by R. R. Banks
“So, you voluntarily come out in the sunlight now?”
I turned sharply from where we had paused to catch our breaths around the corner from the store. Behind me a tall, middle-aged, self-described voluptuous man stood holding six shopping bags in one hand and an antiqued bronze lamp in the other.
“Mr. Adam?” I said, stunned to see him out in the wild rather than in the confines of our usual context.
“Oh, Honey, flashbacks, flashbacks,” he said, squeezing his eyes closed as though he couldn’t bear hearing the name again.
“Sorry. It’s so good to see you.”
I rushed forward and tried to hug him, got tangled in his bags and smacked with the lamp, and settled on a modified headbutt into his chest. I turned to Nia who was trying to maintain the same frustrated, astonished look she had when we had encountered Gregory in the grocery store, but was only managing to look confused and slightly afraid.
“Nia, this is my old manager from the restaurant, Adam Gillis.”
My year-long stint as a hostess at a tiny, locally-adored, strawberry-themed restaurant had brought me bitterness, an ulcer, and Mr. Adam. There were days when he was truly the only thing that had kept me from smearing strawberry juice across my cheeks as war paint and raising a rebellion against the rude and stunningly dumb guests that wandered in.
“Actually, not anymore.”
“You aren’t at the restaurant anymore?”
“Oh, no. I’ll be there until Hades does a tap dance with Jesus backed up by the Ice Capades. What I mean is I’m not Adam Gillis anymore. Andy and I finally changed our last names. It was our twelfth anniversary gift to each other. Now we’re the Gilliamses.”
“Gilliamses?”
“We were considering Williamillises but that was too difficult to pronounce.”
“Good choice. Have you eaten?”
Adam looked down at himself, twisting back and forth as if examining his girth.
“Far too much for far too long, but that’s not stopping me from doing it again. Lunch?”
We wove through the crowd with both Nia and me using Adam as a human battering ram to form a path on our way to a bistro at the front entrance to the mall. Inside the pseudo-fancy restaurant, a disturbingly thin girl with eyes I didn’t want to look at too hard for fear they would pop out flashed a smile with at least double the number of teeth she should have had.
“Hi!” she chirped, and I took an involuntary step back. “How many?”
“Three,” Adam told her.
The hostess’s smile widened as she looked to a diagram of the restaurant and a waitlist on her podium.
“I didn’t get a podium,” I muttered to Adam.
He waved me toward a bench near the door.
“It’s going to be a fifteen-minute wait,” the hostess announced as Nia and I walked toward the bench.
I recognized the tone as if-I-am-exuberantly-optimistic-about-making-you-wait-you-are-less-likely-to-get-mad-at-me. The other hostesses at the little restaurant where Adam and I had worked had learned to master that tone, but I had never bothered. If these people wanted to wander into the packed restaurant on a Friday night, get told that there were twelve reservations in front of them, and still choose to get put on the wait list, they could damn well wait without complaining.
Which is probably why it’s a good thing that I left the restaurant when I did.
After giving our name, Adam joined us on the bench. Ten minutes later Nia glanced impatiently at her cell phone. Five minutes later she started to stand up but I grabbed her and yanked her back down.
“Don’t do it.” Nia looked at me strangely and went to stand up again. “Don’t do it,” I repeated and pulled her down again.
“What?” Adam asked, looking up from his bags of goodies.
“She’s going to go ask the hostess where we are on the list.”
“No, I wasn’t. I was going to…” I tilted my head at Nia, “Ok, I was. But it’s been fifteen minutes!”
“She can’t make the people move. Don’t be one of the people I hated.”
Twenty minutes later the hostess had stopped giving us the encouraging looks she had been flashing us every thirty seconds in hopes of seeming like we were on the same team and lulling us into complacency. Five minutes after that she was hiding behind a column.
“Remember the princess?” Adam asked.
I laughed, shaking my head at the memory. The woman we were talking about had trained me when I started working at the restaurant. In fact, she had been one of the first people I had met after leaving home and having my heart drop-kicked by Gregory. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Adam I would have thought that all people outside of my hometown of Whiskey Hollow were like her and would have run home even faster than Gregory had traded me in for a woman who as at least three-quarters peroxide and silicone.
“The doctor?” I asked
Before we could explain anything to Nia, who was staring at the empty podium as if she was afraid that there had been a very localized rapture and she had been overlooked, the hostess appeared from behind the column clutching menus and grinning nervously.
“Angola, party of three?”
My eyes widened. Adam gathered up his purchases and stood without looking at us.
“Single-file everyone.”
Mouth hanging open, I watched Adam swish subtly after the hostess, holding the lamp to his chest as if to protect it from any lamp-snatchers that may have stopped for a quick bite to eat.
“I thought his last name was Gilliamilles-thingy,” Nia whispered from beside me.
Without looking at her I pressed three fingers to Nia’s lips and shook my head.
“Follow him quickly before he asks her where the showers are.”
My salad closely resembled grass clippings and my iced tea was so saturated in sugar I was relatively confidant I could float my spoon in it Dead Sea-style, but I was laughing so hard I barely noticed.
“How many times was she pregnant before she quit?” Adam asked.
He sliced into his salmon with a delicateness that belied his life’s goal to be rolled up in the world’s largest pancake (cooked in the world’s largest skillet located in Dollywood, also known as Adam’s Mecca) armed only with a bottle of syrup and with the mission of eating his way to safety.
“At least three.”
“How did she support so many children just as a hostess?” Nia asked, shocked.
“She didn’t have any children,” I told her.
“That’s terrible! Miscarriages?”
Her voice dropped when she said ‘miscarriages’ in that way that people whisper words that they don’t want to put out into the universe.
“Delusions. Girly was the compulsive liar to end all compulsive liars.”
“Oh.” Nia sat back, comforted that the other hostess wasn’t some blighted, dysfunctional mother and was just crazy. A moment later her face contorted as though she had just processed something that we had said. “Why was she a princess?”
“Well, apparently she came from royalty on top of being direct from Zimbabwe. I’m guessing there was some end-of-the-spectrum Black Irish thing going on. Her family was on a horribly misdirected cargo ship and became a small, highly specialized clan that produced a sickly pale, Southern twanging white girl.”
“And she was a doctor.”
The confusion was settling in now, reflecting how all of us at the restaurant had felt about this girl before we had caught on to her craziness and just found her exhausting.
“Apparently. When she quit she announced she was leaving to be a doctor for the Red Cross in Africa. She was very excited because they had provided her a waterfront house…in Johannesburg.”
I choked on the gulp of iced tea I was taking. Laughter overflowed as I remembered the map of Africa Adam had printed out and posted on the wall of the wait station, a bright red star indicating the land-locked Johannesburg. Dr. Princess left quickly thereafter. Only following a drama-soaked breakup with he
r boyfriend/imaginary baby daddy. We never heard from her again.
Because I still felt underlying anger towards the groups that would linger endlessly in the restaurant, especially at the specific tables I needed for that huge reservation that walked through the door twenty minutes early with three extra people, a baby that needed a highchair but wasn’t counted as a person, a wheelchair, two cellos, balloons, a cake, and a seeing-eye dog, I ushered Adam and Nia out of the bistro within ten minutes of finishing our million-calorie dessert.
I might have a little touch of restaurant worker PTSD.
As we walked down the gradually clearing sidewalk Adam took a very shiny high-tech communication gizmo from his pocket.
“Let me get your phone number. We should do this again.”
He pressed a few buttons and the little machine made a noise and glowed happily.
“That’s cute,” I said.
“Isn’t it? It’s new. This thing does everything. It holds your phone book, keeps your schedule, sings to you, wakes you up…calls your mama a whore.”
I recited my number while Adam fought to program it into the device.
“I’m pretty sure that’s how I do that. Damn, I’m old. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Andy is making dinner and I think I have at least four things in these bags that he’s going to need.”
Adam leaned in to hug me but one of the frolicking punks broke in between us and rolled into the distance. Holding his packages and lamp in the air Adam gave a flailing kick toward the boy’s back then a decidedly shimmying advance.
“That would have been a lot more effective had you not wiggled like that,” I told him.
“Float like a butterfly, bitch, float like a butterfly.”
Adam turned with a flip of his head and walked away.
“Love you,” I called after him.
“Love you,” he responded over his shoulder before disappearing behind the huge, booming clock.
Nia lifted her cell phone to check her lipstick in the reflective cover and started when she noticed the time.
“We need to get our asses in gear. I have to leave in an hour.”
“Why?” I asked. “The party isn’t until tomorrow.”
“I have to go to a family reunion tonight.”
“You didn’t mention that to me.”
“That’s because I’m not terribly excited about it. It’s nice to see the family and all, but it always ends up with at least three arguments and usually a curse or two.”
“That sounds delightful. Why would your family keep getting together if that’s how it turns out?”
“Because way down deep we’re still pretty tight. And everything always works out by the time that the reunion is over. I am a little bit excited for this year, though, because my cousin is coming.”
“Don’t your cousins always come? Isn’t that the point of a family reunion?”
I, for one, didn’t have enough family to actually warrant a reunion, but I had been witness to some in my day and they tended to seem like whole family trees had exploded onto the lawn in front of the host house for the event.
“Most of us do, but my cousin Roman hasn’t been in a while. He’s quite a bit older than me, but we were always close when I was growing up. Then he and the family had a falling out.”
“Over what?”
“He decided that he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of all of our parents and their parents before them and their parents before them and be a part of the family business.”
“What did he do instead?”
“I’m not entirely sure of everything, but I know he’s a pretty powerful business mogul. He owns three chains of hotels and a couple of specialty resorts. A few years back he made some mutterings about starting a custom yacht tour business, but I don’t know if that ever actually came to fruition or if he moved on to something else.”
“It sounds like he does pretty well for himself.”
Nia scoffed.
“I should say so. He was a billionaire before he hit 35.”
“ Billionaire ?”
“Yeah. With a ‘B’. Like that thing you wanted to be for Halloween and got banned from.”
“If your cousin is a billionaire, why do you have roommates and work in a hotel?”
“Because he’s my cousin, not my daddy or my husband. Besides, who says he hasn’t helped me out some?”
“The hotel,” I said, catching on.
Nia nodded.
“Besides, I like having roommates. I’m not a live all by myself type of person.”
“But if he’s so successful, why is the family still mad at him?”
“It doesn’t really matter how much money he’s made. He rejected the family tradition. But it’s not really the whole family that wanted him gone. His father pushed him away years ago, but we’ve kept up over the years. Now he’s coming to the reunion and I’m really looking forward to seeing him. But with the reunion tonight and all of the preparations that I have to do for the party tomorrow, we have exactly 45 minutes to finish up here and get back to the car.”
“Should that inspire some panic in me?” I asked.
Nia stopped and took me by the shoulders.
“We came here on a mission to find Halloween costumes, and we found absolutely nothing.”
I glanced in vain at my hands where I had hoped the cute clothes fairy had deposited something sassy and, dare I hope, sparkly.
“We didn’t do that, did we?”
“We ran away before we could pick anything.”
“Alright, well, then we have to dive back in and not be frightened by the native mall people.”
Throughout the rest of our scouring of the mall I had performed a clandestine mission looking for yellow tights, determined that she wasn’t going to keep me from being the bee that my soul told me to be, but I had been unsuccessful. Now the plan has shifted and I was looking ahead to pouring myself into at least a yard too little of black mini-dress I was fairly sure was woven partially out of ultra-sparkly aluminum foil and black leggings I prayed would conceal a multitude of things I didn’t feel needed to say hello to the world. A pair of murderous shoes waited conspiratorially in a box at my feet. I hoped that if they sat near my feet for a little while before I strapped them on they would come to an understanding and the shoes wouldn’t want to hurt their new friends.
Chapter Three
Roman
Why in the hell am I doing this to myself again?
I stared out of the window of my plane as the ground started to come closer, the tiny pinpricks of illumination growing until they became distinct safety lights along the runway. I sighed and leaned my head back against the seat, swirling the drink in my hand as I went over every scenario of how this reunion was going to unfold in my head again. They had been tormenting virtually my every waking moment since I had agreed to go to the reunion and now I was experiencing the gnawing feeling in the upper part of my belly that I usually got when I thought about seeing my family. That was one of the delightful things that I had discovered when my age tipped over forty. Rather than just getting angry butterflies when I was nervous or dreading something, I got a raging case of indigestion. It felt like a reminder from the universe, as if because I didn’t feel like I was getting older I needed to have my ass smacked down a few pegs every now and then to remind me of the years that I had lived.
It had been several of those years since I had taken this trip back home to see my family. I wasn’t in a private plane then, and there were considerably fewer hotels and businesses with my name on them dotting the world, but even with all of that backing me up, I still felt nervous about walking into the reunion and seeing my family again. The truth was I probably wouldn’t have even considered attending the annual event if it hadn’t been for Nia. Still my “little cousin” in my mind even though I was aware that she was now a fully-grown woman, Nia had been one of the few members of the family who hadn’t totally turned their back on me, and the only one who I connect
ed with on a regular basis. Though I had secured her a job in the biggest of my hotels in her area and occasionally encouraged a bonus or two on her paychecks to make sure that she was doing alright, I hadn’t seen her since the last time that I attended a family reunion. It was her, though, that told me that this reunion was also acting as an anniversary party for our great-grandparents. Considering they were both 101, I figured that now was probably the time to go visit and try to make amends.
As the plane slid down toward the ground, I started to question whether this was actually a good idea. I could have planned a visit to my great-grandparents without having to involve the rest of the expansive family. I felt like I was building myself up for disaster. I took a breath as I stood and slipped my jacket back on, buttoning it and smoothing it into place before the door to the cabin opened so I could walk down the steps onto the tarmac. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It had been years. Maybe that had given all of them the opportunity to cool down and gain some perspective about my choices. It was possible that I could walk into the party and they would welcome me with open arms. Or at least look at me in vague anonymity. Even that would be better than the last few minutes of the reunion the last time that I saw them.
I accepted my bag from the attendant when I reached the tarmac and started toward the limo that was waiting for me. It would bring me to the hotel where I was staying and from there I would take my own car, one of a fleet that I kept stashed throughout the country to ensure that I was never without personal transportation when I was traveling. Hopefully not having a driver bring me should make me seem a little more approachable to the family who thought that money had somehow put me on another plane of existence than them – or at least that I thought that it did.