your hand … and your elbow … and your lower back. No, Forester was a prince, and like a prince he’d swooped in and saved me from the torment and agony of being just another associate slave. The job was hard, but I knew I was now doing good things for Pickett Enterprises. Still, that knowledge couldn’t hedge my occasional yet powerful bouts of self-doubt or the feeling that I was an impostor, one who could be exposed at any time.
Tanner grunted. “Keep the hours up. We’ve got the end of the year soon.”
I put a concerned look on my face, as if I didn’t have the top billable hours of any associate at the firm, and nodded. “Sure. Will do.”
He left. Thank God.
My cell phone dinged from where it sat atop a monstrous deposition transcript on my desk. I picked it up. A text message from Sam. Hey, Red Hot. Leaving for Cassandra’s. See you there.
“Dammit.” Cassandra was the wedding planner.
Q raised his eyebrows.
“Darn it,” I corrected.
I swiveled around and started scrambling through the chaos on my credenza until I found my bag. I couldn’t be late again. Plus, I needed to talk to Sam about this wedding stuff, which was starting to weigh me down as heavily as my job.
“Are you taking home the Casey research?” Q asked. “We have to file the motion by tomorrow.”
“I know, I know.” I stuffed a pile of case law and my Dictaphone into my bag.
“And don’t forget Sam’s work dinner tonight at the Union League Club,” Q said.
I tried to ignore the mountain of panic taking over my insides. “Yeah, it’s going to be torture. Those financial dinners always are. But I’ll leave early and work on the motion.”
“You can do it,” Q said. “You always do.”
“Thanks.” I stopped and smiled, and he flashed one back.
As I kept stuffing things into my bag, I thought about how a big blowout wedding had not been my idea. In fact, when Sam and I got engaged, I was fine to book a trip to the Caribbean with a few friends, throw on a little slip dress and get married to the sound of steel drums. But my mother, who hadn’t planned much of anything, or didn’t usually care about much of anything, seemed stuck on a huge, traditional wedding. And my soon-to-be husband, who had legions of friends from grade school, high school, college, business school and work, said he was on board for that as well. I want everyone to see how much I love you, he’d said. How does a girl say no to that?
My phone rang. Q took a step toward my desk and we both looked at the caller ID. Victoria McNeil. My mother.
Q picked it up, handed it to me and left the office.
“Hi, Mom.” I zipped up my bag. “What’s up?”
“Izzy, I know you two picked out the plates with the silver border for the reception, but I think we should consider the gold again.” My mother’s voice was calm and smooth, as always. “I’ve been thinking about it, and the linens are a soft white, rather than a crisp white, and that really lends itself toward gold rather than silver.”
“That’s fine. Whatever you think.” Reflexively, I extended the fingers of my left hand and glanced at my engagement ring, an antique, art-deco piece with an emerald-cut diamond. Looking at my ring used to make me grin. Now, it made me wince a little.
“Okay, and another thing. If you talk to your brother, Charlie, give him a little encouragement, will you? We need him to try on suits.”
“The wedding is still six weeks away.”
“That’s right. Only six weeks away.”
My stomach hollowed. Only six weeks.
“Charlie has to stop dragging his feet,” my mom said.
I murmured in vague agreement, but for once I felt simpatico with my brother. Mentally, I, too, needed to stop dragging my feet about this wedding thing.
“Don’t forget, you have another dress fitting tomorrow night.”
I tried not to sigh. “I know,” I said. “Battle number five.”
During the first visits with my bridal seamstress, Maria, it seemed she was trying to flatten my breasts and hide my hips, parts of my body I rather liked. I kept telling her, “I think the dress needs to be sexier,” and so she’d been dutifully making the bustline lower and the waistline tighter, until the last time, when she’d taken the pins out of her mouth and said in her accented English, “You want to look like hooker on wedding day?”
I told her I’d think about it.
I realized that most women wanted an ethereal look for their wedding, but I liked wearing sexy clothes on a daily basis, so why not for my wedding day? Plus, Sam said he wanted me in something hot. So I was going to give him hot.
“Izzy, really,” my mom said. “I don’t want you showing nipple on your wedding day.”
I laughed, and it felt good, like it was loosening up my insides. “See you tomorrow.”
I logged off the computer, grabbed my bag and left to meet Sam.
It was just an average day.
2
The funny thing—although maybe funny isn’t the right word—is that I already knew a single day could slap you around and send you reeling. I’d had such a day twenty-one years ago when my father died. It was Tuesday, and it was gloriously sunny and clear—I always remember the weather first—and Charlie and I were playing in the leaves in the backyard, making painstakingly neat piles, which we would dive into with a yelp and destroy in an instant.
My mother came out of the house. She was wearing jeans with a brown braided belt that tied at the waist, the ends of which slapped her thighs as she walked. Her red-blond hair was loosely curled around her face, as usual, but that face was splotched and somehow off-kilter, as if it had two different sides, like one of those Picasso paintings my teacher showed us in art class.
She sat us down on the scattered leaves and told us he was gone. He had been on a solo flight, training for his helicopter license when the helicopter experienced mechanical trouble and went down over Lake Erie. My father was a psychologist and a police profiler, but my mother would later tell us that he was always learning new skills. And now he was dead. It was as simple, and awful, as that.
Charlie seemed to take the news well. He furrowed his tiny brow, the way he did in school in order to avoid accusations of not paying attention. He nodded at her. He was six then, two years younger than me, and I could tell he didn’t understand, or at least he didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation. It was a trait Charlie would carry all his life.
After my mom and Charlie went inside, I raked the scattered leaves into neat piles and left them that way.
We moved from the small log house in Michigan to an apartment on the north side of Chicago, where my mother knew a few distant family members. We changed our wide swath of lawn
