Chapter One

 

Cherry

 

I was really beginning to hate my wedding planner.

"There's no way I'm letting that thing anywhere near my mouth," he spat.

"Oh, come on," Jess coaxed.

"It's fuzzy."

"It's supposed to be fuzzy. Just take a little nibble."

My best friend is also starting to piss me off.

"No. That's disgusting."

"No, it's not. Just open up and go for it."

"No. And you know why? It doesn't want me to eat it. It is telling the world that its gross, furry outside should not be eaten."

I turned around and held my hand out.

"Give me the damn peach."

Jess looked dejected as she dropped the peach into my hand. I put it back in the basket I was carrying and took a moment to smooth down my dress.

"I still can't believe that you are bringing them peaches," she said.

I shot her a glare.

"I picked them myself during my visit to Georgia last week," I said, trying to keep the defensive note out of my voice. "I can't come to a tea empty-handed. Especially one that's being held in my honor."

"Speaking of which. Remind me, why did you think it was a good idea to meet your fiancé’s parents at the same time that you are introducing them to your maid of honor and your wedding planner?"

"Anthony and I had a whirlwind romance and I haven't had a chance to meet them. Since the date that we chose is coming up fast, we wanted to make sure everyone could get to know each other without slowing down the planning process."

"I didn't think that 'whirlwind romance' was a phrase that people actually used in conversation.”

My glare changed trajectory to focus directly on Smyth the Wedding Planner. I really should have known better than to hire someone with a deliberately misspelled last name as a first name and a capitalized title that was not warranted in any way. He came highly recommended, but I was now convinced that I was the butt of a particularly cruel matrimonial prank. I could just see the announcement now:

Wedding planned by wedding coordinator to the nobodies – Smyth the Wedding Planner.

"They will think it's a sweet gesture."

"Why?"

"Because it's a sweet gesture, damn it." I took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. I smoothed my simple floral dress again and flashed what I hoped was a somewhat convincing smile to Jess. "They're expecting us. Let's go."

We started back up the meandering stone walkway that led to the palatial estate owned by Anthony's parents.

“Remember, don’t say the ‘v’ word," Jess muttered toward Smyth.

“What ‘v’ word? Violet? Vanilla? Viagra?”

“No, that Cherry’s a virgin.”

As I continued up the path, I closed my eyes and tried to count to ten to calm my nerves.

“Why, thank you, Big Bird. Next week will be brought to you by the letter ‘Q’.”

I'm going to kill them before we get to the party.

“And now to the Count for today’s number.”

I'm going to plan my own wedding and be my own maid of honor.

“Would that be 666?”

Maybe we'll just elope.

“Two scary future-in-laws, ha-ha-ha.”

As we made our way up the walkway I noticed a car pulling up the driveway that looped behind the house. The driveway had been designed in what may be the least convenient way possible so that the drive itself wasn't visible from the road in front of the house. Instead, just the hint of the entrance could be seen before the asphalt veered away from the grounds so that they remained untouched. Pristine. It was one of the few features of the house that Anthony had described to me beforehand, so I would know what to expect when I arrived. I had stopped in front of the house just as he had instructed, and a valet appeared beside me, taking my keys. The three of us hurried out of the car and he unceremoniously drove away, leaving us at the gate that led to the walkway.

The walkway was so long I couldn't really imagine the family used it on a regular basis. It was only used by people that they wanted to impress with their manicured lawns and fountains, before taking their breath away with their estate that seemed to unfold like origami on the horizon the closer we got.

But it wasn't my car making its way up the hidden drive. The brief glimpse of it that I caught told me that it was a different color and a far more elegant, expensive model.

"I thought that we were the only ones coming to this shindig," Smyth said.

"It isn't a shindig," I said. "And we are. That's probably a caterer."

As I said it, however, I knew that wasn’t the case. Caterers showed up in big white trucks, not glittering European sports cars. A nervous feeling was building in my gut and I forced an even larger smile on my face.

Nothing can go wrong when you're smiling this big. Countless commercial product campaigns aimed at resolving miserable conditions have taught me that.

We had only walked a few more steps when a low sound – that my mind had convinced me was the distant murmur of the lawn equipment that had to be going at all times due to the size of the property – became more distinct. It wasn't a riding mower fighting a never-ending quest against the blades of grass and harshly molded ornamental trees. It was the murmur of music and voices.

Confused, I followed the sound the rest of the way up the walkway and then around the side of the house. My confusion only increased when I stepped through another gate and saw the tiered back patio swarmed with guests in clothes too lavish for the afternoon, much less a casual tea. Jess stepped up beside me, never turning her widened eyes away from the spectacle unfolding in front of us.

"Nope," she said, shaking her head. "This is definitely a shindig."

I didn't know what to think. This wasn't the plan. I couldn't understand why Anthony didn’t clue me in to such a tremendous shift in our plans for the afternoon. My eyes scanned the crowd, desperately looking for him. When they finally settled on him, my heart fell even more. He was standing several yards away in a sunken section of the garden, holding a glass of champagne in one hand and giving what looked like his very best snobby rich man laugh. His other arm was draped casually around the waif-like waist of a blonde woman standing beside him.

What were the chances that she was his sister he never mentioned to me that recently returned from war?

"Hey, Cherry," Jess said from beside me. "Remind me again how you got your name."

I didn't take my eyes off Anthony or the glass of champagne that swirled when he leaned toward her to touch a kiss to her temple.

"My father said that marrying my mother and having my brother made his life complete, but that I was the cherry on top."

"Ok...adorbs...but we'll talk about that later. Is it short for anything?"

"Cherry?" I asked. "No. It isn't short for anything."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Do you have another name? Like a little-known first name that would only be used for formal occasions?"

Aggravation was rapidly building inside me.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

"Are you absolutely positive?"

I let out an exasperated growl.

"Yes, I'm absolutely positive that I know my own fucking name!"

The voices around me quieted and I felt my cheeks burning.

"Um." I turned toward Jess, who was pointing at an elaborate flower centerpiece crafted into names with a scrolled heart in between them. "Because it seems that the flower guy thinks your name is Michelle."

I felt like I couldn't breathe.

"Cherry!"

I turned toward Anthony's voice and saw him rushing toward me. The whispers and mutterings around him had become so thick that it seemed like he needed to physically push his way through them.

The judgment is strong with this crowd.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Part of me said turn and run like hell from the humiliation I felt. The other part said stand my ground and find out what was going on. Another small part of me wanted to hurl peaches at his head until my basket was empty and then fill it back up with flowers torn out of the centerpieces. And then throw those at his head.

"Cherry, what are you doing here?" Anthony asked.

He was talking in a low, whispered hiss as if that was going to do a damn bit of good with three-quarters of the town's society page staring at us.

"What am I doing here?" I asked. "What do you mean what am I doing here? What is she doing here? In fact, who is she?"

I pointed at the blonde I could only assume was Michelle as she made her way toward us. Anthony glanced behind his shoulder toward her and then looked back at me. All the color drained from his face and I realized that it wasn't until that moment that what was happening really sunk in for him.

"Can we talk?" he asked, lowering his voice again.

"I'm not sure," I said. "It seems to me like not talking might be what brought us to this moment. So, I think that the question is...can you talk?"

I was making a scene. I knew it. Jess knew it. Smyth knew it. Michelle knew it. The governor, who I was fairly certain I was watching scarf down cocktail shrimp like it was a new tenet of his office, knew it. But I didn't care. If there ever was a moment in my life that warranted a scene, this was it. I, like every other good Southern woman before me, had been training my whole life to throw the perfect hissy fit, and I was about to give them one hell of a show.

"Cherry, please. Let's go somewhere and I can explain."

He was looking at me with a desperate expression in his eyes and a small feeling of compassion came over me. I gritted my teeth and nodded.

"Fine," I said.

"Thank you."

Anthony gestured toward the walkway and we turned around, feeling like we were being ushered out of the party. My party. My stupid get-to-know-you engagement tea. As the voices rose up behind me again, though, I knew that wasn't what it was. It had never been.

We reached the front of the house where the sounds of the party were mercifully muted. I turned around and felt my jaw set when I saw that Michelle had decided to come right along with us. Anthony must have seen me doing my best to bore holes in her stupid couture with my eyes because he leaned down and whispered something in her ear. She nodded solemnly and planted a small kiss on his cheek before turning away and heading back down the path. Bastards. I felt Jess's hand grab onto my arm before I could start to take a step toward them.

She knew me so well. I withdraw any feelings of impending hatred of her.

Anthony turned back to me and I realized that he wasn't leading us into the house. He expected us to stand there, in the middle of the walkway, and hash this thing out. I didn't know exactly how many levels of offended that made me feel, but it was a lot. Apparently, I was good enough to be engaged to, but not to step inside the house while my ‘fiancé’ explains to me why there was a haughty, skeletal woman taking on my role at my engagement tea. It reminded me of the casting on one of those true crime dramas where they do reenactments of grisly murders. The more horrible the thing that happened to the person, the more flattering the casting of their reenacted selves tended to be.

"Anthony," I said, wanting to get in the first words. "What in the hell is going on?"

"Cherry, I can explain."

"Can you? Who is that woman? And who are all these people? I thought that this was supposed to be a quiet tea where I could get to know your parents and they could meet Jess and the wedding planner."

"Smyth."

Smyth the Wedding Planner stepped forward, offering his hand to Anthony delicately, as if it being kissed right now is the appropriate solution for this situation.

"Seriously?" Anthony asked.

"Yes," Smyth said. "Do you have a problem with it?"

I reached out and pushed Anthony on his chest, attempting to pull him back into the conversation.

"Look," Anthony said. "I am so sorry that this happened this way and that Jess and Smitty were here to see it."

"Smyth."

"Yes. Smyth. I don't know what to tell you."

"The truth. Tell me the truth."

"Michelle is an old friend…"

"The truth, Anthony," Smyth snapped.

"I can handle this myself, Skippy."

"Smyth," I said through gritted teeth. "And I'm not really so sure that you can. Why don't you start again?”

Anthony sighed.

"Michelle is my fiancée," he said.

"That's funny," I said. "I thought that I was your fiancée."

At least he had the dignity to have a few tears in his eyes.

"Both of you are. Were. I don't know. I've been with Michelle for a while. We had started to drift apart after we got engaged and she left on a three-month vacation in Europe with her family. That's when I met you. You were so different, Cherry. You caught my attention from the first moment I saw you, and I just couldn't get you out of my mind."

"So, I conveniently fit in there right next to Michelle?"

"It wasn't like that," he said.

"Really? Because that's exactly what it seems like. Your fiancée was away, and you were bored. So, you needed someone to keep you amused until she came back."

Anthony gave me a quizzical look.

"Keep me amused?" he asked. "What kind of amusement would that be, exactly? You wouldn't even have sex with me."

"That's just unnecessary,” Smyth said. "Don't talk to her like that."

Maybe he is not quite as awful as I thought he was.

Anthony turned to him sharply, pointing one finger directly at his chest. The tears were gone from his eyes now and his face was red with color.

"Look here, John Jacob Jingle Heimer Shut the Fuck Up, I've heard enough from you. This is between Cherry and me."

"And these lovely people who I'm going to guess are your parents," Jess said, looking over at the two extravagantly dressed people rushing toward us. "Oooo. They look mad."

She and Smyth stepped slightly further away from us as Anthony straightened and dropped his hand.

"Anthony?" A woman with severe makeup and expertly coiffed silver hair called as she approached. "What's going on here?"

"Who is this woman?" The tall, dignified man beside her asked. "She has disrupted the entire party."

I gave them a saccharine smile.

"Hello," I said, stepping toward them with my hand extended. "You must be Angela Freedlander, Anthony's mother. I'm Cherry. Anthony's fiancée."

Her face fell. Angela’s hand gripped mine limply, controlled by the force of a lifetime of social polishing and etiquette. I shook it enthusiastically before offering my hand to the man.

"And Sterling, is it? Mr. Freedlander, it is lovely to meet you."

I was struggling to maintain control and look like I was still put together even though inside I felt like I was falling apart. The two older Freedlanders were looking at each other and then their son, then back at each other. Neither would face me. I got the feeling they had the attitude that if they didn't acknowledge the problem, aka me, I would just disappear.

"Cherry, please," Anthony said again. "Let's try to be dignified about this."

I felt my cheeks burning. My heart was pounding erratically in my chest and my hand tightened around the handle of the basket I was still holding until the wicker pierced my skin.

I can't believe I picked peaches for these assholes.

"Dignified?" I asked incredulously. "You want me to be dignified? I just walked up to a house where I thought I was supposed to be having a tea to meet my future-in-laws and found it swarming with people. I'm sorry if my first thought was that I was woefully underdressed and not that I just crashed an engagement party other than my own!"

"How did this happen?" Jess asked. "Did you double book just in case one of the women didn't show up?"

"No," Anthony said. "I didn't plan this. This was never my intention. I swear. I mentioned the tea to my mother a couple of weeks ago when we first planned it. When she told me that she had made a few more plans for today, the date was familiar, but honestly, I had completely forgotten about the tea."

"That might be the first bit of honesty I have ever heard from you," I muttered bitterly.

"When I got here today, my mother had put together this beautiful engagement party and Michelle was here...I got completely wrapped up in everything…"

"And just conveniently forgot that you were celebrating your engagement to the wrong woman?" I asked.

Anthony glanced at the muffled sound of the party and I saw his shoulders drop as he sighed.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I was celebrating my engagement to the right woman."

Things got a little blurry after that.

 

I heard a knock on my door two weeks later, but couldn't answer around the spoon that was in my mouth. Instead, I made a sound that was somewhere between a cordial invitation to enter my home and a primal grunt. Fortunately, Jess is fluent in Cherry-speak and let herself in. She gave me a scolding look as she closed the door behind herself and turned the deadbolt.

"You really should keep your door locked when you're home alone."

I managed to pull the spoon out of my mouth.

"I'm always home alone."

"You're not right now."

"Because I didn't have my door locked."

"You're a young, beautiful, single woman. The perfect target for a predator."

I narrowed my eyes at her.

"Did you just TV Guide description me? Are you watching Law and Order again?"

"It's educational. Which reminds me...you really should keep your doors locked."

I sighed.

"Why? What's the point?"

"Alright. That's enough," Jess said, coming across my apartment and trying to physically pull me out of my chair. In her efforts, she knocked over the basket that had once been filled with peaches. "I can't believe you brought those things home with you."

"I had to. I needed to make a peach crumble. If I didn’t have the peaches it would have just been crumble."

She walked past me into the kitchen and out of the corner of my eye I saw that she was staring down into the glass baking dish on the top of the stove.

"There sure are a lot of peaches in here. What are you eating."

I hesitated for a beat.

"Crumble."

Jess sighed and came back into the living room.

"Come on. Get up."

"What?"

She reached for the spoon and pulled it out of my hand before I could get the next bite into my mouth.

"Up. Come on. It's time to get back to the world of the living."

"I don't want to."

"We agreed that you would have one week to be miserable about Anthony, and then you were going to snap out of it. And honestly, I'm still in the camp that he didn't even deserve that much."

"Yes," I said, "but then I lost my job."

"Yes. And I even agreed that was pretty horrible timing on behalf of the universe and sucked a lot, which is why I gave you an extra week to get your shit together. But that's over now. It's time for you to start living again. You need to get up and get in the shower because I think you were wearing these clothes when I came to visit you three days ago. After that, we will figure out what to do next."

I stood up reluctantly and glared at my best friend. I was doing my best to look angry and indignant but in reality, I felt fragile. I hated that.

"You can be really mean, you know," I said.

Jess reached forward and brushed a piece of my greasy hair away from my forehead.

"I know," she said. "But it’s only because I love you."

I nodded through the tears that were, once again, threatening to push past my eyelids. My eyeballs were red and stinging from crying so much over the last two weeks. Everything that had happened with Anthony was heartbreaking but also really humiliating. All those people saw me standing there. All of them saw him whisk me away after my sad attempt at a temper tantrum. Worse, they were probably judging my dress as much or even more harshly than they were me. That just felt like adding insult to injury. Losing the job that I had been at for almost five years felt like one kick in the teeth too many. They said that the company was downsizing and that my position had been eliminated in favor of streamlining. It didn't matter how they put it, really. I had gotten my ass fired a week after finding out that my fiancé was actually somebody else's fiancé and that she was the one that got to be the bride and have the happy ever after, not me.

It seemed like the whole world is falling down around me and I’m paralyzed. I didn’t know what to do. I felt just about ready to give up. But Jess was right. I needed to keep going. It wasn't just about me. I still needed to take care of my mother. She had been getting sicker in the last few months and I was all she had. She relied almost completely on me. The pension check she got every month was barely enough to pay for groceries, much less to put a dent in her medical expenses. I knew that my father would be devastated if he knew how much she was struggling. He had worked so hard when he was alive, pouring himself into the company that he had been a part of since it first started. We had never been wealthy, but we were comfortable enough. He thought that the pension that he would get would keep the woman he loved comfortable for the rest of her life. His sudden death, however, had made it necessary for her to start relying on that money earlier than expected. The collapse of the company a few years ago had significantly cut into the amount that she received each month and there was always the looming threat that the checks would simply stop coming. I had done everything I could to make the situation better. I pursued legal action. I tried to figure out how this could have happened in the first place. In the end, I discovered there was nothing I could do. It was up to me now to make sure that she had the care that she needed, meaning that I didn't get to sit around and pity myself anymore.

By the time that I got out of the shower, I almost felt human again. Washing away the grime and putting on fresh clothes, ones that weren’t stained by tears and an embarrassing level of melted ice cream, seemed to cut through the fog and bring me some level of focus. I walked back into the living room and found Jess sitting on the floor beside the coffee table. What looked like the classified sections of at least three different newspapers were spread out in front of her. Beside her was a bottle of bright red, sparkly nail polish. I finished drying my hair before dropping the towel into the hamper I kept next to the sliding glass doors to my back patio. It was mortifying to my mother that I would literally have my dirty laundry out for people to see but considering that I was the only one other than Jess who ever came into the apartment in the first place, it didn’t really matter. And since I was certainly the only one who had to haul the hamper to the laundry room, my linens-related interior design choices were up to me. It was easiest to get to the laundry room by going out the back door and passing between the two buildings behind me, so keeping the hamper there rather than in my bedroom or bathroom saved me the struggle of lugging the damp, heavy wicker.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

Jess took the brush from the bottle of nail polish and with a dramatic swooping motion, circled one of the listings on the newspaper directly in front of her. An instant later her arm shot out again and she circled another listing on the paper to the side. I was getting shades of her great aunt Lula Mae – who scandalized the local senior community by taking over an entire table with Bingo boards during the Senior Fall Bonanza one year. The uproar that had ensued meant the end of the Bonanza all together and ushered in the era of the spring garden tour. Allergies and the occasional bee sting aside, at least the event came without such an ill-advised name.

"I'm going to help you find a job,” Jess said.

She circled another listing enthusiastically.

"I love a good Dolly Parton reenactment as much as anyone," I said, dropping down to sit on the couch behind her. “But as much as I appreciate the Straight Talk situation you have going here; most people actually do this type of thing online now.”

"I don't have my computer with me," she explained, "and I'm in between cell phones at the moment."

"What did you do to your phone?" I asked.

"There was an unfortunate washing machine incident."

"Ah," I said. I reached over to the end table where my phone was charging. "Well, it just so happens that I haven't laundered my phone recently."

Jess signed and abandoned the newspapers and got up onto the couch with me, turning the attention of the nail polish brush to her fingernails instead.

"You just got me thinking," she said.

"That you might want a change of careers, too?" I asked, scrolling through listings on the job site I joined earlier in the year during a short-lived, fantasy mutiny against my boss that only ever existed in my head.

"That we need to have a movie marathon soon. It's been ages since we've watched all those old movies."

I resisted pointing out to her that devoting an entire evening to marathoning Dolly Parton movies wasn't exactly the same thing as appreciating the classics. But, it didn't seem like I was in the position at that moment to be the voice of reason.

"This might be something," I said.

I turned the phone toward Jess and she leaned forward slightly to look at the screen.

"Elevator operator in the home of an elderly eccentric billionaire?" she asked. "I don't think you would look very good in the little hat you would wear."

"Ha-ha. Not that one," I said. "The one under it."

"Secretary?" she asked, with much of the same incredulity.

"Yeah," I said. "Why not?"

"You have absolutely no experience at being a secretary," she said.

"So?"

"The listing specifically says they are looking for a highly experienced executive assistant."

"It pays better than my old job and it comes with much better benefits. The least I can do is try," I said. I stood up and headed for the kitchen. "At this point, getting rejected would kind of be par for the course. Besides, if it is, I can always grab a $20 bill and try to throw myself off the nearest bridge."

"That might not be my favorite movie reference," Jess called after me. "I can't promise I'll be able to save you."

I laughed, feeling like that might be the first time I had done so since the day I walked up that long winding sidewalk to Anthony's parent's house. I knew that the position wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse. Other than the spattering of restaurant jobs I had as a teenager and bartending when I was in college, the only real job I ever had was with the courier company. Answering phones and assisting with deliveries didn't exactly align with what I imagined an executive assistant did, but it couldn't be that much different. After all, there was some overlap. They both involved phones. Right?

Even though I didn’t have the experience or expertise that they wanted, I hoped there was a chance I could get the job. The pay, while not astronomical, was an upgrade, and the benefits were definitely better. Besides, it would be a fresh start and that was exactly what I needed.