Jack With a Twist

advance.

The “Thank God I at least met my fiancé here so it wasn’t a complete, total, utter waste of time” part was implied. As was the “I hate you. All of you.” part.

“I’ve got a meeting with Janobuilder Corp. Didn’t you use to work on their matters when you were a first year?” Larry says to me, seemingly out of breath. Or at the very least out of patience.

“Yes,” I say, “but I don’t work here anymore.”

Clearly, Larry did not get my carefully worded politically correct Exit E-mail Memo. An argument for sending the “I hate you” e-mail?

Larry doesn’t respond. He merely turns on his heel and begins muttering angrily.

I turn around and begin pushing the button for the elevator furiously. My pulse begins to climb as I realize that I must get out of this building immediately before someone else tries to assign me more work. Vanessa will just have to understand. I’m sure that this sort of situation is covered by her maid of honor duties.

Anyway, it’s time to get back to my own law firm. Where I can be accosted with work by partners in my own hallways.

16

Do not cry. Do. Not. Cry. You are not going to cry. You are a tough, no-nonsense attorney who can handle anything. Even the twenty boxes of documents that Jack just sent you to review. Piece of cake, right? After all, each box should take approximately four to five hours to review, so it’s not that big a deal. That’s only, well, let’s see, eighty to one hundred hours of work ahead of you.

Eighty to one hundred hours of work. That is, like, so not a piece of cake.

And I’m due at the Pierre in forty-five minutes.

There’s only one thing that I can do now—only one thing that anyone in my position would do, really—feign illness to get out of this afternoon’s festivities. Which is absolutely fine by me. After all, I don’t even want to get married at the Pierre. The wedding’s only there since Jack’s parents bullied my parents into it. And, I don’t really care what they serve for dinner. My father’s going to dominate the day anyway with his talk of his beloved meats and I’m sure they’ll serve the glass of obligatory champagne to celebrate, so my mother should be prancing around with a lampshade on her head in no time flat. And I’m sure my father’s already worked out some sort of side deal with the chef, so, why should they need little old me to help with menu selection? They probably won’t even notice if I don’t show up!

I practice my cough and slouch down in my chair—method acting at its best to sound fatigued—as I dial the number for my mother’s cell phone. As it rings, I practice a lame, “Hello?” into the air and it’s perfect. Which makes sense, since when the twenty boxes of discovery documents were delivered to my office just a moment ago, it actually made me feel physically ill.

“Knock, knock,” a voice announces at the door. I hang up the phone quickly and sit up in my chair. “It looks like someone has got quite a bit of work cut out for her.”

“Jack,” I say as I get up from my chair to greet him. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d pick you up to take you to the Pierre,” he says, baby blues gleaming. I smile and forget about my work for a moment. Work that he assigned to me. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is my relationship with Jack. This is the man that I fell in love with. This is the man that I want to spend the rest of my life with. I knew it all along. Turns out I can do it all—I can have the perfect fiancé, work hard and win my case. All in three-and-a-half-inch heels. “And, of course,” Jack continues, gazing over at the stack of boxes he’s messengered to me, “I wanted to see the look on your face when you got our documents.”

This is the man who is making my life a living hell. This is the man I am going to decimate in court.

“Is this your idea of a joke?” I ask, holding up a handful of documents.

“These are the documents you requested,” he says.

“I just took a quick look at the first box, and already there are tons of duplicates,” I say. “That’s going to make it take me twice as long to go through this as it should.”

“The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure don’t say anything about having to mine the documents for duplicates. And there was a tight turnaround time on these, so it’s not like we had time to have a paralegal check for dupes, anyway.” Jack is smiling as he says it.

I am not smiling. “And there are tons of documents in here that aren’t even responsive to my requests.”

“Well,” Jack says, his smile sort of turning into a smirk, “I just wanted to make sure that we didn’t leave anything out. The judge would be furious if he thought that we weren’t giving you exactly what you deserve, sweetie.”

As we walk out of my office and down the hall, Jack starts telling me about our wedding videographer, Jay.

“So, is he supposed to be taking video of my filing cabinets?” Jack asks as we walk toward the elevator banks. “Is there going to be attorney-client privileged information on our wedding video?”

“Well, Jackie,” I say, “we just want to get footage of you in your natural habitat.”

“But, my natural habitat isn’t at the office,” he says.

“It isn’t?” I ask, with an innocent look on my face, as the elevator doors open up for us.

“No,” he says, walking into the elevator with me and then kissing me as the doors close. “My natural habitat is anywhere that you are.”

Swoon.

Jack and I kiss the rest of the way down the elevator, and then hop into the first taxicab we see. Fifteen minutes later, we are rounding the corner to the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, just across the street from Central Park. A uniformed doorman opens our taxi door and I walk out slowly.

The lobby is grand and lush and looks every bit the “testament to understated elegance” that their Web site promises, with its original 1930s detailing still on glorious display.

As soon as I walk in, I feel instantly reminded of something. From the black-and-white marble entranceway to the exquisite crown moldings on the wall to the lush royal-blue carpeting, I get the distinct feeling of déjà vu. And it’s not because I’ve been here before for events. There is something about the Pierre that reminds me of somewhere else.

Jack’s parents’ house.

And Jack’s parents look right at home, seated in chairs on the landing in the near right corner, talking quietly as they wait for us. My parents, on the other hand, stand out like a stripper in church (or pair of strippers, as the case may be), milling about toward the far left corner of the lobby, looking around curiously and waiting for us. The lobby is so large that they haven’t even seen each other yet.

Ladies and gentlemen, on one side of the lobby, we bring you Barry “the Butcher” Miller, who hails from the South Shore of Long Island, measuring five foot nine inches and weighing in at 250 pounds, 360 if you also count his wife, Mimi. On the other side of the lobby, we’ve got Edward “the Judge” Solomon, who comes to us from the mean streets of Philadelphia, measuring six foot two inches and weighing in at 225, and a hell of a lot more if you count his wife, too, since she’s wearing palazzo pants today.

It’s the clash of the parents: Round Two. Ding!

Now, I know what you’re thinking—the first meeting of the parents didn’t exactly go as planned. So, why on earth would I be bringing them all back together again? Well, I seemed to have this crazy notion that inviting everyone would be a good way to get the families to start getting along better.

And why should that be so difficult? After all, we’re here to celebrate a joyous occasion—the marriage of the Solomons’ youngest and my parents’ only—so of course everyone will soon come around and iron out their differences. Just being here all together today at the Pierre is the first step in becoming a big happy family. The type of big happy family an only child like myself has always dreamed of.

As I stand between the two sets of parents, in the middle of the lobby of the Pierre, a thought crosses my