Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (5 page)

“I hope I haven’t kept ya’ll waiting,” Virginia said, unfolding her napkin on her lap. She was dressed impeccably in an Ann Taylor suit and dark pumps. Her hair was cut in a fashionable bob. “Have you already ordered?” Without waiting for a reply, she waved the menu away and said to the waiter, “I’ll have a Caesar salad and a glass of sweet tea.”

He looked at Eadie and smiled. “Another merlot?”

“I’m going to need one of those big frozen margaritas,” Eadie said, holding up two hands to show him the size. “The bigger, the better.”

“You better bring me one, too,” Lavonne said, closing up her Daytimer.

Virginia leaned her elbows on the table, laced her well-manicured fingers together and rested her chin there, looking expectantly from one to the other. “So what did I miss?” she asked. She smiled broadly, showing a row of sharp little teeth. When no one answered, she put her hands in her lap and said brightly, “Well, I’m sorry I’m late but I had a meeting at Bitsy Manchester’s. She has a new Cambodian yard boy, and honey, her yard is just lovely. Not a weed in sight. Roses everywhere. Dogwood trees that look like they sprang up overnight. You should see about getting yourself one, Nita.” She turned to her daughter-in-law, patting her arm the way you’d pat a colicky baby. “You could use some help with your lawn. You could use some help with the weeds and that brown mold you have growing all over you rhododendrons.” She stopped patting Nita. Nita slid her hand into her lap. “I wonder where you go to find a Cambodian yard boy?” Virginia mused to no one in particular.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Lavonne said. “How about Cambodia?”

Virginia pursed her lips and let her eyes rest, briefly, on Lavonne. She leaned over the table and said, lowering her voice confidentially, “So, have you found a caterer yet?” She pretended to be concerned but secretly, of course, she hoped they had not. She had overheard Charles two weeks ago bragging to someone that the firm’s party basically ran itself and she had immediately decided to teach him a lesson. Virginia had handled the details for this party for the last fifteen years, and it had been a monumental and thankless task ripe with the potential for disaster. She could only hope that this year Charles would discover this for himself. Perhaps it would make him more grateful and less boastful. When she heard he had turned the planning over to Nita and Lavonne she had secretly crowed with delight. Everyone knew there were no decent caterers in this town and to hire one from Atlanta required months of advance scheduling. Virginia had promptly fired the Atlanta caterer when she decided to teach Charles a lesson (she had lied to him and said it was the caterer who backed out at the last minute). Now all she had to do to succeed was pretend to be helpful, and sit around and watch Nita and Lavonne turn the party into a disaster.

“We’re working on it,” Lavonne said.

Virginia sighed. “I’m so sorry I had to withdraw for health reasons and then that idiotic caterer in Atlanta backed out at the last minute. I had
no idea
Charles would expect ya’ll to come up with a caterer at the last minute, it really doesn’t seem fair at all, and what
good, good
sports ya’ll are being about this whole wretched affair.”

No one said anything. The waiter brought their drinks. Virginia glanced around the table to get a good look at what everyone was wearing. Virginia was very particular about appearances. She was one of those Southern women who cannot imagine why a woman would let herself go the way Lavonne had let herself go. To give way to obesity suggested deep-seated unhappiness and MoonPie binges. It hinted at poor breeding and a tendency toward white-trashery. Seeing as how Lavonne was a Yankee, Virginia figured she might not know all this. Virginia figured it was her duty to suggest methods for improvement. “You know, Lucy Metcalfe went on that Atkins diet and lost sixty pounds,” she said to Nita.

“Lucy Metcalfe went to Atlanta and had her stomach stapled,” Eadie said, lifting her big margarita. “Any idiot can do that.” She grimaced and sipped her drink. She’d had about all she could take of Virginia Broadwell. Another ten minutes and things were going to get ugly.

Virginia was accustomed to ignoring Eadie Boone. “Lavonne, have you lost weight?” she said, smiling sweetly. “You look like you have.”

Unperturbed, Lavonne buttered another roll and took a big bite before answering. In June, she had gone on Weight Watchers and gained ten pounds. Then in August she went on the Palm Beach Diet and gained fifteen more. If she kept dieting at this rate, she would put on forty pounds by Christmas. “No, Virginia,” she said finally, still chewing. “I haven’t lost weight. Thanks for asking though.”

Eadie touched her big margarita glass to the rim of Lavonne’s glass. She motioned for the waiter to bring them another round.

It made Nita nervous the way Eadie and Lavonne were draining their big drinks. The last time Eadie and Lavonne drank tequila around Virginia, they’d gone out to her house in the middle of the night, stolen her lawn jockey, and painted him to look like Bozo the Clown, then returned him to his rightful place in the middle of the front flower bed. It had taken Nita a week of steady pleading to talk Charles and Virginia out of hiring a private investigator to find out who defiled the jockey.

“So what’s your plan for finding a caterer?” the irrepressible Virginia said, trying to sound like a coconspirator. She rested her sharp little chin on her palm and looked from one to the other.

“My plan is to get the hell out of town,” Lavonne said. “My plan is to throw my suitcase into the back of my car and head for the beach.”

Eadie thought this was funny. “Now you’re talking,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

“I haven’t been to the beach in so long,” Nita said wistfully. The last time had been six months ago for their sixteenth wedding anniversary. Remembering, Nita felt a vibration of guilt in the pit of her stomach. Charles had ordered room service and they’d eaten on their balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Maybe the condoms weren’t even his,
Nita thought suddenly. Maybe he’d found them on the ground and picked them up and put them in his pocket.

Virginia looked at her daughter-in-law as if she were noticing her for the first time. “Nita,” she said sharply. “What’s wrong with you? You look terrible.”

Nita blanched and knocked her water glass over. “Charles hung his hunting jacket in my closet,” she blurted out, mopping the water with her napkin, “and I had to move it.” She looked around the table. They were all watching her now, Lavonne and Eadie above the rims of their big-as-a-cereal-bowl margarita glasses, and Virginia with a pinched expression on her face, as if she’d just caught a whiff of something unsavory.

“Maybe you should try sleeping pills,” Virginia said.

Nita said, “Sleeping pills?”

The frustration of watching this exchange grew inside Lavonne like a tumor. She’d been watching it for years, Virginia, cruel and manipulative, and Nita, soft and yielding as butter. Lavonne felt Nita’s life would be better if just once she told her mother-in-law to fuck off. Except for Nita’s steadfast refusal to join the Junior League, Lavonne could not think of a single time Nita had openly opposed Virginia. She took everything Virginia had to dish out, and never said a word in her own defense.

“Maybe you should try Prozac.”

“Prozac’s not the answer for everything, Virginia,” Lavonne said.

“It’s the answer for most things,” Virginia said.

“Well, you should know,” Eadie said.

“I don’t have to sit here and be criticized by an adulteress,” Virginia snapped, feeling her fa¸cade of sympathetic good cheer beginning to slide.

“Well, fuck me,” Eadie said.

“I think that’s her point,” Lavonne said, sipping her drink.

Nita had had enough of this bickering. She couldn’t handle open conflict. She put her hands on the table, palms down, and leaned forward slightly. “Maybe we should just concentrate on making this the best firm party ever,” she said with the forced fervor of a cheerleader.

Lavonne smiled and said, “Hear, hear.” Virginia took a deep breath and regained her composure. Eadie sipped her margarita and thought,
Oh, this’ll definitely be the best party ever. They’ll be talking about this one for years.

The waiter brought their food and they settled down to eating. While they ate, Virginia droned on about the Ithaca Cotillion Ball she had attended two weeks ago. The Ithaca Cotillion Ball was one of the oldest debutante balls in south Georgia. People from all over rural Georgia sent their daughters to be presented here, people from towns like Moundsville and Sandy Hook and Shubuta. In Eadie and Nita’s day, the only way you could be presented was if your grandmother had been presented or you were nominated by some rogue chairwoman who was herself a member of the committee but who didn’t follow the traditional rules of decency and good breeding by allowing new girls in. Mothers worked furiously for years to assure their daughters a berth on the coveted list of twenty-five debs. But over the years the prestige of the ball had begun to diminish. Some of the girls whose grandmothers had been debutantes didn’t care about such things now. They refused to participate, leaving room for daughters of doctors and lawyers and corporate executives who were swarming into Ithaca like a horde of nouveau riche barbarians. Getting an invitation to attend the ball was almost as hard as getting an invitation to be a debutante. Lavonne had lived in Ithaca eighteen years and had never been invited. Nita and Eadie had only been twice. Lavonne guessed, unless her daughters somehow managed to be asked as debs, she might spend her entire life without ever attending a debutante ball.

“I don’t even think we have debutantes in Cleveland,” Lavonne said suddenly.

“Probably not,” Virginia murmured.

“Or if we do I don’t know about it.” Even after eighteen years of living in the South, Lavonne was still trying to work out the complexities of the social scene. Southern society could be broken down into two broad groups: those who were debs, and those who weren’t; those who went to private school, and those who didn’t. When someone down here asked “What school did you go to?” they weren’t asking about college.

“The South is a place of tradition and culture,” Virginia reminded them, lifting her sharp little chin.

“Tradition and culture,” Lavonne said, raising her glass in a toast. Eadie grinned and lifted her glass. Nita put her face in her hands. “I’m reminded of it every time I’m asked to
mash
an elevator button or
carry
someone to the store,” Lavonne said. “Every time I’m asked to
chunk
somebody the remote control.”

“Or
tote
a watermelon to a picnic,” Eadie said. “Or
whomp
somebody up side of the head to get their attention.”

Lavonne grinned and tapped her glass against Eadie’s. “I’m reminded of the tradition and culture that is the South every time I drive to the Git n’ Gallop or the Honk ’n Holler to pick up a quart of milk.”

Virginia had had enough of this conversation. Lavonne was obviously intoxicated. Virginia could tell from looking at the woman that she’d been sampling the frozen margaritas a little too freely. Virginia had been raised to avoid open conflict, she had been taught that no matter how deep an antagonism may run, surface civility must be maintained at all costs. Virginia could hug an enemy to her bosom with one hand, and disembowel her with the other. This was obviously not a skill taught up North.

Virginia lifted her chin slightly and turned to her daughter-in-law. “Nita, did your yard man finish the pool house?” She took her napkin out of her lap and placed it on the table. “You know Charles won’t like it if there are scraps of lumber everywhere. You know he likes the yard to look nice the week of the party.”

“Jimmy Lee finishes up today,” Nita said, remembering. He was finishing up even as she sat here. She’d probably never see him again after today. She picked up her spoon and gazed down into her tomato basil soup. She felt light-headed. Her stomach bounced around her rib cage like a hyperactive gymnast. She wondered if her dream of little blue fishes had something to do with the condoms she’d found in her husband’s hunting jacket. She wondered if she was coming down with the flu.

“Jimmy Lee?” Virginia said, frowning.

“Jimmy Lee,” Lavonne said. “The south Georgia yard boy.”

Nita swirled her soup with her spoon. Jimmy Lee should be loading his tools into his truck right now. She stared into her soup like she was staring into a crystal ball. She could see him reflected there, standing with the sun shining on his dark glossy hair. If she hurried maybe she could get home before he left.

Virginia clucked her tongue and looked around the crowded restaurant. She wished now she hadn’t overheard Charles and gotten her feelings hurt. For one brief moment she wished she hadn’t turned the party over to her daughter-in-law and her drunken friends. It was sure to be a disaster, and then Virginia would have to spend weeks explaining to everyone who’d listen that she hadn’t had a thing to do with it. “Look,” she said to Lavonne, opening her purse and taking out a business card. “Call this woman. She works out of her home in Valdosta. I haven’t used her, of course, but I understand she did the Chasen girl’s engagement party when the girl got herself in the family way and her parents didn’t have time to plan a decent function.”

Lavonne could feel a muscle twitching above her right eye. She felt like someone had tied a plastic bag around her head. She had a sudden vision of her mother lying dead on the frozen ground, a basket of wet clothes strewn around her like the petals of some monstrous flower. “She won’t use it,” her father had said, when Lavonne asked him why he hadn’t hooked up the new dryer she’d brought her mother for Christmas. “Why hook it up when she won’t use it.”

“Do you want it or not?” Virginia repeated, holding the card out to Lavonne like she was offering entrails to a rabid dog.

Lavonne shook her head. “Keep it,” she said. “I’ll find my own damn caterer.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

O
N THE WAY
home from the lunch meeting, Lavonne decided to stop at Shapiro’s Bakery for a cream cheese brownie. She was feeling depressed and anxious and she figured a cream cheese brownie might be just the thing to take her mind off the party. The traffic was light and she found a spot in front of the bakery and parked.

Lavonne hadn’t even known there were Jews in the South when she first moved here. She had been amazed to learn that Dixie Jews went by names like Junior and Bubba and prided themselves on being Southerners, first, and Jews, second. The South was like that. It could take in any ethnic group, culture, or religious sect and pretty soon they’d be saying “ya’ll” and fixing greens and corn bread for supper. Maybe it was the drinking water filtered out of murky lakes where alligators slept, maybe it was the sultry, siesta-prone climate or the way the jasmine smelled blooming on a moonlit night. Whatever the reason, within a generation of arriving here from Bialystok in 1886, the Shapiros were as Southern as they come.

Lavonne pushed open the door and went in, the little bell above her head tinkling merrily. Mrs. Shapiro came from the back, wiping her hands on a clean white apron. “Oh, hey, Miz Zibolsky,” she said. She was a small round woman with red cheeks and wisps of gray hair that escaped from her hairnet and fell in wild profusion around her face. She had a lazy left eye, the result of a childhood accident involving her brother, June Bug Rubin, and a shovel. “You doing all right?” Mrs. Shapiro’s bad eye shifted slightly to the left of where Lavonne stood contemplating the glass case of baked goods.

“I’m fixing to get a whole lot better,” Lavonne said. She could talk Southern when she wanted to. Everything in the display looked wonderful. The Texas sheet cake looked especially good. “You got any of those cream cheese brownies in the back?”

“I sure don’t. If I’d known you were coming in, I’d have made up a batch this morning,” Mona Shapiro said, patting her hair. “The Texas sheet cake is real good.” She moved the cake closer to the glass front so Lavonne could get a good look at it. She’d been selling baked goods to Lavonne Zibolsky for a long time and she knew what she liked.

While she waited for Lavonne to decide, Mona said, “Did you hear about Velma Boggs?” Her bad eye skittered and careened off the walls like the headlamp of a runaway train. Lavonne hadn’t heard, so while she tried to decide between the Texas sheet cake and the kugel, Mona told her all about Velma, how Velma had a swelling in her stomach the size of a Texas grapefruit, how she went up to Emory and they opened her and she had what you call a benign tumor, meaning it won’t kill you but it’ll suck the nutrients out of you so’s you wind up skinny as a bed slat.

Lavonne listened and clucked her tongue in the right places. After eighteen years of patronage she was used to Mona’s tales of woe and mayhem. Mona collected bad news the way some women collect spoons. “How’s the Peach Paradise?” Lavonne said finally, pointing at the display.

“Oh, honey, it’s delicious. Those peaches are frozen fresh from Mr. Skidmore’s orchard,” Mona said, bending over to move the Peach Paradise a little closer to the glass window.

“Okay,” Lavonne said. “Wrap it up.”

Mrs. Shapiro went in the back to get a box, then came back out to wrap up the Peach Paradise. Lavonne stared at the dessert and tried to cheer herself up, imagining the anticipation, the excitement, the sweet taste filling her mouth, but no matter how hard she tried, all she could think about was Leonard’s face when she told him she would have to use Piggly Wiggly deli trays for the party. She felt sure the unsettling dreams and visions of her mother, the constant sense of impending disaster, were somehow tied to the stress she was feeling trying to handle last-minute details for the party. She tried to remember a time when her life had been about more than worrying whether she could find a caterer, but those days were a distant memory. She wondered if what she was feeling now might stretch back farther than her marriage to Leonard. She wondered if the spreading roots of her discontent might be imbedded somewhere deep in her childhood.

An only child, she had spent her lonely childhood fantasizing about belonging to a family like the ones she saw on TV. Her father, Raymond, was a clerk down at the local hardware store where he had worked since high school. He was a quiet, morose man accustomed to a degree of sameness in his life. He liked the same beer, ate the same food, sat in the same plaid easy chair, and drove the same sad Buick he had driven for twenty years. Lavonne and her mother, Margaret, spent most of their time moving carefully around their own home so as not to disturb Raymond Schwagel’s rigid and meticulous routine. Margaret Schwagel worked as a clerk typist at Bieder & Assoc., an accounting firm located only four blocks from the little house on Hennipen Street where the Schwagels lived. Lavonne would go with her mother to the office on the occasional Saturday mornings when she had to work, and noting Mr. Bieder’s plush office and the deference her mother showed him, it was here Lavonne first decided she would be an accountant when she grew up.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Mona Shapiro asked, beginning to tape up the box.

“Not today,” Lavonne said, thinking
But probably tomorrow.

Maybe she wouldn’t tell Leonard anything. Maybe she would call Eadie and Nita and go to the beach instead. She imagined the three of them loading their suitcases into the back of her car and turning off their cell phones. She imagined driving three and a half hours with the windows down and Jimmy Buffet singing on the CD player. She imagined them lying on the beach in the bright sunlight drinking margaritas while Trevor, Charles, and Leonard, forced to organize the party themselves, plundered Ithaca like marauding Huns, seizing take-out tubs from Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, snatching deli trays from the Piggly Wiggly, and commandeering massive quantities of alcohol from Merv’s Shake Rattle & Roll Liquor Store. Actually, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack wasn’t such a bad idea. Lavonne made a mental note to call them later.

There was a bookkeeping ledger open on the counter, one of those heavy old-fashioned books Lavonne hadn’t seen in years. Mona saw her looking at it and she groaned. “I can handle the baking but the ledger book gives me fits. Marvin always kept the books. Since he’s been gone things are kind of sliding downhill fast. I never could tolerate numbers. All those long columns staring me in the face night after night. I just can’t seem to concentrate. I’m hoping Little Moses can move back and take over that part of the business for me.” Little Moses was Mona’s only child, a good-looking, clean-cut boy who used to help her in the shop. Lavonne hadn’t seen him since he graduated from high school and went out to California to cut a demo tape with his Jewish reggae band, Burning Bush.

Mona put the last piece of tape on the box. “You probably want to keep this in the refrigerator,” she said. “That way it’ll stay fresh until you have a chance to eat it all.”

Lavonne was pretty sure that wouldn’t be a problem. The last time she bought a pie from Shapiro’s she’d eaten it in one sitting. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She thought about Mrs. Shapiro entering long columns in a ledger book. Hadn’t she heard of personal computers? Hadn’t she heard of accounting software?

Lavonne checked her watch again. Louise had an after-school fencing class. Ashley had cheerleading practice. They would most likely eat dinner at school. Lavonne hoped they would make better food choices than their mother. Like all reformed career women Lavonne took her parenting seriously, volunteering for play groups, turning her kitchen into a craft center, driving her daughters to preschool, and soccer, and horseback riding, and, later, to school, to slumber parties, and to school sporting events. But now the girls were seventeen and sixteen and no longer seemed to need her to drive them around or make dinner for them. Lavonne was left with large blocks of time to sit around eating Peach Paradise and Rocky Road ice cream out of the carton and spy on her neighbors. There were moments in the middle of the afternoon when she thought,
Maybe I should adopt a child.
She thought,
Maybe I should join the Peace Corps.
Lately, she had begun thinking,
Maybe I should get a job.

Mona pushed the box toward Lavonne. She sighed and pulled her hairnet into place. A bus rumbled by in the street outside. “If I can’t talk Little Moses into helping me with the business, I might as well go on and sell to Mr. Redmon.”

“Mr. Redmon?”

“You know Mr. Redmon, don’t you?” Mrs. Shapiro said, shaking the flour off her apron and turning to ring up the purchase on the cash register.

“Yes,” Lavonne said. “I know him.” Redmon was Leonard’s biggest client. Around the office he was known as the Strip Mall King. He was single-handedly responsible for buying up family farms along the interstate that ran through Ithaca and turning the pastoral landscape into a garish jungle of fast-food restaurants, truck stops, and strip joints. In the process, he’d made himself fabulously wealthy. Leonard worshipped him. When Redmon said “Jump,” Leonard said, “How high, Mr. Redmon, sir.”

“He’s been after me for years to sell. You know I own this building,” Mona said, lifting her hand to indicate the shop around them. “And the building next door, too. Marvin bought them back in sixty-seven, right after his daddy died and left us a little money. Back then it was nothing more than a dusty storefront and I couldn’t see the point of buying something downtown—all the businesses seemed to be moving out to the interstate back then. But Marvin’s daddy had a dream right before he died. He dreamed they’d find gold buried beneath the streets of downtown Ithaca, and Marvin was a big believer in dreams. The ink wasn’t even dry on the probate documents before he plunked down the money to buy this place.” She chuckled and shook her head, remembering. She looked fondly around the room. Her bad eye rolled and bounced in its socket like a bobber on a fishing line. “Still, I don’t know why Mr. Redmon would want it. I don’t know what he would want with a bakery anyway.”

Lavonne looked through the plate-glass window at the steady stream of tourists moving along the sidewalks. Across the street a crowd gathered on the porch of the Pink House Restaurant. Five years ago, a big Atlanta developer had discovered the charm of Ithaca’s old downtown and had begun a steady renovation. Now, Mrs. Shapiro’s crumbling building must be worth at least a half million dollars. Redmon would no doubt buy it and turn it into an upscale restaurant or women’s clothing store.

“Mrs. Shapiro, do you have an attorney?” Lavonne took her wallet out of her purse and counted out the bills.

“An attorney?” Mona frowned. Her eye took off like a rocket, flaring off the walls, the ceiling, and coming to rest finally on a spot just to the left of Lavonne. “Well.” She shook her head. “Marvin always took care of all that. He used his second cousin, Solomon, over in Valdosta.”

“No, I mean an attorney to look over any contract Redmon might want you to sign.”

“Actually, Miz Zibolsky, Mr. Redmon said your husband might be able to help me.” She closed the old-fashioned cash register with her hip, and counted out Lavonne’s change.

Lavonne had a sudden image of Leonard and Redmon bent over a contract in Leonard’s office, laughing and rubbing their hands together like villains in a vaudevillian play. The thought that Leonard might make his living by taking advantage of trusting widows, that the big house they lived in, the grand private school her daughters attended, the everyday luxuries she herself enjoyed might be built upon the backs of sweet, gentle women like Mona Shapiro occurred to Lavonne like a blow to the head. Staring into Mona Shapiro’s kindly face, Lavonne felt an odd swelling sensation that started low in her abdomen and traveled up through her chest cavity into her throat. Her breathing quickened. She wondered if she might be hyperventilating. The effect was fleeting but alarming. She took a deep breath and put one hand on the counter to steady herself.

Seeing her discomfort, Mona hurried around the corner and put her arm around her. “Sugar, are you all right?” There was something comforting and familiar about the little woman, something motherly. Lavonne wondered why she had not noticed it before. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just a little short of breath.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“No, I’m okay.” She took another deep breath. There was a sound in her head, loud and insistent as rain drumming on a tin roof. After awhile she said, “Have you ever heard of conflict of interest?”

Mona Shapiro stood looking up into Lavonne’s face with her good eye, trying to read her expression, trying to figure out if she was all right. “You sure you don’t want to sit down?” she said.

Lavonne took another deep breath. “I’ll be okay. But listen, Mrs. Shapiro, don’t sign anything with Redmon or my husband before you get your cousin Solomon to look it over.”

Mrs. Shapiro let go of her. She seemed puzzled by Lavonne’s request, but she nodded her head in agreement. “Okay,” she said.

Lavonne was breathing normally now. She picked up the Peach Paradise in her arms, cradling it like she would a baby. A thought occurred to her suddenly, and she shook herself and said, “Mrs. Shapiro, have you ever done any catering?”

Mona went back behind the counter. Her bad eye shot off like a steel ball in a pinball machine, and rolled slowly back to rest on Lavonne. “Well, I do a lot of bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs,” she said hesitantly.

Lavonne was a little surprised. She hadn’t realized there was such a thriving community of Dixie Jews in Ithaca. “I need a caterer for next Saturday.”

Mona’s face turned pink. She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve never cooked anything but kosher food for big groups,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to cook anything else.”

“Cook whatever you like,” Lavonne said quickly. She was afraid Mona would refuse and now that she’d stumbled on the idea, she didn’t want to give it up. “I’m sure it’ll all taste great. I’ll make a few things myself, maybe some crab and artichoke dip, cheese straws, things like that. Finger food.” Using Mona Shapiro was the perfect solution to the problem of the firm party, and Lavonne wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. Her pulse stopped drumming in her head like the voice of doom. Her stomach settled down. The feeling of anxiety lifted, and for the first time in a long time she began to feel almost optimistic. “Could you do it? We’ll probably have about one hundred people.”