When I returned from the first service at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and a quick visit to the grocery store to pick up supplies for the Aspen Meadow Women’s Club dinner, I found Macguire Perkins sitting on my doorstep. Rain still washed across my waterlogged front yard and ran in rivulets down the sidewalk. Yet Macguire wore no rain gear, and his hair was as sopping as his sweatshirt and torn blue jeans.
“Macguire,” I said impatiently, “why don’t you put on …” Oh, forget it, I thought. It was hard enough trying to be mom to one kid who did his best to ignore me. I unlocked the door and disarmed the security system ? needed protection against the Jerk’s periodic rampages ? and shooed him into the house.
Macguire snuffled, tilted his head backward, and shook his hair. Raindrops sprinkled across the room. Taking lessons from Jake, apparently. “I’m okay.” He snuffled again. “The rain’s not too bad, you don’t really need a coat.” His long strides propelled him, camel-like, toward the kitchen. “Besides, I brought my uniform stuff in the car. It’s not wet. In the car, I mean. I’ll be all right.”
Well, fine. We had work to do. I put vats of thick, tomato-rich Bolognese sauce on for a last simmering. Macguire washed his hands, grated hillocks of gold-threaded Parmesan and creamy fresh mozzarella cheeses, then looked around for more work. The pizza dough I’d taken out to rise before church had come to room temperature. He carefully punched it down. As the Bolognese sauce began to bubble, the phone rang. Mrs. Kirby-Jones, no doubt. Clients invariably feel duty-bound to call on Sunday morning. They want to make sure you’re not sleeping in. They expect you to be slaving away in the kitchen for their evening shindig. In fact, they expect you to have been working there since dawn.
“Goldilocks’ Catering,” I said with agonizing sprightliness as I reached for a package of the frozen green lasagne noodles I’d made the week before. “Where everything is just right!”
“It’s me,” Marla said morosely. “I’m in hell. I feel so damned guilty. Tony just phoned, and he’s on his way over. I am about the farthest thing from just right that you could possibly imagine. Matter of fact, I’m sitting here thinking about what I’m going to say when I get a call from Albert Lipscomb’s lawyer.”
I cradled the phone against my ear and tried to un-wrap the noodles. Whenever Marla plunged into precipitate action, she ended up in exaggerated remorse. “For heaven’s sake,” I soothed, “why do you feel so bad? Didn’t Tony talk to Albert?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Tony went straight to the Aspen Branch Bar after the party and got plastered. Now he’s nursing a hangover. He has a conference tomorrow morning, so he can’t be in on our meeting.” I heard her bite into something. I hoped it was one of the lowfat lemon muffins I’d given her. I also prayed her use of the term our meeting didn’t mean she was counting on me for tomorrow’s confrontation with Lipscomb. She went on: “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m worried about with Albert. He throws around those terms like year-over-year and same-store sales and technical support. Now he’s all ticked off, so he’ll probably treat me like a dummy.”
“But how can year-over-year data or same-store sales have anything to do with a mine being reopened?”
“Ooh, Goldy,” she whined, “I don’t know. I guess I should have just hashed it out with Tony, or called my lawyer or the state consumer fraud people, or somebody, instead of going after Albert like that yesterday. It’s just Episcopal guilt. You know, you worry about how you’re handling your money.”
“Wait, wait,” I said with a glance at the clock. By the time we got through a litany of her worries, hours could pass, and I only had ninety minutes to finish the preparations for the Kirby-Joneses. Much as I loved Marla, I didn’t have time for a party postmortem now. “Can we talk about this later?”
“Please, please tell me that it’s going to be later, as in tomorrow morning later,” she pleaded between bites. “As in, when you come down to the Prospect office with me?” I tried to block out the vision of Marla and Albert squabbling viciously in one of Prospect Financial Partners’ plush Cherry Creek offices. “Please, Goldy? Don’t say no.”
I opened a plastic container of fresh basil leaves and inhaled their flowery scent. “Oh, Marla, I’ve got this new booking for a dinner to do tomorrow night ? “
“Come on, you can help me stay calm. It’s bad for my health to get upset. We won’t be there for an hour, even. We’ll go have brunch afterwards ? my treat.”
“But why do you want me there?” I measured out olive oil, Parmesan, and pine nuts and prayed that I could do my pesto recipe from memory. “The only thing I know about business is that I don’t have much at the moment.”
“I’ve invested a hundred thousand dollars just in the mine venture, Goldy. With that money, I could have put my dear nephew Julian through Cornell. Twice.” Her husky voice cracked.
“You’re already putting him through,” I reminded her gently, and started the food processor whirling.
“Yes, but still, a hundred K!” she fumed. “I could have… well, let’s see, I could have… put in a few new windows at the cardiac rehab center. Then I’d have a nice view of the hospital grounds while I’m on that damn treadmill.”
And wouldn’t Lyle Gordon, M.D., have loved that, I thought. The pesto ingredients had turned into a brilliant green, fragrant paste. “Marla, please. I need to cook. Are you feeling okay?”
Ignoring my question, she demanded, “Remember what I did to John Richard’s shoulder? Think Albert knew about that? Maybe I intimidated him.”
I groaned. My assertiveness was a behavior I’d learned only after my disastrous marriage to Dr. John Richard Korman ended. But Marla had stood up to him, and consequently had managed to be married a lot fewer years, and with much less grief, than I.
I said truthfully, “You didn’t actually hit Albert yesterday. You just yelled at him and called him names. There’s a difference,” I added, sneaking another look at the clock. Macguire was almost done punching all the air pockets from the dough.
“Okay, look,” she said reluctantly, “I know you’re busy. In addition to crying on your shoulder and begging you to come with me tomorrow, I just wanted to tell you that Tony and I are leaving for our fishing trip on Friday night, and we were hoping you could do that other favor for us before we go.”
I began to slice fat vine-ripened tomatoes thinly, removing the seed pockets as I went along. “What other favor?”
“Oh, didn’t he tell you? Tony was really hoping you’d do a taste-test for Prospect. Could you manage it? I think he’d pay for your time …”
I barely avoided slicing my index finger. “You’re not serious, are you? I don’t want to be paid to taste someone else’s food. Besides, I thought you got out of analyzing restaurants. How does Tony think I can possibly help?”
“Don’t ask me, I’m the dumb broad who can’t even read an assay report,” Marla said blithely. “And as for tasting ? well, Tony just doesn’t trust his own taste buds. What he’ll do is watch the traffic in and out of Sam’s Soups there by the lake. He’ll talk to people, maybe conduct exit interviews, like that. Albert will crunch the numbers. All you have to do is sample Sam’s menu and tell Tony if there’s any way that soup will be the next food craze. You know he’ll appreciate it, he’ll have you cater Prospect’s next big do. Please?”
“Friday lunch,” I agreed reluctantly. Whether Tony would have me cater Prospect’s next big affair was something I doubted very much, given yesterday’s fiasco at the mine. But Marla was my closest friend, and I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. Besides, it was the only way to get her off the phone. “I’ve made a couple of unexpected bookings, and Friday’s the first time I can manage. Now please, I have to ? “
“What, go feed the dog? How come I can’t hear the mighty canine? Usually he’s in the background singing away.”
“He’s out with Tom and Arch.”
“In this weather?”
“Don’t remind me.” I removed the wrappings from several packages of milky-white chevre and started to cut it into small cubes. “No, I’ll let you go if you’ll just promise you’ll come to Cherry Creek with me tomorrow morning. Be the buffer at the Prospect office.”
I inhaled deeply, turned away from the chevre, and stirred the dark Bolognese sauce. “If I come with you, promise you won’t lose your temper again with Albert Lipscomb.”
“I’ll be like Mr. Rogers. On Librium,” she added, and signed off. As the former wives of a doctor, Marla and I always laced our similes with drugs.
“Okay, look,” I said to Macguire, but stopped. “Macguire, what are you doing?” I cringed as a large chunk of dough just missed the ceiling. “Macguire!”
