I dropped Jack back at the beach house to read through a bunch of scripts Katie had sent him before heading to work myself. I wasn’t there two minutes before Hector broke out in an operatic voice with ‘O Mio Babino Caro’ in the kitchen. I guess the flush in my cheeks and the ridiculous need to smile while asking about saltshakers and mustard had given me away. I rolled my eyes at him and tried hard to pull myself together.
By the time book club rolled round, I was a little calmer. Although my stomach did clench as I walked past the living room where the blanket was folded neatly by the fireplace.
Mrs. Weaton came through my back door fifteen minutes early bearing a huge basket of lemon squares and asked me to help her with the ice tea she’d made. We trotted back across the yard.
“So dear, he’s a dreamy one, isn’t he? And so charming,” she sighed with a soft smile.
I laughed. “Yes he is, Mrs. Weaton, yes he is. Now you know you can’t tell anyone, right?”
“I know, dear. And far be it for me to offer opinions, I was quite the little go-er in my day, but you best guard your heart, honey. And you know ... that whole secrecy thing can make for a much more intense time than normal.”
Go-er? I shook my head. Did that mean popular or slutty? I focused on the heart stuff.
“I’m trying Mrs. Weaton. To guard my heart,” I clarified. “But, just in case I fail, can you make sure and stock up on the lemon squares and maybe that chocolate caramel pudding with the sea salt?”
“Sure will, honey.” She patted me on the arm. In the same moment, we heard the roar of a motorcycle going down the street on the other side of the house. She noticed my attention and raised her penciled-in eyebrows.
I shrugged. “He rides a bike, did he tell you that?”
She shook her head and sighed again. “As I said, dreamy. Let’s hope he doesn’t put on a tool belt. Then it’s all over.”
I sputtered. She just grinned.
I headed back up the steps, still laughing and held open the screen door for my aged companion. Jazz’s car pulled up and disgorged her, Faith, and Liz.
“Who’s minding the shop, Faith?” I asked with a smile, admiring, as I always did, the way she could pull off her elegant platinum hair and ruby red lips.
“I closed up early, there’s hardly anyone around at the moment. And anyway, I made a huge sale today.”
“You did? That’s great.”
Faith’s store was an eclectic, but super elegant mix of designer furnishings and one of a kind pieces—as well as jewelry she designed herself and accessories she saw here and there and couldn’t pass up. She always joked it was the ‘buy high’ addiction for her and it was a good thing she had a shop to resell stuff in, or she’d be on an episode of Hoarders. We would roll our eyes when she said this, as her home and her store were as far away from impulsive and chaotic as one could get. I loved to go hang out there with Jazz just to sit in the serene, awesome candle-smelling-chic-ness.
I looked back and forth between Jazz and Faith, who seemed to be having an entire silent conversation. “What?”
“Well,” said Jazz. “Please don’t kill me ... ” She affected a fake sheepish look that told me she really didn’t give a hoot if I liked what she was about to say or not.
“Oh, man. What Jazz?”
“Well, uh ... since you finished it last night, and Faith had been asking about your stuff, I decided to take the chandelier in to the store this morning.” Her cringe looked a little less fake as she reached the end of her confession. Probably because my face must have shown complete horror.
“You did what?” I barely got the words out as the blood drained from my head. I wasn’t ready. “It wasn’t ready!”
Dear God, I felt like I had just woken up naked at a fair.
“Jazz, you had no right to do that. I wasn’t finished, there was still so much, and the wiring ... the wiring hasn’t been tested, and I’m not sure I’m ready yet, what would I even charge for that piece of crap, and who the hell—”
Faith had said something, and her words finally penetrated. “It what?”
“It sold,” Faith repeated with a shrug of her shoulders and a huge smile.
“It did?” I whispered. “How much?”
Faith and Jazz beamed, and Jazz bounced up and down as we all looked on.
“Well,” Faith said. “I usually have a forty percent mark up on my home furnishings, and I wanted to make it worth your time, and mine, so I sold it for forty-one hundred dollars.”
I made some sort of weird squeaking sound as I reacted in shock. “You what? Four thousand and one hundred dollars? Who in their right mind would pay that much for a glued together bunch of washed up stuff?”
“It was beautiful, Keri Ann,” Faith pronounced, as Jazz nodded and murmured her agreement.
“You mean I made,” I quickly paused to calculate, “about two thousand four hundred dollars today?”
I was breathless and a little shaky. Mrs. Weaton steered me onto one of the rocking chairs, and I made to sit down, and then stopped cold.
“Who bought it?” I asked.
Oh hell, no. I glared at Jazz. “Who bought it, Jazz?” She furrowed her brows in confusion.
“What do you mean?” she asked, and then she got it. “Oh.” She looked at Faith. “I wasn’t there when the sale happened. Faith, who did you say bought it? Did someone come in to the store?”
I grabbed onto Jazz’s hand and she gripped me hard back. I didn’t even want to acknowledge the kinds of feelings I would be having if she told me a guy bought it, or someone from California called. And it would be the latter probably, at his behest, if the flooring debacle was any kind of indication.
“Oh,” said Faith, oblivious to the tension. “This lady is here with her husband on vacation from Ohio, some kind of second honeymoon, whatever. Anyway, she saw it and almost went into spasms of pleasure. She couldn’t stop touching it, absolutely adored it. If she hadn’t bought it, I was going to have to start charging her groping fees.” She laughed.
My hand relaxed infinitesimally. The fact that I had automatically assumed it wasn’t a legitimate sale wasn’t lost on Jazz, and she’d give me a hard time about it later. But for now we grinned at each other stupidly. At least, I was grinning stupidly. Jazz would cluck like a hen if she could, such was the proud bearing of her shoulders and I told you so eyebrows.
“And I’d like to commission three more, all slightly different of course. Do you have any other things I can put in the shop?”
“She sure does,” said Jazz. And the next half hour consisted of us bringing stuff down from the attic and Jazz showcasing all my various projects ... from an old mirror framed with driftwood to sea glass-bejeweled photo frames ... like she was hosting a promo special. I looked on in bashful wonder.
Finally, both Jazz’s mom and Brenda arrived and we all got comfortable on the porch to start the book discussion.
“So, who thinks the parallel dimension theme is symbolic of the unattainability of the perfect man?” Jazz asked loudly. And basically, for me, it went downhill from there.
Between the pointed observations from Mrs. Weaton and Jazz about the heroine having to learn to trust and suspend her disbelief, and the references by the oblivious members of the book club about how perfectly cast Jack Eversea was in the role, I decided to stay out of most of the discussion.