply beautiful.” She paused. “I would have liked to have known you then.”
“I was a different person living in a different time. Happiness, joy, don’t last long. I know. The last time you were mixed up with that family, Laurel, I lost you.” Her mother’s voice caught and she looked away, seeming to shrink even more. “You went to live in France. You got married. You had Annalisa. All of it, all of a woman’s most important life moments, were six thousand miles away from home.”
“You were there for the wedding.”
“As a guest. I flew in at the last minute because that was when you told me about it. I’ve wondered if that was the point. And then the wedding was in a pasture.”
“It was a lavender field, not a pasture. In 1974 I thought it was romantic. In retrospect, a lot about that day was a mistake. But none of it has anything to do with now.”
“It does for me. Every time someone named Banning comes into our lives we lose something, something we can’t get back.”
Laurel walked around the bed and put the card on her nightstand. “I had to get away, Mother.”
“Because of them. Because of those two brothers. You were caught in the middle. It was their fault.”
“It was my fault. My fault.”
“You had to get away from me.” Her mother was crying and Laurel hated that she was again the cause of all this pain.
“Look. I’m sorry this hurts you. I’m sorry it reminds you of things in the past that are difficult to remember. I wouldn’t bring you any more pain over Daddy’s death for anything. But it’s over. It’s done. It was so long ago. We can’t change any of it. You have to understand this is about business.”
“What business?”
“BanCo is the parent company for Del Mar and the Camino Cliff project. I didn’t know that when we bid the project, but this is a chance for King Design to take off. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and Annalisa went after the job and got us the contract. A five-million-dollar contract.”
“Five million dollars,” Kathryn repeated flatly. “I can’t compete with five million dollars.”
“It’s not about you. This is as important to Annalisa as it is to me. She’s a smart kid and I’m proud of her. She doesn’t know about my past or yours with the Banning family, and I’m not going to let your fear take from her what you took from me.” She sounded so rigid and bitter, almost as bitter as her mother.
Kathryn walked out the door, but stopped and turned back. “All I wanted was to protect you.”
“Let it go, Mother.” Laurel took a long, deep breath. “Please. Let it go.”
27
The next morning her mother was gone with only a note saying that she was going to stay in LA, close to the gallery, for a few more days. Laurel’s night had been pretty much sleepless. Guilt was an ugly thing, and the relationship between women often a complex knot of emotional reactions. The things she’d said she couldn’t take back. Nothing felt simple anymore. The office elevator closed behind her before she noticed the two single-tubed roses—each the size of a fist and with its own card—on the floor in front of the office door.
Lunch. Call me when you’re ready.
Jud
The rest of the day was a mess, with Pat on vacation and Annalisa meeting with Del Mar and running errands. The phone rang off the hook most of the morning and into the afternoon; the project plans had been delivered to the wrong company, so Laurel had to spend time stuck in traffic to pick them up; and all day, every hour, the florist delivered a single rose of a different color: flame red, sunshine yellow, wine red, light orange, pink—bright and soft. Each card came with a local phone number and read the same.
Near the end of the day, she had lined up the cards like Roman soldiers along the edge of her desk, the stemmed roses flanking the corners. “I’m not going to call you.” She aimed at the cards, and one by one shot them off the desk, then gathered the cards and flowers and dumped them in the wastebasket before she went to work on a project appliance list.
A few minutes later the florist delivered her favorite rose, a lavender gray called ‘Sterling Silver’. “Damn him,” she said under her breath and sagged down on Pat’s desk.
“He sure is persistent,” the delivery girl said, then explained, “I took his order and filled out the cards.”
Laurel checked her watch. “How many more?”
“Two. I have them in the van.”
“Could you go get them now?”
“Sure.”
When the girl came back Laurel handed her a slip of paper with her credit card number. “There’s still time for a local delivery?”
“Another hour.”
“Do you have any cactus at the shop?”
“We have everything.”
“Then send him the biggest, thorniest cactus you have with a card that says, ‘No.’”
The girl was still laughing as she closed the office door.
But back in her office, Laurel took one look at the flowers in the trash and decided she was a weak, weak woman. The only vase in the cabinet was oversized, but she filled it with warm water anyway, and while cutting the ends, she noticed all the thorns had been clipped of Life should be so simple. Just clip off the thorns along the way.
“I’m back!” Annalisa came down the hall with a box of coffee and supplies and disappeared into the small kitchen, then flopped down in a chair across from her, kicked off her shoes, and crossed her feet on the rim of Laurel’s desk. “That vase is too big.” She used a piece of red licorice she was eating from a tub to point at the vase.
“It’s the only one we had here. How’d things go today?”
“Fine. Slow. But that’s probably just as well. I want to wait until we get back from the Chicago show before I make a list of possible fixtures. Those flowers from the same guy?”
“I’m not going to discuss the flowers. We’ll need sample drawings, but we shouldn’t lock in any configurations yet either. I picked up the plans today. Also, I’ll need to meet with the chefs involved pretty soon.”
“Get this. They aren’t contracted yet.”
Laurel dropped her pen. “You’re kidding?”
Annalisa shook her head.
“Talk about cart before the horse. Can you imagine your father coming into a place where the configurations and appliances had already been selected?” Laurel laughed. “They’d have to start all over just on principle. He would rant about everything, even if it were exactly what he wanted.”
“I told them. Then they dropped a bombshell. They’re talking to Dad about the cliff restaurant.” Laurel swore and rested her head on one hand. “You would have washed my mouth out with soap if I’d said that word.”
“I learned it from your father.”
“It’
s not French.”
“Your father swears in Anglo-Saxon English. He just doesn’t do it around you, his little girl.” Laurel sat back in her chair and thought for a moment. “At least I understand your father. My biggest problem will be keeping him from telling us how to do every kitchen on the entire job.”
Annalisa slumped lower in her chair. “Dad’s going to hound me all the time about working with him.”
“Maybe not. When he sees how good you are at what you do, he might finally leave you alone.”
“Sure. And I’m going to win Lotto and not gain any weight from eating half a bucket of this candy.” She held up the red licorice and bit off the end. “We can hope he turns it down.”
“Your father? No way. Is that your dinner, or do you want to come over?”
“Sure. Let me put this candy away.”
A few minutes later, Laurel was locking the office door and the elevator bell sounded. Beric rushed out waving a manila envelope. “Oh, there you both are. Good. Good. I have a surprise for you. Guess what this is?”
“A contract for the cliff restaurant at Camino Cliff.” Annalisa said flatly.
“Yes! How did you know?”
Annalisa looked at her, then back to Beric. “They told me today you were talking with them.”
“At first I thought, no. But they convinced me. So now I have the very best news.” He stood there, laughing, cocky, arrogant, his hands on his hips. “I have all the restaurants on the project. They will all be Beric King restaurants.”
Laurel couldn’t stop the small groan that escaped her lips, and Annalisa looked pale as flour.
“It is good. Come, come. We will celebrate.” Her ex-husband slid his arm around her shoulders and Annalisa’s and squeezed them both close to his body with all the Gallic enthusiasm of a Frenchman hugging two buoys to stay afloat. “Maybe, and I’m only suggesting a possibility”—he squeezed Annalisa hard—“we will call one of them Annalisa’s and ma petite jeune can design her own place. Then she will work for her maman and papa.”
“Dad. Please.”
“I know, I know, I know. It is all too much. We will talk later. All the Kings will be working together again.” Beric herded them toward the elevator. He looked at her and she wanted to flinch. “This will be great fun, Laurel, no?”
“Great fun, Beric. Just great . . . like our marriage.”
Dinner with her parents was always interesting to Annalisa. Though they’d been apart for years, her father still loved her mother, and sometimes it was painful to watch, because he had a complete inability to understand what had happened, along with trouble letting go of what he thought his life should be. Annalisa loved them both, but she had been an innocent, unknowing bystander while her parents’ marriage deteriorated the more and more they worked together.
Alone, her mom wasn’t lost anymore. But their divorce had crippled Annalisa; she lived the Sturm and Drang of guilt and anger, sorrow and blame. For a while, she took everything out on her mother the way teenage girls could do when they understood their own emotional power: mothers would always love you no matter what horrible things you said when the pain was too much to live with.
Tonight, though, her mother suffered through her father’s exuberance and assumptions, his energetic need to tell both the women in his life what they should do—the world according to Beric King, chef, father, husband, ex-husband (which was worse), and pain in the ass.
After her parents left, together and still arguing over the width of stainless counters, Annalisa didn’t feel like going home to an empty condo. She wandered into the bar, where a popular local jazz group played, and sat on a bar stool, sipping a drink, which was better than sitting at home alone, watching hopelessly romantic movies and eating microwave popcorn or, worse, that pint of cookie dough ice cream she’d bought during a weak moment.
The room grew crowded and noisy, with others leaving dinner and wedging their way to the bar, and soon the band took a break. Some of the tension from dinner drained away with people all around her. In a body of perfect strangers she was freed from the terrible fate of a single woman at home alone—the clear expectation and despair that no one would ever love her, and the world would go on, everyone falling head over heels but her. She turned around to set her drink down and came face-to-face with Matt Banning. “Well, hello,” Annalisa said.
“I saw you sitting here.” He leaned against the bar, close enough to wish she could move her stool.
“I like jazz,” she said. “Did you come to see the band?”
“No. We just had dinner.”
She looked around. “Who?”
“My dad just left. We try to have dinner every week. Male bonding,” he said with a laugh, but he wasn’t insincere. Something told her she might envy his relationship with his father.
“I had dinner with my parents, but I didn’t see you.”
“We ate upstairs, where it’s quieter. My dad doesn’t like noisy restaurants.”
“Restaurants are home territory to my parents. They usually make up a large part of the noise.” The squeeze of lime in her glass was a distraction for an awkward instant of silence, because his impact on her was unsettling, alarming, like a siren only she could hear. Around him she grew warm with desire she was powerless to stop. It rose from a secret place so new to her. He sat only a foot away and still the air vibrated; she could feel his presence in those sensitive places: the back of her neck, along her arms, perhaps from some butterfly feeling deep inside her heart. Such unfamiliar territory, and she thought herself too lonely a creature to trust those kind of unexplainable feelings.
“Let me get you another one,” he said. “What are you drinking? Vodka?”
“Club soda with lime. I like to know what I’m going to say next.” As he ordered from the bartender, she regretted what she thought her words revealed about her. “I drink sometimes, but seldom during business hours, and not when I’m driving.”
He handed her a fresh club soda. “You like to be in control.”
“No more than you do,” she said, laughing. “You drank Coke at the cocktail party the other night. I saw you order.”
“Can’t take your eyes off me, huh?”
“That’s it. You have me so infatuated I will do anything to be near you. I’m obsessed. Every time you look over your shoulder, I’ll be there. I live you. I breathe you. I dream you.”
“I wish that were true.”
She stopped laughing abruptly and could see his expression turn serious. “Please—don’t, Matt.”
“I was being honest. Would you want me to lie?”
She thought perhaps at that moment she would prefer the lie. “Why me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know”
“There are thousands of girls in Orange County, and plenty in this room who would jump at the chance to meet you. Pick one of them.”
“One of the women in this room?”
“Yes.”
“I did. She won’t go out with me.”
“No. She won’t,” Annalisa said firmly. “So what’s your alternative?”
“Staying dateless and lonely and unattached.” He leaned closer. “Don’t you feel sorry for me?”
“You’re not going pin your dateless state on me.”
“So explain your dateless state.”
“I never said I was dateless.”
“You’re right. This will be our first date.”
“No. It won’t.” She set her glass down hard. “I’ll find a girl for you. There. See that blonde over there? She’s very pretty.”
“She has a tan.”
“Every blonde in the room is tanned. Since when does having a tan bother men?”
“Wrinkle city.”
“Matthew . . . Matthew . . . Matthew . . . men don’t think about women and tomorrow. Only what they want now”
“You make us sound like two-year-olds.”
“I’m not going to argue that one.”
“Who have you been dating?
”
“The wrong men.”
“Did they all act like children?”
“No.”
“Just most of them?”
She took a drink and wished it was vodka, sorry she’d led the conversation down this road.
“Tell me about the last guy you went out with.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Are you still dating him?”
“God, no.” She wasn’t seeing anyone, but to admit that to Matthew Banning might make her look pitiable. Something in his expression told her he would sit there until she answered him. “Okay, the truth is”—she winced—“the last guy I went out with was a blind date.”
“No one should ever go on a blind date.”
“I was doing a favor for a friend.” She paused, then added, “He told her later he thought I was too big.”
He choked on his drink, then looked at her as if she were lying.
She held up her palm. “I swear. It’s the truth.”
“Was he short?”
“No. Tall, blond, and a stockbroker.”
“He was a blind man, not a blind date.”
She stayed silent because what the guy had said about her still got to her a little. Too big, and she had a carton of ice cream in her freezer and a tub of Red Vines at work. Her willpower was nonexistent, even now when she should get out of the bar and leave temptation while she could. It wasn’t easy to walk away, because she liked talking to Matt, was flattered by the way he looked at her and teased her, the way he stood close without touching her. He was dressed casually in a polo shirt, jeans, and moc loafers with no socks, and used her silence to study her long enough that she wondered what he was thinking.