“Yum.” Sam pulled up a seat at the table. “Where's the master chef so I can thank her?”
“I think she goes home for a while, then comes back.” Anna cut a segment of the salmon and put it on her floral-print Wedgwood plate, then broke off a piece of
injera
and used the bread to scoop up some of the fish.
Sam tore off some
injera
and popped it into her mouth. “Tastes kind of like sourdough bread.” She chewed and washed it down with the iced spice tea Mimi had thoughtfully left for them. “So, you ready to see my killer documentary footage after this? I brought it anyway.”
“Not really, if that's okay with you,” Anna replied honestly. “You know how I feel about it.”
Sam shrugged. “Whatever. Your loss. Oh, I got one of my dad's drivers to take us tomorrow night in the stretch, by the by. Everyone can fit. You and Ben, me and Parker, Cammie and Adam, Dee and fill-in-the-blank hot guy Cammie finds for her.”
“Well, it's a little more complicated than that.”
Anna quickly explained how and why she and Ben would be arriving later, so that Ben could first escort Maddy to her prom.
“Wow, so this chick used to weigh how much?” Sam asked, as she dug into the stewed chickpeas.
“Three hundred pounds, maybe,” Anna replied, remembering that her friend had an unnatural fascination—no, obsession—with weight loss. “But she had to have surgery to do it. You realize that people die during that surgery? She was huge, though. Can you even imagine how cruel kids must have been to her? Ben feels protective of her. It's sweet.” She couldn't decide whether to take more
aziffa
—lentil stew—or
buticha
, a side dish made of jalapenos, green onions, and garbanzo flour. Remarkably, it tasted more like perfect scrambled eggs than anything else.
“That's the Ben I know and love,” Sam remarked as Anna scooped up a little of each side dish.
“Ben as white knight, you mean,” Anna translated, because it was what she so often thought herself.
“That's what he does, right?”
For reasons she couldn't name, Anna felt defensive. “He didn't save
me
.”
“Bull.”
“Sam, I did
not
need saving.”
“Didn't you guys meet on the plane when you were first moving here? Didn't he save you from the asshole music producer you were sitting next to, who kept hitting on you? He swooped in and saved you. Admit it.”
Anna had never thought of it like that. It was odd, because in her own family she was usually the rescuer, not the rescued. It was also true. He had swooped in and saved her.
“Is this Maddy chick cute now?” Sam asked, tearing off another piece of the soft flatbread.
“Kind of. She's very curvy, but I don't think she makes much of an effort. You know, baggy clothes, thick eyebrows, frizzy hair—”
“Good,” Sam opined. “Because you definitely wouldn't want Ben to take a hot girl to prom.”
“Don't be silly,” Anna scoffed. “She's like a little sister to him. A family friend.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said knowingly.
“It's
true
.”
“Please. If she looked like Cammie, you'd freak.”
Okay. That was true, too. In fact, she was already having regrets that she'd suggested that Ben take Maddy to her prom first. Obviously Maddy had a massive crush on him. Many a guy had been swayed by that kind of intense attention from a girl.
“Does Eduardo know you're going to prom with Parker?” Anna asked, in a deft—she hoped—effort to change the subject.
Sam shook her head. “Doesn't matter. It's no big deal.”
Could Sam really mean that? She scooped up some mashed chickpeas with a piece of
injera
. “He's your boyfriend. He deserves to know.”
Sam waved away her friend's concern and reached for her iced tea. “It's just two friends going to a school dance together. He's helping me with the documentary. It's totally cool.”
“When does Eduardo leave?”
“Tomorrow morning. Early.”
The kitchen phone rang; Anna rose to answer it. “Anna Percy.” She spoke automatically.
“Well, I'm glad to see that someone hasn't lost her manners.” Her mother's voice was as wellbred and melodious as ever. “But shouldn't you be at school, Anna?”
Anna hadn't spoken to her mother in more than a month. This wasn't surprising, though, because Jane Percy spent as much time in Europe, visiting the various young artists whose work she collected, as she did at the family town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. (Anna suspected her mother also collected the artists more than occasionally, but it wasn't a conversation they were ever likely to have.)
Bone-thin with a classic short blond haircut and vintage couture style, Jane Percy exuded class. She could, and did, trace her ancestry back to the
Mayflower
. She and Anna's father had been divorced for years.
“I came home for lunch with a friend,” Anna explained. “How are you, Mother?”
“Very well, darling,” Jane replied, which meant nothing. Jane Percy would have said, “Very well,” if she were sliding off the deck of the
Titanic
, because that was simply what one did. “Is your father there? I need to talk to him about something in the trust for Susan. The office said he'd left for lunch and he isn't picking up his cell.”
“I haven't seen him, but I'll tell him you called,” Anna promised.
“Write it down, Anna,” Jane instructed, as if she were a small child.
“Where are you calling from? Which number should I give him?”
“Manhattan. For a few weeks, anyway. There's some ridiculous snafu with your sister's trust fund—it's all very tedious.” Her mother's voice cut out a couple of times in the middle of the last sentence; a sure sign of call waiting. “I've got to take this, Anna, it's my attorney. Call me, sweetheart.”
Jane hung up. So did Anna, feeling instantly out of sorts. Talking to her mother generally did that to her. Her mother might say, “Call me, sweetheart,” but both of them knew that their relationship didn't involve calling each other for no good reason. Anna couldn't remember her ever having received a phone call from her mother that didn't have a purpose other than to get caught up on one another's lives. Whenever Anna did call her just to say hello, she got the sense that Jane was busy with something else. More than that, every conversation they did have left Anna feeling as if she wasn't living up to some mythic standard of how Jane Percy's perfect daughter should act.
“Your mother?” Sam asked as Anna sat back down.
Anna nodded. She'd been enjoying her lunch with Sam. Now, despite the good food, she felt almost empty.
“Don't complain. At least she calls you. I haven't spoken to mine since 2004.”
“You never talk about her,” Anna noted curiously, pouring each of them more iced tea. The most Anna could recall was Sam saying that her mother's marriage to Jackson had crashed and burned about nine years ago. Other than that, Anna knew nothing.
“What's to talk about? She was a feature writer for the
Los Angeles Times
when she met my dad. I think it was either an interview or the premiere party for
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
. I know they were friendly with George Lucas back then. They had me, got divorced; she took a job with a paper in North Carolina and married a guy who teaches at Duke. The end.”
“‘The end’?”
Sam shrugged and wiped her mouth with one of the pale blue extra cloth napkins that Mimi had left at her place setting. “The end.”
Anna could see that Sam was trying to hide whatever feelings she actually had about this situation. From the
This Is How We Do Things
Big Book (East Coast WASP edition), she had learned not to pry. On the other hand, she knew what it felt like to not get along with your own mother.
“Why did she and Jackson split up?”
Sam grimaced. “Evidently they got into some weird free-love/open-marriage thing.” She rolled her eyes. “I learned that in one of his heart-to-heart oversharing moments. My father operates in two gears: ignore me, or TMI—too much information. No wonder I'm fucked up.”
“Aren't you curious to see her?”
“Hardly.” Sam threw down the used napkin. “She doesn't even send me a goddamn birthday card.”
Anna felt terrible for her friend. Sure, her own mother was pretty cold, aloof, and judgmental. At least she was around … occasionally.
“If we decide to have kids, we can do better,” she finally suggested optimistically. “Can't we?”
“Shit,” Sam responded. “We sure can't do any worse.”
Adam sat at the kitchen table in basketball shorts and a faded vintage New Riders of the Purple Sage T-shirt, nursing a Dr Pepper and poring over the catalog for Pomona College—he'd been accepted at Stanford, Georgetown, and Williams, but he was pretty set on nearby Pomona, in Claremont, California. He wasn't one of those kids who couldn't wait to leave high school behind. Frankly, he'd miss his buds and his b-ball team—those guys were the best. But in another way, he was more than ready to move to the next stage of his life. He'd chosen Pomona carefully, liking its small size and low student-to-faculty ratio. He'd be able to play basketball there, which he knew would be unlikely at one of the big Division I-A schools. Best of all, it was within striking distance of Los Angeles. Adam knew it might be old-fashioned, but he didn't want to be too far from his mom and dad. He liked them, they liked him. It was a blessing.
His situation was very different from Anna's. He knew she was going back east, to Yale. Sam would be at film school at USC. Cammie had been accepted at Pepperdine, though she was making noises about deferring enrollment and going to work for some entertainment-related business, like David Brokaw's public relations firm. As for Dee, he had no idea. Parker wasn't going to college at all; he just planned to audition and support himself any way he could. Translation: Wait tables.
Adam's parents always joked that ultimately Adam would become a lawyer, too—”go into the family business.” They'd met in law school at the University of Michigan and had practiced contracts law and litigation together for the past decade. Their simultaneous hiring by a law firm in Century City—the joint offer had apparently been close to seven figures—was what had brought Adam and his family to Beverly Hills from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Adam doubted that future for himself, though. Too conventional.
He heard the front door open. “Adam, you home?” his dad called out.
“In the kitchen!”
His parents stepped though the kitchen door, both of them wearing their lawyer costumes—dark, perfectly cut suits. It amused him, because his folks did not have suit-type personalities. They were actually easygoing, casual people and had always been very hands-on parents. Each of them cared about the world, and they had raised Adam to care, too. They took on quite a few liberal pro bono cases—meaning they got paid nothing— and were very involved in Democratic Party politics. His father even made noises from time to time about running for elected office.
For a pair in their forties, they were cute. His dad was better than six feet, long and lanky, with short dark hair and round John Lennon–style glasses that he needed all the time but wore only for reading. His mom, on the other hand, was petite, with a pixie-style Audrey Hepburn haircut that worked with her fine-boned feminine features.
In the parental sweepstakes of life, Adam figured that—on balance, of course—he had come up a winner.
“It's after eight, sweetie, did you eat dinner?” his mom asked with a smile as she slung her briefcase up on the white kitchen counter. It was the same counter that had been in the house when they'd bought it a year or so before; the Floods were the only people in their zip code who didn't redecorate within a month of buying a new home.
Adam nodded. “Your lasagna from last night. Better the second day.”
Mr. Flood had already opened the refrigerator door and cracked the top off a can of Guinness. It was his one indulgence—he drank one a night after work, and always from a Guinness glass he'd brought back from a business trip to Dublin where he'd had a chance to tour the brewery.
“Ah,” he said, as he poured the dark liquid. “Nectar of the gods.”
“How's the case going?” Adam asked, clearing off some room at the table for his parents by stacking the Pomona catalog and that morning's
Los Angeles Times
and putting them on the fourth chair at the table. His parents were trying a breach-of-contract suit on behalf of one of the movie studios, where a star was claiming that his unplanned trip to drug rehab was a satisfactory excuse for having to miss two weeks of shooting.
“Okay.” His mom sighed loudly and stepped out of her heels. “Except one of the jurors passed the defendant a love note today. She had to be replaced with an alternate.”
“Which is what we hope doesn't happen with your prom date,” Mr. Flood cracked. He took his beer glass and pulled up a seat at the round, 1950s-style Formica kitchen table that had also come from their house in Michigan. “You have to remember to let a Guiness settle in the glass, son. Let the head form. Don't rush things.”
Adam grinned. “Thanks for the tip. Since when are you a fan of Cammie, Dad?”
His father sat and hoisted his Guinness in a toast to Adam. “As long as you're happy, kid. Now it's ready.” He took a sip. “Ah. That almost makes the love note in court worthwhile. You got everything planned? Limo? Tux? Shoes? Corsage?”
Adam nodded. Earlier in the day, he'd stopped into Mr. Williams' Formals, the tuxedo shop in Westwood, to rent a tux. It had turned out that the store was basically a one-stop-shopping for prom night. He didn't have to bother with a limo—Sam was providing one for all her friends—but he had rented a nice-looking Ted Lapidus suit and dress shoes, and arranged for a corsage that the seemingly gay salesman advised would work best against Cammie's strawberry blond hair. “Never,” he'd sniffed, “go by the color of the gown; much too matchy-matchy.”
“I didn't go to my prom,” Mrs. Flood recalled as she went to the fridge for a Vernor's vanilla soda, a Detroit-based drink to which she'd been partial ever since Adam could remember. When they'd moved to California, Adam remembered how overjoyed she'd been that she could buy it at the local Ralph's supermarket. “It was the seventies—too politically incorrect.”