“The neighborhood seems kind of sketchy.” He looked around.
Bree kneaded her upper arms. “I’ll wait inside.”
Ryder kicked at the pavement, for once looking awkward and out of place. “I…”
She interrupted him. “This is it. Not that I didn’t appreciate your being there today.”
Ryder nodded more with his eyes than his chin. “Straight.”
She switched to massaging her shoulders. “All that crazy Vegas stuff is behind me now.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Awesome.”
“I’m feeling pretty good about myself.”
“That’s sick.” He held out his arms. “You take care, Bree.”
She embraced him quickly and stepped away. “Bye, Ryder.”
Would she see him again? She didn’t know. That was the real answer. But that wasn’t Stephanie’s real question in the first place.
“Right now I’ve got other things going on in my life.”
Their car skirted a set of double parked vans and gained velocity as Stephanie drove it downhill. “Just wait till I tell Kacey you were attacked twice in one day.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s so going to regret not being there to see it all.” She peeped at her friend out of the corner of her eye. But Bree was curled on the seat, arms crossed on her chest, fast asleep.
“Awesome, mi hermana,” she whispered and eased off the accelerator. “You deserve some rest.”
Chapter 19
Bree raised her fist to rap the wood. At the entrance to Stephanie’s apartment, the hum of women’s voices reverberated through the crack between door and frame. Bree lowered her hand without knocking, remembering her nervousness six months ago when she stood at this same doorway about to walk into a party with this same group of friends. She trotted back to the mirrors by the elevators and straightened her décolletage. Her eyes sparkled as she turned sideways, adjusting the hemline. As Mal pointed out when she debuted the tight fiery red outfit for him a few night before, it left little to the imagination. That, she had told him, was the point. He shrugged.
“Is he depressed?” Stephanie asked when Bree first remarked on Mal’s plunge into extraordinary silence.
But Bree knew it was the divorce. Mal couldn’t wrap his head around the rift in his family, his father and grandmother on one side, his mother on the other, and he and his sisters ricocheting between them like the puck in an ice hockey game. Usually taciturn, he pulled even more inside his shell. Even Bree had trouble prying him out. When she surprised him at a South Indian restaurant with her hair cut thirty-six inches shorter, he first walked by her, and when she ran after him and tapped him on the shoulder, stared at her without a word, kissed her on the cheek, and asked for a table away from the window. Her new penchant for bigger necklaces and striking earrings elicited no comments. Only when she asked whether he would join her in a park to work out with her twice a week did he demure. He preferred, he said, the dog-free environment of the treadmill and weights in his own apartment. Since they would soon be moving in together, he also pointed out, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to save the money of a fitness class and simply use his equipment?
But these days Bree didn’t like standing still, she didn’t like waiting for things, and she especially didn’t enjoy taking the easy route. Her first flight since the trip to Disneyland with her parents for her tenth birthday was to New England for the fifth reunion of her pharmacy school class. She took a Xanax, sat on the aisle, and blasted heavy metal through her headset on takeoff and landing. Besides grabbing the arm of the stranger next to her during an episode of particularly violent turbulence on the flight home, the trip was uneventful. When her supervisor implored someone in her workgroup to lead a teambuilding retreat to the Pasayten Wilderness in Eastern Washington state because the original director fell ill, she volunteered for the adventure that required flying, driving, horseback riding, and overnight camping, despite never having done two of the four prerequisites.
With Faye Patel focused gouging her soon-to-be former husband in the divorce settlement, Bree also had free reign over the wedding. That was handy, she told her friends, because a prior romantic weekend getaway with Mal in Puerto Rico unearthed the need to revise her honeymoon plans. It turned out that Mal’s subcontinent genes gave him no immunity to the gastrointestinal onslaught of alien water. The first evening in San Juan, a fruit cocktail felled him, and he spent the following days crawling between bed and toilet. When he returned to Sacramento, he kissed the ground and subsequently refused to leave the country again for a year. The wedding would still take place in Vegas and an international honeymoon, she and Mal finally agreed, would take place on their first anniversary.
Bree skipped back from the elevators to the door and pushed it open without knocking. She yelled above the thrum of the music. “I’m here.”
Celine leaned against the entrance wall, hands on hips. “I saw you hanging out at the elevators just now.” She gave Bree a quick squeeze. “Don’t get any ideas.” She stepped back and surveyed her friend. “Girl, what have you been doing since I saw you last? And where can I get me some?”
Bree laughed. “Not telling. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
“Well, if Vegas can do that…” She gestured from Bree’s head to toes. “I sure am glad I’m going back.”
Stephanie shoved aside the other guests who begun to crowd the entrance hallway. “Let me at her.” She grabbed Bree’s arm and towed her into the living room. “We’ve been waiting half the night for you. The bachelorette party can’t start without the bachelorette.”
Bree inspected the bottles of hard liquor on a narrow side table by a set of lace curtained French doors that led into the bedroom of the small apartment. “It doesn’t seem to have stopped you.”
A few minutes later, Bree stood on the sofa, her legs wobbling on the soft cushions, holding a martini glass, her arm raised high. She studied the upturned, smiling faces of the women crowded into Stephanie’s cramped living room. She had been laughing, but as her eyes focused on each friend in turn, the laughter faded and she lowered her arm, at a loss for words.
Stephanie recognized the look and stepped onto the cushion beside her, teetering. “Let me go first, chiquita.” She urged Bree back down to the floor.
Bree gazed up at this friend from her childhood, the thin blonde Caucasian who had always understood her plump brown Latina soul better than any person alive. Stephanie reached out her hand and another friend passed her a flat, rectangular package, beautifully wrapped in shiny lilac paper with a thick white ribbon.
“Tonight is about celebrating.” Clapping interrupted her. She waited until it died down. “The flight to Vegas in two days will be about celebrating, even though your sorry ass is going to drive there again.” A few people applauded. “And, of course, your wedding will be the biggest celebration of all.” At this, cheering drowned out the music. But the expression on Stephanie’s face shifted, and the room fell into silence. “But I know there’s a part of you that abstains from celebration. It’s grown smaller over the years. I’ve even seen it shrink these past few months. But I know it’s still there.” Stephanie’s voice cracked and a tear rolled across her cheek and dropped, with a small splash, into her wine glass. Someone turned off the music. “Inside you is still a fourteen-year-old girl mourning the loss of her parents.” She extended the gift. “I can’t bring them back for you, amiga.” A steady stream of tears now coursed down her face. “But I can bring them to you.”
Bree unwrapped the large sliver-framed photo of herself and her parents at Stephanie’s own fourteenth birthday party. Bree climbed onto the sofa and hugged her friend. Stephanie rubbed her tears. “The hotel will have a chair waiting for this picture at the ceremony and another at the reception. Wherever they are, Bree,” she kissed Bree on the cheek, “I know there’s nowhere they would rather be than with you.” The silence that followed was broken only by repeated sniffling and blowing of noses.
It was
an hour before Bree climbed onto the couch again, this time evidencing less stability and more inebriation. She held a glass in each hand, clutching them like invisible walking sticks, elbows tight at her side. “This will be short and sweet.” She looked at the floor, her mind momentarily blank.
“Too short.” Someone shouted from the back of the room.
“The Bombay Sapphire’s got her sideways.”
Bree raised a glass and swallowed. “The most important thing in my life is family. But things don’t always work out the way you think.” She blinked back a tear. “I got a firsthand lesson in ninth grade about how life isn’t perfect. I don’t expect a perfect marriage. I don’t expect a perfect husband. But I expect to meet my challenges head on, to do the best I can do, and to be true to myself.” She raised both glasses. “And I can’t do any of that without my friends. So here’s to you.”
***
A day later, a stretch baseball cap with the brim to the rear kept her hair out of her face while she navigated a convertible through the easing congestion on Route five. The rushing wind whipped the last remnants of a hangover from her head.
“I reserved this just for you,” Bree told Mal’s grandmother earlier at the sleek rental car agency counter. “Wait till you see it.”
The look on the old woman’s face was worth the price. Her eyes widened and her mouth hung open. She ran tentative fingertips over the bright red paint, her hand trembling. “It’s a Cadillac.” She exhaled the words as someone else might say “It’s a million dollars cash.”
Bree’s smile widened into a grin she couldn’t repress. She opened a thick door and showed off the leather interior. “And you know who drove Cadillacs...”
Juli bit her lip and nodded. “The King.”
“I wanted to get pink.” Bree fanned herself with the rental car agreement papers. “He gave his mother a pink one. But that’s a custom paint job.”
Soumil pulled Bree aside while his mother peered into the trunk. “How did you know? Not even my father knew about her obsession.”
Bree winked. “We girls have secrets. Isn’t that right, Grandma?”
But the older woman didn’t hear her. She nestled herself in the rear bucket seat behind the driver, her short legs demurely curled up under her green sari with its intricate border of silver flowers, her expression blissful.
Soumil shook his head, opened the rear door, and pointed at the pavement. “Get out.” The wrinkled face clouded with dismay, like a child whose favorite toy was confiscated. Soumil placed her hand in the crook of his arm and led her to the other side of the car. “You’re sitting in the front.”
Bree saluted her soon-to-be father-in-law’s gallant gesture. But Juli resisted her son’s efforts to ensconce her in the wide passenger compartment. Women, she argued, wielding her purse as a shield, did not sit in the front and make men sit in the back. When Bree pointed out that a woman was driving, the older woman flicked the argument away like an annoying fly.
“You are American. It’s different for me.” Only after her son promised to switch seats halfway through the trip did she acquiesce, the twinkle in her eyes belying her former reticence.
On the highway, Bree initially hugged the breakdown lane, not wanting to frighten Mal’s grandmother, who gripped the door armrest with one hand and the center island with the other. The car’s speedometer hovered consistently at the speed limit. Cars overtook them in a constant stream. But Bree tapped the brake at the first sign of slowing traffic. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Juli’s face grow more and more rigid. Renting a convertible, she thought, had not been a good idea after all. Even though they couldn’t fly on the same flight as Mal and his sisters and mother, they could still have flown. What made her insist on revisiting her first drive to Vegas?
After the flow of traffic temporarily forced her into the middle lanes, she turned on her blinker to merge right. A sudden outburst from the passenger seat surprised her.
“What are you doing?” Juli regarded her, eyes bulging.
Bree straightened the wheel and turned the blinker back off. “I’m getting back in the slow lane.”
Juli held her face between her hands. “I am a seventy-year-old woman.”
Bree’s stomach sunk. This had been a bad idea. She took one hand off the wheel and fiddled in her purse. “Soumil, can you set the GPS to take on the back roads? That way we won’t go over forty-five.” She passed the phone to the back seat. The gray head beside her drooped. Bree’s heart thumped. Was she giving Mal’s grandmother a heart attack on the way to the wedding?
“Bree.” Dainty eyelids fluttered as the wrinkled face leaned into the wind. “We are in a Cadillac like Elvis. But I am thinking you are trying to kill me.” Her fingers quivered on the arm rests. “Stop driving like a grandmother. Give us some speed.”
***
In the rest stop restaurant booth, Bree skipped ahead on the menu past the soups, salads, and main dishes, searching for the desserts. She flipped the clear laminated sheet back and forth and read all the entries twice but couldn’t find the section she was looking for. Her eyes were unenthusiastically scanning the salad selection when Juli wordlessly slid a metal stand across the wood-grain plastic tabletop. It tapped Bree’s elbow. She looked up. The corners of the older woman’s mouth crinkled up slightly. Her brown eyes darted briefly to the stand and then resumed their perusal of her own menu. Bree picked up the hand-sized metal and glass display, which listed the day’s fresh-baked pie selections. She grinned at Juli, who pretended not to notice.
They gave their orders to a friendly waitress with thick black eyeliner, a shaved head, and pewter-colored rings that pierced every facial feature except her eyes. Before the teenager was finished the notes on her pad, Soumil edged out of the booth and stood, hands in pockets, eyes focused vaguely out the window at an indiscriminate point in the parking lot.
“I’m going to the restroom.” He sauntered toward the back of the crowded dining area.
Juli watched her son, shaking her head. “He is not going there. He is calling his girlfriend.”
Bree blinked and leaned forward, hands on the table. “Soumil is seeing someone?” Her eyes followed the retreating back of her future father-in-law, unable to imagine him divulging his feelings about politics, to say nothing of mustering the emotional fortitude to maintain a new romantic relationship.
The deep eyes with their still dark lashes held Bree’s gaze. “I am seeing things he doesn’t think I’m seeing.” She rocked her head in her characteristic fashion. “From me, he can’t hide.”
Bree nodded slowly. The idea of Soumil with another woman captivated her imagination. She wanted to ask what kind of person he chose after Faye. How he behaved when they were alone. And whether or not they fought. But she couldn’t ask his mother. And Mal never even hinted at his father having any interest in life outside his job. The true story would have to wait.
The waitress propelled a basket of rolls in a small dish of butter patties across the table in a fluid motion, hardly breaking her stride on her way to another set of customers.
Juli carefully extracted the largest roll and placed it on the bread plate by Bree. “You can’t be hiding from me either, Bree.”
At first Bree thought she was talking about the bread. She looked up, ready to smile at a joke. But an intense, almost haunted look in the eyes of the older woman across from her gave her pause. “What do you mean?”
“Your secret with Ryder.”
Bree leaned back against the red vinyl cushion of the booth. She felt her face flush even as she told herself there was nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing to hide. “It’s not a secret.” She reached for the butter, tore the roll in half, and slapped the bright yellow patty on one side without spreading it. “After Vegas we’ve kept in touch.”
“I am not saying it is bad.” Juli adjusted her fork with the fingernail of her index finger. “Only that it is secret. Like Elvis.”
Background chatter and the
karaoke version of a popular song on the overhead speakers filled the pause between the two women. Bree recombined the two halves of the roll and pressed down until the soft butter oozed out the sides. She thought about how to explain her friendship with Ryder, trying to remember how things started. But in her mind there was no clear beginning. It was as though their series of meaningless goodbyes in Las Vegas had created an opening through which it became natural to step. The texts between them when they returned to San Francisco simply extended something that never really started or ended. And when she called him that first time with a question about a situation at work, she didn’t think much about it. Mal wasn’t someone to go to with management problems. He’d always worked for his family. Finding creative solutions wasn’t his forte. But Ryder excelled at seeing the big picture. His experience with startups enabled him to think outside the box. And at some point in the past months, it became routine to pick up the phone and call Ryder on the drive home. And sometime after that, it didn’t feel strange when he showed up to take her out to lunch.
Just a few days ago, they met downtown, he looking every inch the hip young business man at the pour over coffee bar, even though he confessed to Bree that he hadn’t worked in months.
“It’s tough listening nonstop to people trying to convince me that theirs is the best idea since Steve put the bite in the apple.” He lifted his cup and twirled his saucer. “I’ve decided to sit out for a while. My heart’s not in it these days.”
Bree ladled whipped cream from her cup and licked the spoon. “So what do you do with your money?”
Ryder laughed. “Invest it in property, like all the other dudes in San Francisco.”
Bree rolled her eyes. “Mal and I pay rent to you dudes.”
A woman passing their stand up table dropped her napkin. Ryder picked it up and reached it to her. She looked as though he had just handed her a thousand dollar bill. Then she took in Bree and swung her chin dismissively toward the bar.
Wild Card (Wild At Heart Series Book 3) Page 20