by Theresa Alan
“Why not!?”
“You know how stressed out I get about stuff. I think a wedding might just put me over the edge.”
“Honey, your father and I eloped and it just never felt right. It felt like something shameful that we sneaked off to do. You can have just a very small wedding with your family in Bermuda or something, but if you don’t have some kind of ceremony, I really think you’ll regret it.”
“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t want you guys to have to spend a lot of money on a plane ticket to the tropics. Maybe we’ll just elope and have a really casual party. A barbeque or something.”
“Why don’t you let me plan the wedding?”
“What? Mom, don’t be ridiculous. You don’t have time to plan a wedding that’ll take place a thousand miles away from where you live.”
“Sure I do. It’ll be fun.”
“Did you suddenly stop working fourteen-hour days?”
“Well, no…but it would be fun. Come on, let me plan it. I’ll take care of everything.”
Ha-ha, ha-ha. That’s a good one. Mom and I have completely different taste in everything. I like ethnic food; she lives off meat and potatoes. I like silver jewelry; she likes gold. I’m a voracious reader; she doesn’t have the attention span to read a greeting card. And while her wedding to Frank six years ago was a beautiful one, let me tell you a little story about it that I think illustrates why I don’t want to hire her as my wedding planner. After Sienna followed me to Colorado, my mother moved out here from Chicago as well, taking her boyfriend, Frank, with her. They had only been in Colorado a few months when they got hitched, and they wanted a symbolic gesture that brought together their Chicago roots with their new life in the west. So Mom came up with this idea to force her wedding party to dance the first dance to the Blues Brothers’ “Rawhide” while galloping on stick ponies. (The Blues Brothers are from Chicago, and “Rawhide” has a western theme, get it?) Mind you, we bridesmaids were wearing floor-length gowns and high heels and were cavorting on stick ponies in front of all of our friends and family. Also, you never really realize just how long the song “Rawhide” is until you have to get up in front of all your friends and family while astride a stick pony while you’re wearing a ball gown. It’s four and a half minutes long. It was the longest four and a half minutes of my life, and I was plenty liquored up at the time, so that’s saying something. But she was the bride, so we had to do what she said. Brides have all the power. You can just imagine their evil bwah-ha-ha laughs as they contrive ways to humiliate the people they love.
So did I want my mother planning my wedding? Not so much. Somehow I imagined that if she planned it, Will and I would end up in get-ups involving sombreros and tutus.
“Okay, Will and I will have a small wedding. I’ll plan it, though. And it’s going to be very nontraditional.”
“That’s fine.” I can hear the smirk in her voice. She’s won. But not really, because like I said, I do love weddings and there is a part of me that wants to proclaim from the rooftops that I’ve found this wonderful man and for whatever reason he seems to want to spend his life with me. I want to vow to be with him forever and ever in front of all the people I care about.
“So…” I say. “How are things with you?”
“I’m ready to kill my husband, that’s how things are with me.”
“What did Frank do this time?”
My mom married a younger man. Frank is a fun guy, and after the divorce, Mom was ready for some fun. She felt like she’d gotten married too young so she never got to do the fun things young people do. With Frank, she went water-skiing on his boat, riding on the back of his motorcycle, dancing at clubs late into the night. It’s his very sense of boyish playfulness that attracted her to him in the first place that drives her absolutely insane now. She’s always complaining about him not doing his share of the housework, sleeping in on the weekends, and goofing off when he should be doing whatever chore Mom feels he should be doing.
“I’m going to have to pay hundreds of dollars to have a handyman come in and do some housework because my husband is too lazy to do it.” Mom launches into a litany of chores Frank hasn’t done: He still hasn’t cleaned up the painting supplies from the study. How many times does she have to ask him? And his second car has been taking up half the driveway for weeks with parts strewn everywhere. They look like they belong in a doublewide! What must the neighbors think?!
“I’m sorry, Mom. I know it’s tough. How are things with the job going? Weren’t you going to meet with that new client? How did that go?” I sit down at my large kitchen table. I spent a bundle to get comfortable kitchen chairs with cushy seats, but I almost never use my table. I either eat at my desk in the study or in front of the TV. I think I had an image of myself being some goddess of entertaining, when in fact I’m more of a solitary TV-dinner sort of girl.
“Oh, I didn’t tell you?” She laughs.
“No. What?”
“So I met with these two stodgy men, really high muckymucks. I met in the one man’s office, and he has those big, big leather chairs for six-foot-tall men that little me just drowns in. I felt like that little girl character Lily Tomlin played. So I went to show them my portfolio,” she giggles again. “And they have that kind of plastic mat that goes over the carpet so you can easily wheel around in your chair. Somehow the wheel of my chair got caught under the mat, and I went crashing down with the chair coming right over my head, trapping me. It was a huge chair. I couldn’t get it off me. So I say…I say…” she’s laughing so hard she’s having trouble getting the words out. “Excuse me. Can you help me get this chair off my head?”
This strikes me as the most wildly hilarious thing I’ve heard in months. The image of my petite mother trying to make a good impression on clients, only to go flying upside down, landing with a chair on her head, and then saying in a voice muted by acres of leather chair, “Excuse me. Can you help me get this chair off my head?” It’s classic.
Mom and I laugh and laugh. I love that my mother can laugh at herself. She’s unlike my father in that way. Dad always pretends he knows everything and has never made a mistake in his life. Mom is fully willing to admit she’s a flawed human being, and it’s her genuineness and down-to-earth-y-ness that I love so much about her.
We say our good-byes and instead of getting to work I go back to my study and jot down my guest list. I want to start figuring out how much a wedding is going to cost. I’ve got money in the bank, but as an independent contractor, I have no economic security whatsoever. When Will and I move in together, that will save me a lot of money on mortgage payments, but until then, I just can’t help being stressed out that my savings account is too anemic to fund a wedding. And I don’t want Mom and Dad to help out because then they’ll want to get involved in planning it, and I’m telling you, that would be disastrous. It doesn’t take me long to write out the list. My bridesmaids are obvious: Sienna will be the maid of honor and Rachel and my girlfriend Gabrielle will be the bridesmaids. My list has fifty people on it. I’m guessing that’s about what Will would put on his, but it’s really inconvenient that I can’t ask him to write his list out so I could know for sure. It’s really going to hinder my ability to plan this thing if the groom doesn’t know that we’re going to have a wedding. I look at the clock. It’s nearly six o’clock. I’ve managed to squander my entire day with dreams of wedding bliss rather than doing my job. That’s one of the really hard things about owning your own business. When you slack off, you’re the only one who pays for it. It’s not like you’re sticking it to the man, you’re just sticking it to yourself. Alas.
Will and I see each other just about every night, unless we have a girls only or boys only kind of event with friends. He usually gets home from work around six, so I drive to his house in downtown Denver and wait for him there; he gave me keys to his place after we’d just been dating about a couple of weeks. With any other guy, I would have thought it was too fast, but everything just felt so rig
ht with Will.
Will’s condo is a small, nicely decorated place. He’s got the same taste in furniture and decorations that I do. Light wood floors, classy paintings, and a modern pale green couch. His hallway is lined with pictures of him and his friends. I hate, hate, hate the pictures where I can see his gold wedding ring. I hate having photographic evidence that he was married to somebody else. If we get married, he’ll have to get a platinum ring so we’ll have color-coded evidence to be able to figure out who he was married to at the time the picture was taken. Of course, the fact that he’s lost a good portion of the hair on his head would also be a clue, but the wedding ring color will be the ultimate test.
As I stand in the hallway, looking at him wearing a wedding ring representing a marriage to another woman, my mood just sinks. Suddenly I don’t know if I can marry a man who was married to someone else, even if I do have a guest list all written out back home. I want a guy without a past, without entanglements. Everything seems too hard and too messy and I want to break up with him and run away from the pain I feel when I think about him and X together.
Will opens the door, and I feel a flush of guilt for speculating on the possible demise of our relationship. I wish I could just believe in happily-ever-after without having bursts of doubt and insecurity.
We kiss and hug. I love the first after-work kiss and hug of the day. All the fears I battle all day rush out for that moment and I feel happy and safe and secure.
“I’m starving,” I report.
“Good. I was thinking I’d take you to this little hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurant.”
“Okay. Sounds great.”
“I can’t believe I haven’t taken you to it before. You’re going to love it.”
He’s right about the restaurant. It’s great. We have saganaki and Greek salad to start and then share a nice meal. We discuss how we spent our day, except I have to lie about how I spent mine since I can’t exactly tell him I’ve been plotting our wedding plans all day. Then, just as we’re about done with our meal, he says, “So, I wanted to ask you something.”
Immediately, visions of an engagement ring and Will on his knee and declarations of “Oopa!” filling the restaurant flood my imagination. Will I react in a suitably teary-eyed, delirious-with-happiness way? These are the things I worry about.
“We spend nearly every night together, and I love waking up to you more than anything. I was thinking maybe we could move in together.”
I smile. It’s not a wedding proposal, but it’s not bad. “I would love that. I would love that a lot. Which one of us should sell our place do you think?”
“Well, your place is bigger, so I think it would make sense for me to sell mine and move in with you. What do you think?”
“I think that would be great. When do you think you’d want to move in?”
“Well, as soon as you want me to, I guess. And then I’ll work on selling my place.”
“You can start moving in tonight!”
He chuckles. “Well, I do have to pack.”
“Details, details.” I smile moonily at him. We stare at each other in silence for a moment as the conversation ebbs. Then I think of something else we can talk about—my phone conversation with Mom. I tell him the story about the chair and he laughs.
“I can’t wait to meet her. I can’t wait to meet all of your family,” he says.
“I know. I can’t wait for them to meet you.”
“Who should I meet first?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Why don’t we fly out to New York sometime in the next month and visit Sienna?”
“This weekend is the barbeque for Jon, but any other weekend after that would work for me. I’ll call Sienna and see what would be good for her.”
As Will drives us back to his place, I call Sienna on my cell phone and ask her if there would be a weekend when Will and I could come out sometime in the near future.
“I perform every Saturday night for the next month,” she says.
“Perfect. We want to see you perform. I want to show off how talented you are to Will.”
“Let me talk to Mark. Hang on.” She puts the phone down for a minute and then gets back on. We decide we’ll come out three weekends from now.
“Just call when you get your flight information,” she says.
“Will do. Later, kiddo.”
I click my cell phone off and smile. I’m excited about not having to live in two places from now on. I’m excited about being able to wake up to Will next to me every morning. I suppose that maybe I should be more nervous about this. After all, it’s a major life change, but it’s one I’ve been anticipating almost since we met. It seems silly to have to pay two mortgages and have to commute from one place to the other every day.
I reach my hand out to hold Will’s and give it a warm squeeze.
Chapter 4
O ne thing about working from home is that you get addicted to lounging around in sweats. However, I suspect that I’d appear somewhat unprofessional if I showed up to my meeting with the executives from WP in PJs and bunny slippers, so I wrestle my way into nylons, heels, and a sedate slate gray skirt and jacket.
I’ve done some work for them before, primarily helping with new product launches. I worked for the company when Warren Woodruff was still running things. Warren had launched the business as a small-scale manufacturer of drugs like headache medicine and cough syrup. He built it into a major cutting-edge biopharmaceutical firm that was one of the top producers of prescription and over-the-counter drugs in the country. He’d done it by being a marketing powerhouse and by heavily investing in research and development, which enabled the scientists who worked for the company to make major discoveries and breakthroughs. Warren stepped down a year ago and handed over the reigns to his eldest son, Kyle, who had almost no management experience. Kyle’s appointment caused a major buzz among the in-the-know businesspeople in the Denver area.
The receptionist guides me to the boardroom where I wait for twenty minutes for the four men I’m meeting with finally to show up.
“Eva Lockhart? So good to meet you! I’m Kyle Woodruff.”
Kyle is my age but he seems much younger. He’s thin and he apparently skipped over the part of puberty that was supposed to add bulk to his chest and shoulders. Doogie Howser comes to mind. He smiles at me and it takes me a second to figure out what is jarring about his smile. Then I realize that it’s a caricature of a smile. Everything about it is big. Big teeth, thin lips that stretch wide as rubber bands, large gaping open-mouthed big. I shake hands with him and he crushes my fingers with his grip. He doesn’t look like he’s capable of crushing my hand, but I guess that’s the point, he needs to prove he’s not the lightweight he looks like.
“Glad to meet you! Glad you could stop by!” Kyle says.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I say, shaking Kyle’s hand.
He points to the three men flanking him around the business table. “Eva Lockhart, this is Michael Evans, the senior vice president and my right hand man. Michael, this is Eva Lockhart.”
“It’s good to see you again, Michael,” I say.
“You two know each other?”
“We do. I’ve done some work for WP in the past,” I say.
“So, do you also know our chief scientific officer Doctor Edward Lyons and Anthony Victorino—”
“Your chief financial officer. Yes and yes,” I say, nodding to both men, who nod back.
I take a seat at the table with the others. Kyle remains standing.
“Well, as you know, we called you in because WP is at a crossroads,” he says. “We have the opportunity to make bold strides into the future or to let opportunity pass us by.”
“I would phrase it more like, ‘we have the opportunity to ravage our reserves on a risky and untested product, or we have the chance to ride the rocky economy out by staying true to our core competencies,’” Michael says.
“But Michael, our cash flows ar
e strong—”
“Our cash flows are strong, but if we don’t have the reserves to weather a downturn in the market, we risk becoming another WorldCom, growing too far too fast.”
“It is a gamble, but I believe as you research this acquisition, Ms. Lockhart, you’ll find that this new product of Ridan’s will revolutionize how diseases are diagnosed, using a noninvasive methodology in which a tube is inserted down a patient’s throat—”
“Ridan is not the first to patent such a product,” Michael says. Dr. Lyons nods in agreement.
Kyle ignores Michael and continues touting the strengths of Ridan’s new diagnostic equipment, only to be contradicted at every point by Michael. You don’t have to be a psych major to figure out what’s going on here. Michael has twenty years with the company while Kyle has eight. Michael is well into middle age while Kyle is in his fresh-faced early thirties. Michael was responsible for the acquisition of one of the leading drugs on the market for fighting osteoporosis and a major moneymaker for WP. Kyle has not yet accomplished anything of that scale. My guess is that Michael thought he should have been named chief executive officer and he will do anything to prove that Kyle was the wrong choice. Kyle knows that his appointment has upset a lot of people since he has so little experience, but if he can make a successful acquisition, it will earn him authority and respect he doesn’t currently command.
The meeting lasts three long, heated hours, and when I leave, I feel like I’ve put in a ten-hour day.
Chapter 5
I t’s Rachel’s husband Jon’s birthday today, and Rachel is throwing a barbeque to celebrate. The barbeque starts at four on Saturday afternoon, and the sun is roasting the dry air of Colorado when Will and I pull up to Jon and Rachel’s house. As Will parks, I recognize the car in front of us as Gabrielle’s.