Will’s parents don’t come back to the table. Eventually he calls his dad and finds out that they’ve gone back to the hotel. I talk him into renting a scooter so that I can show him the island. He drives (obviously!) while I give him a tour of all my favorite places: the rocky beach at Fort Taylor, the quiet stretches of Louisa and Royal where I used to ride my bike. Bayview Park, where Mom played softball. The Bight, where sailboats from all over the world knock gently against the weathered docks. The parking lot of the federal courthouse, where an unhappy client put a Santeria curse on Gran using some chicken bones and a vial of goat blood.
I rest my cheek against Will’s sun-warm back as we putter through the streets. I can feel him relaxing.
“Down to our right is the southernmost point in the continental United States,” I tell him. “From there it’s only seventy miles to Cuba.”
“Is it worth seeing?” he asks.
“If you like that sort of thing.” I pause. “The monument looks like a giant red-and-yellow suppository.”
He takes a right. “Can’t miss that.”
We stop and take a few pictures of each other, and ask someone to take a picture of the both of us. Then we head back in the direction of Old Town.
I try to guide him to the cemetery, but I get confused. “Turn left here.”
“No, I think it’s to the right,” he says. He turns, and in a block we’re there. We stroll around for a while, reading the bizarre epitaphs, admiring the stone carvings. Then we scooter back up Duval. There’s a cluster of women outside Margaritaville. The drunkest and loudest is wearing a feather boa and bright-pink sash that screams Bride!
Will drops me at the hotel and heads out to meet some college friends who arrived last night. I change into my bathing suit. The bartender at the pool tells me that Freddy is on the beach. I order two more of whatever she’s drinking and head out.
She’s huddled on a chaise lounge under an umbrella, wearing a floppy hat and enormous sunglasses and wrapped in a white hotel bathrobe.
I look down at her. “I hope the skin grafts are healing nicely.”
“It’s freezing out here!” she cries. “What is wrong with these people?” She waves an outraged hand at the swimmers, the loungers, the frolicking children.
I flop into the chair next to hers. “They’re enjoying life. You should try it.”
Our drinks arrive, in steaming mugs. “Irish coffee,” Freddy explains.
I sip mine and gaze out at the horizon. “Brides. They’re everywhere. What do they know that I don’t?”
“So very, very much,” she replies. “How was your morning?”
I describe my planning activities and the calls I fielded from Ana, Gran and Jane. “Then I had lunch with Will’s parents.”
“How was that?”
I hesitate.
“Uh-oh.” She gestures to a passing waiter for another round. “What did you do?”
I tell her everything. New drinks arrive. When I finish, she says, “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you’re doing.”
“No? Glad I came to you, then.”
“Hold up there, missy!” A warning finger emerges from her terrycloth cocoon. “Please recall that I am, officially, smarter than you are.”
“Whatever, lady.”
“Whatever with your whatever,” she scoffs. “I beat you in that online IQ test.”
“Well I beat you in that online quiz that shows your real age.”
She looks skeptical. “How did you beat me? It said you’re fifty-three.”
I clink my mug against hers. “Age before beauty, my love. Age before beauty.”
Freddy takes a towel from a nearby chair and wraps it around her feet. She takes a polka-dotted scarf from her bag and twists it around her neck. She blows on her hands. She settles back in her chair. “So,” she says. “Lunch. You did it on purpose. I bet you weren’t even that drunk. What did you have, five or six drinks in the space of a few hours? That’s nothing. That’s like back to baseline for you.”
New drinks arrive. “But maybe I did it because I was nervous, not because I don’t want to get married. And if I’m nervous, that means I genuinely love him. And if I genuinely love him, that means we should get married.”
“Do you really want my opinion?” Freddy asks.
“Is it one I want to hear?”
“No,” she says.
“Then no,” I say.
“You should call off the wedding.”
“No way! We had the most incredible sex this morning.”
“Oh, then marry him, by all means,” she says lightly. “Wouldn’t want that to stop.”
We order another round. I know Freddy is waiting for me to stop joking and tell her honestly what I’m thinking. She always does this: she nudges me in one direction or the other, never pushing me too hard, always trying to help me come to my senses on my own. And I want to explain it to her, I really do. How this morning I was so convinced that marrying Will was the right thing to do, and how that conviction slowly ebbed throughout the day.
But I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of thinking about it. There’s plenty of time for that later. “Where’s Nicole?” I ask.
Freddy rolls her eyes. “Moping around somewhere. She’s such a drag, Lily. Why are you even friends with her?”
“Law school. All those late nights. It was a bonding experience.”
“She’s so annoying. And she says such shitty things about you.”
“She’s usually not this bad,” I explain. “She hates her job. And her boyfriend dumped her. And her apartment has bedbugs.”
Freddy looks appalled.
“Had!” I say quickly. “Had bedbugs.”
“You bitch!” she cries. “How could you not tell me?”
“How was I supposed to know you were going to share a room? This isn’t band camp!”
“I’m poor!” Freddy wails. “And now I’m going to have bedbugs!”
“The guy came and cleaned. The bedbug guy. With the dog! She’s totally cured.”
“She’d better be. Do you want another drink?”
“Do you have any …?” I tap my nose.
Freddy gathers the folds of her bathrobe and struggles to her feet. “Come with me.”
As we pass the front desk, the clerk hands me an envelope. We go up to Freddy’s room and do a couple of lines. I open the envelope. It contains the guest list, an empty seating chart and a long, complicated note from Mattie. “Help me with this,” I call out to Freddy, who’s changing. “It’s the seating arrangements for the reception.”
She comes out of the bathroom and examines the list. “How do you decide where to put people?”
“No idea. All I know is that the Gortons and the Heydriches must be separated.”
“Gortons?” she says. “Like the fish sticks?”
“Sadly no. I think this one runs a hedge fund.”
“I loved those when I was little,” Freddy says.
“Hedge funds?”
“Fish sticks! ‘Trust the Gorton’s fisherman!’” she sings.
“We should serve them at the reception!” I take out my phone and text Mattie.
—Pls investigate poss of srvg fish stx at wddng asap stat thx
“I wish we had some right now,” Freddy says dreamily.
I dial room service and demand two dozen fish sticks. Then I tell Freddy the tale of Donald and Mitzy’s forbidden passion.
“And you’re supposed to keep them apart?” she says. “That’s bullshit.”
“You think?”
“Hell yes I think!” she cries. “Who are you to come between them? Who the hell are you?” She’s all up in my face. “Think about Donald’s heart, Lily. You think it doesn’t beat like yours? Because it does. Feel it. Feel your heart.”
“I don’t need to—”
“Put your hand up and feel it right now.”
“I really—”
“Feel it, goddammit!”
Freddy gets like this on coke sometimes.
I put my hand on my heart.
“We’re not gods, Lillian. We can’t interfere in the course of true love. Do you think Donald is dead inside? Do you think he doesn’t feel a little thrill when the first breezes of spring waft through the windows of his penthouse? Making his thinning hair dance? Ruffling his piles of money? You know what Thoreau said about this.”
I think about that for a minute.
“‘Drink the drink, taste the fruit?’”
“No.”
“Yes, he did. I saw it on a poster at Starbucks.”
“‘In the spring,’” Freddy recites, “‘a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’”
“Using Thoreau to sell shit.” I shake my head. “It’s like, hats off, capitalism. Who are you going to hijack next—Karl Marx?”
Freddy starts jumping up and down on the sofa. “‘We looked at each other with a wild surmise! Silent, on a peak in Darien!’” She leaps off, landing on the floor with a thud.
“Hey, workers of the world! Drop your chains and pick up our new Acai Caramel Salted Burrata Latte!”
“Love über alles!” Freddy shouts, grabbing the seating chart. She puts Mitzy and Donald at one table, their spouses at another, far away. “Four down, two hundred and eighteen to go,” I say.
“Let’s do more coke,” Freddy says.
We do.
“Let’s rearrange the furniture,” she says.
We can only move the sofa and the end tables. The beds are bolted down. We pull the mattresses off the beds and make a fort. Inside, we look at the guest list again.
“Time to focus,” I say.
We put all the lawyers at the tables closest to the bandstand. We put Gran’s ex-con with the federal judge I clerked for after law school. We decide to seat all the left-handers to the right of right-handers.
“How can we tell which is which?” Freddy says.
I text Mattie.
—pls send mass email inquirining re handedness of all guests fyi thx btw yolo tgif
“I’m going to cannonball into the pool,” Freddy announces.
“From the balcony?”
“Where else?”
“You’ll die.”
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
“I’m petite,” she says.
“Your death will be small and final,” I say.
I get a text from Mattie:
—I think you’ve sent me two texts that were intended for someone else.
—they were intendeded, my dear, for posteriyt
—Sorry?
There’s a knock on the door. “Fish sticks!” we yell, and burst out of our pillow fort.
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you seduce the room service waiter,” I tell Freddy.
“Done!” She whips off her dress and flings opens the door.
Nicole is standing there.
“I forgot my key,” she says. “Why are you in your underwear?”
“Global warming,” Freddy says.
Nicole looks around the room. “What happened to the furniture?”
“Air raid,” I say.
She rolls her eyes, finds her key and leaves.
Freddy and I huddle over the seating chart again. We put all the bald men together. All the known redheads. All the young children at one table with Will’s mom. We finally get bored and fill in the rest of the names at random.
“We’re done!” I throw down the pen.
“I love wedding planning,” Freddy says. “Let’s do some molly and get started on your thank-you notes.”
Tempting! Instead, I wander back to my room and flop on the bed. I pick up the binder for the Hoffman prep. I’m not actually going to work—surely there’s an ethical rule against billing under the influence. Although, wasn’t Sherlock Holmes all coked out when he solved his cases? Maybe I can crack this thing wide open! I open the binder and read the complaint again.
Nope. As far as the environmental claims go, the plaintiffs have pretty much nailed it. EnerGreen employees doctored the maintenance logs on the oil rig in the months leading up to the explosion. They racked up dozens of safety violations and chose to pay the fines rather than correct the problems. When the rig blew, they lied to state officials about how much oil was gushing into the Gulf. They deserve to fry for what they did, and I really wish they’d suck it up and settle.
I dial Lyle’s number. He answers. “What.”
“I have a question.” I lean back against the headboard with the binder in my lap. “What’s stopping the plaintiffs from giving Hoffman’s e-mails to the DOJ right now?”
“They can’t disclose them without violating a court order. The confidentiality stipulation states that the plaintiffs can’t show our documents to anyone who isn’t a party to the lawsuit.”
I remember now. “Unless that document is used at a deposition or at trial.”
“Right. If the plaintiffs properly offer the e-mails into evidence at Hoffman’s deposition, they effectively enter the public domain. Plaintiffs can then show them to the court, to the media, to the DOJ.”
“How’s Philip going to stop them?”
“He’s going to be Philip,” Lyle replies impatiently. “Daniel Kostova, plaintiffs’ lead counsel, is good, but Philip is better. He’ll fill the record with objections. He’ll ensure that Hoffman’s testimony is evasive and confusing, or that it repudiates the e-mails so clearly that if plaintiffs try to publicize them they’ll come off looking like misleading scumbags. And he’ll do it all with perfect courtesy and completely by the book, so the plaintiffs can’t cry foul.”
“But—”
“Why are you wasting my time?” Lyle demands. “You want to know what Philip’s going to do? Ask him yourself. Judging from what I overheard Saturday night, you know him a lot better than I do.”
I don’t say anything.
“I went up to his office to discuss the brief I was working on,” Lyle continues. “You weren’t exactly being discreet in there.”
I take a minute to think about that. I started sleeping with Philip a few months ago, when we were traveling together for a different case. It’s only happened a few times. It’s fun and exciting and meaningless—just the way I like it. Would I prefer that people at work not know about it? Of course. So this is unfortunate. But not a disaster. Lyle is my senior associate—he can make my life miserable, but he already does that. He can gossip, but so what? I haven’t broken any rules. God knows I’m not getting any preferential treatment from Philip—look at how I’m spending the week before my wedding.
This is my business, not Lyle’s. And the best way to deal with someone who doesn’t know something is none of his business is to let it go. So I do.
“I still don’t understand why we’re not settling,” I say. “Doesn’t EnerGreen know how bad this looks?”
“Urs keeps urging his higher-ups to settle, but they won’t listen to him. They have a lot of faith in Philip.”
“Can I ask you one more question?”
“No,” Lyle says, and hangs up.