Gertie Girl was the nickname Jack had always used for me. It was short for Gertrude, my real name. Jack didn’t like the name Goldy, he’d told me when I was very small. It had been one of the times he’d shown up without warning at our house, laden with gift bags full of books, puzzles, and games. He always loved to pose riddles to me, too. “What word appeared when So met Imes?” he asked when I was five. After a moment, I shrieked, “Sometimes!” which had caused him to erupt in gales of laughter.
“I learned kindness from you,” I replied, when he stopped dancing around my kitchen. In addition to all the goodies Jack had always bestowed on me, he’d written me letters when I was away at school. And he’d sympathized with me when I was trying to get out of my first marriage, to an abusive doctor, now deceased, thank God.
To me, Jack was the model of the perfect godfather, which I told him often.
In my kitchen now, he hugged me, and I handed him a batch of the salty fried pecans I’d made for him and his new drinking buddy, a recently retired, much-loved local physician named Harold Finn. They relished the pecans with their scotch. I invited them over often, but they seldom came. Sometimes I worried that the nuts were the only food the two of them ate.
Well. No matter how many contract changes I was forced to make for Billie Attenborough, I kept telling myself to be patient. At age thirty-six, Billie was getting married for the first time, after two broken engagements. Unfortunately, Billie held an intense dislike for my godfather’s pal, Doc Finn, and never tired of telling me how awful he was. According to Billie, Doc Finn had told both of her ex-fiancés—one with gastritis, the other with migraines—that they needed to break off their engagements to her. Since this didn’t sound like any medical advice I’d ever heard, I asked Doc Finn about it. The kindly, white-haired general practitioner had rubbed his goatee thoughtfully, then looked at me over his half-glasses. He’d said that while he couldn’t comment on any particular patient, he was in favor of everyone lowering levels of stress.
Now I knew what Doc Finn was talking about. Stress? Stress? I’d gotten to dreaming that I was throwing Billie off the nearest mountaintop. Too bad Doc Finn had hung up his stethoscope: I needed him to treat me for Billie-induced insanity. As I kneaded bread for the small baguettes Billie had insisted be served at her reception—instead of the croissants she’d demanded initially, or the corn bread muffins she’d wanted the second time around—I wondered how difficult it would be to dial 911 with a tray in my hand once I began to have the symptoms of a heart attack.
At least Billie was happy in love, I reflected. In fact, by her account, she was ecstatic, head over heels, and had found her true soul mate with her intended, a man eight years her junior, a newly minted general-practitioner named Craig Miller.
Miller, quiet, good looking, with round horn-rimmed specs and an easy smile, had recently joined Spruce Medical Group to replace Doc Finn. Once, during a particularly excruciating lunch, Billie was again critical of Doc Finn, saying everyone knew he was senile and incompetent, and it was long past time for him to be replaced. Craig had joined us for this meal, and he calmly told Billie that Doc Finn had been a great asset to the community. Back when Spruce Medical Group was a small practice located in an old office building on Upper Cottonwood Creek Road, Finn had spent hours listening to, and talking to, patients who adored him. She should be kinder toward him. Billie had immediately shut up, and I wanted to ask Craig if he could come to all our lunches.
I kept telling myself, Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Eons ago, I’d majored in psychology, which had its uses in the catering biz. Billie just hadn’t learned how to get along with people, I told myself. Even though she graduated from college, she’d never held a regular job. She’d been jilted by two fiancés; maybe she’d imagined them critiquing everything about her, and that was why her chief occupation in life was criticizing people. But I couldn’t find a reason for what to me was Billie’s main problem: the flakiness. Yes, she got lost; yes, she couldn’t keep track of her calendar. But she’d also completely changed her menu six times.
Each time she changed the menu, she gave oddball reasons such as, “Oh, I tasted shrimp cocktail at the Pardee wedding, and knew we couldn’t have it, too, because some of the guests would be the same. So I want calamari.” When I told Billie’s mother what that would cost, the menu was quietly changed to include deviled eggs topped with a spoonful of caviar. But then there was, “Last night Craig and I had a chicken satay at a Thai restaurant in Denver; could you make us a satay, but with duck?” Duck satay? Charlotte vetoed that one, too. But finally, Billie whined, “C’mon, it wouldn’t be that much trouble for you to roast three or four suckling pigs, would it? You could dig the roasting pit outside your house.” Right. Charlotte also vetoed the roasting pit, thank God.
“I’m giving up weddings,” I told Tom, when I came home from that particular lunch.
Tom sagely commented, “Then you’d go nuts.”
“I’m there, Tom. I’m totally bonkers. First I waited for her for two hours while she was lost trying to find the restaurant, and then she hit me with the roast suckling porkers.”
Tom said, “Uh-oh.”
“Billie Attenborough’s wedding is killing me.”
“Aw, you always say that.”
“This time I mean it.”
2
The morning of August the twentieth dawned with rain, again, the same as we’d had since the month began. It was two days before Billie’s twice-postponed nuptials. From our bedroom window, I looked out ruefully at the downpour. I had another wedding to cater today, Cecelia, aka Ceci, O’Neal’s. Rain meant that the guests wouldn’t be able to mingle outside, and we’d have the added problem of sixty raincoats to store.
I shook my head. It was a perplexing summer, weather wise. Even if the Colorado forecasters call July and sometimes August “monsoon season,” the rain usually arrives in the late afternoon. And anyway, the term “monsoon season” is a laugh in itself, since we generally get an annual average of thirteen inches of rain. (Ten inches of snow equals one inch of rain, and we’d already had a winter featuring twelve total feet of snow. “You do the math,” my sixteen-year-old son Arch had commented. To which I’d replied, “No, thanks.”)
Still, three weeks of unremitting, incessant downpour was uncharacteristic. The New Age people over in Boulder would have said that all of Billie Attenborough’s nutty behavior had brought on the bad weather. When I told Tom that interpretation, he pulled me in for a hug and whispered, “At least we know who to blame.”
The Friday morning of Ceci’s wedding, I decided that the first order of business was to take a freshly made sweet bread, richly studded with dried apricots, dried cranberries, and toasted pecans, across the street to my godfather. At fifty-eight, Jack was, by his own admission, a “recovering lawyer.” Retiring from his practice, he said, and suffering through two heart attacks, had made him want to be closer to his son, Lucas, who had lived for over a decade on the other side of Aspen Meadow. But really, Jack had confided to me, he missed being a part of my life.
“And anyway,” Jack admitted, “it’s best for Lucas and me if we take each other in small doses. I know he’s my son, but I’m telling the truth. I mean, after he got divorced, I paid for him to go to physician’s assistant school. And when he graduated, what did he do? Told me to stop smoking and drinking. That’s gratitude for you.”