Double Shot

restaurant.

I blinked at Cecelia Brisbane, who was seated close by. Her wide body spilled over the chair seat as she hunched over the table, her thick glasses perched on the edge of her bulbous nose. She was taking notes, for God’s sake! If she made fun of the Roundhouse’s pine odor in her next column, I’d tell her to be grateful the folks hadn’t inhaled what had preceded it.

I focused on the rest of the guests. Gray-haired, squirrel-faced Nan Watkins, a longtime ob-gyn nurse at Southwest Hospital, nodded to me and gave a thumbs-up. I was doing her retirement party this week, so it was a good thing she was enjoying the lunch. In fact, all of the guests looked satisfied—at least with the food, if not with Ted Vikarios’s droning on. I’d been gratified by the way they’d slurped down Julian’s herb-topped chilled asparagus soup. After that, the mourners had dug into our quickly assembled assiettes de charcuterie. Amazing how a long church service can stimulate the appetite.

And speaking of church, God, and things we were thankful for, I’d also been grateful to the Almighty that Liz had been able to muster Arch out earlier than I’d requested. Looking over at Arch, now quietly filling water glasses at a far table, I was filled with pride. At fifteen, my son was finally getting taller. His shoulders were broadening, he’d cut his toast-brown hair short, and he’d traded in his thick tortoiseshell glasses for thin wire-rimmed specs.

But there was another change in Arch. Toward the end of the school year, I’d finally had enough of my son’s self-centeredness and obsession with having stuff. I’d barely been able to deal with a stream of demands for an electric guitar, a high-tech cell phone, a new computer, and other paraphernalia. Worse, his annoying behavior was increasingly expressing itself as verbal abuse directed at yours truly. I’d lived in denial for all those years with the Jerk, I said to myself one particularly sleepless night, was I going to do the same with Arch?

I was not. No matter whose “fault” his behavior was—I blamed the brats at Elk Park Preparatory School, Arch blamed me—I decided to pull him out of EPP. Unfortunately, there was no Episcopal high school in the Denver area. So I told Arch he could go away to military school (I was bluffing) or he could attend the Christian Brothers Catholic High School, not far from the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. After much yelling and door slamming, he chose the Brothers.

Once Arch had been admitted, the school had phoned and invited him on a class retreat. Arch had had a fantastic time. He had made a slew of new friends who now invited him to skate, play guitar, or just hang out, something he had never, ever been asked to do by any student at Elk Park Prep.

And then my son had started required community work in a Catholic Workers’ soup kitchen. Chopping fifteen pounds of onions on Saturday mornings to go into stew he then helped serve to two-hundred-plus homeless people—this had changed his materialism, but quick. Now he put away half his allowance for the Catholic Workers and begged me for paid work so he could help more people eat.

Well, I was all for helping people eat. I mean, just look at this lunch! It might be costing me a mint, but it was happening. Right from the start, Liz and Julian had commandeered Arch into an assembly line that would have left Henry Ford in the dust. They’d zipped around the kitchen prep table, placing slabs of creamy Port Salut cheese beside delicate rosettes of spicy imported salami. Because I was hurting, they’d given me the meager job of rolling the delicately smoked Westphalian ham into thin cylinders. They’d placed these next to slices of a heavenly homemade goat cheese Liz had nabbed at the farmers’ market. We’d all pitched in to pile Liz’s salad—crisp, tender field greens mixed with crunchy slices of hearts of palm and coated with her scrumptious vinaigrette—into pyramids in the middle of each assiette just as the first cars wheeled into the gravel driveway. Right before the lunch had commenced, when we’d been finishing the last of the plates, Dr. Ted Vikarios had burst into the kitchen. Apparently, Arch wasn’t the only one with matters religious on his mind.

“Jesus God Almighty!” Ted Vikarios yelled.

The four of us had jumped. After recovering, I’d reminded him of who I was. Goldy, from the old days, remember? Limping along, I’d led him back out to the dining room and asked him what I could do to help him. When he’d mumbled microphone and podium, I’d carefully shown him where he’d be giving his speech after the meal. Seeming preoccupied, he’d wandered off.

After that inauspicious kickoff, however, the lunch itself had been stupendous. The guests had devoured every morsel of food, right down to the baguettes, the butter—even the gherkins. Moving through the tables, I’d noticed a few members of the crowd making sandwiches from leftovers and tucking them into purses and sacks—a sure sign of success, if not good manners.

And now the guests were devouring the swoon-inducing slices of the flourless chocolate cakes I’d made for Marla. We’d topped them with Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, quickly purchased by Julian, as our homemade batch had melted when the compressors were shut off. Julian had handed the portable mike—at least I’d set that up the previous day—to Albert’s widow, Holly. Short, gray-haired, as vibrant and energetic at fifty-five as she had been at forty, she’d given an enthusiastic thanks to everyone who’d come. She’d added that there would be one tribute only, from Albert’s old friend Ted Vikarios.

As Ted now proclaimed into the microphone, his wife, Ginger Vikarios, smiled nervously at the crowd. Like her husband, Ginger, slender and overly made up, had taken unsuccessful steps to look as if she had not aged. She’d dyed her hair orange, the lipstick on her downturned mouth was orange, and she had bright spots of orange blush on each cheek. She looked fragile and unhappy, like a sad clown. I certainly hoped Ginger had not heard the insensitive comments on the way her curly orange hair matched her unfashionable orange taffeta dress. Whatever had happened to people wearing black to funerals? they wanted to know. I hadn’t the foggiest.

John Richard Korman’s late arrival with his blond, nubile new girlfriend, Sandee Blue, had caused a ripple in the crowd. Sandee, her platinum curls swept forward in a sexy do, ignored Ted Vikarios as she giggled and nuzzled John Richard’s ear. Smiling, John Richard pulled away, ran his fingers through his long hair, and winked knowingly at Sandee. I wondered if he was technically old enough to be her father.

Marla and I had met Sandee two weeks before, when we’d delivered Arch to John Richard’s house prior to a golf lesson. Clad in a bikini (to the best of my knowledge, the Jerk had not installed an indoor pool in his country- club rental house), she’d opened the heavy door, looked us up and down, and introduced herself.

“I’m Sandee Blue. That’s Sandee with two e s.”

Arch had done his best not to gawk. I’d shuddered and, for once, been tongue-tied.

Confused, Sandee had asked, “Are you here with money?”

Without missing a beat, Marla had said, “No, but we’d be blue, too, if we didn’t have any.” Sandee had retreated, looking even more perplexed. Then we’d heard the Jerk yelling at her from inside the house, and finally he’d appeared and wordlessly taken Arch. What was that French saying—plus ca change? Well, anyway, stuff doesn’t change and neither do jerks.

According to Marla, Sandee worked in the country-club golf shop, and that was where John Richard had decided he had to have her. Also according to Marla, once John Richard met Sandee, he’d dumped his willowy, wealthy, gorgeous, brunette girlfriend, Courtney MacEwan. Courtney was a highly competitive tennis-playing socialite. She was known for throwing her racket and her fluorescent pink tennis balls at opponents who beat her—and hitting them. This was not the kind of woman I’d want to have as an enemy, but John Richard was an expert in—Marla’s term—the Art of Bedding Dangerously.

Now, watching John Richard lean over and whisper in Sandee’s ear, my gaze traveled over to lovely, brown- haired Courtney MacEwan, standing on the far side of the French doors. Unlike Ginger Vikarios’s orange gown, Courtney’s dress was black, but it was so low cut and tight—showing muscles I wasn’t even sure I had—that it made Ginger’s pouffery look tame. I racked my gray cells to figure out why Courtney was here, and then remembered that her former husband—he had died of a heart attack when Courtney had surprised him in bed with a flight attendant—had been a top executive at Southwest Hospital.

Courtney had been John Richard’s squeeze in—what, April, the beginning of May? Then the Jerk had moved on to the greener Sandee pasture, and they’d split. Now Courtney stared in his direction. The bitterness of her expression shrieked, If I can’t have this man, no one will! I wondered if her copious Louis