Chapter 7
Ella
A moment after I pushedthrough Rolling Green’s grand front doors to wait for my mother, Charlie stumbled along the walk from around the side of the building.
He scowled sloppily at me as our eyes met, but then his face broke into apology. I hurried over to greet him, pretending that I couldn’t stay away but in reality wanting to keep him from swerving and swaying so obviously. I tucked my arm into his. He resisted at first but then let me.
“Sorry, E.” He breathed 100-proof fumes on me.
I wrinkled my nose. “Tennis, huh?”
“I’m an absolute wreck over what I’ve done.”
“It’s OK. I promise it’s all going to be fine,” I soothed automatically, my voice taking on a hint of babysitter soothing a child crying for his mom to come home.
His face crumpled and oh my God, he was going to day-drunk cry in front of everyone. I reached down and was about to pinch him sober when he muttered. “Mary would never...never be as forgiving as you.”
“Mary, huh?” I was getting secondhand embarrassment from his slurred apologies.
“Bob,” he said too loudly. I thought maybe he’d just been trying to sound sober.
Everything tingled. I had a name. And although Mary was pretty common, I thought I remembered seeing it when I’d scrutinized Charlie’s socials.
He stopped, and since I was attached to him, I stopped too. “Come on, Charlie,” I coaxed, not wanting any more of a scene.
A car had pulled up to the entrance, and now the driver climbed the front steps, peering at us curiously. I smiled, overly bright, recognizing Mr. Finick but not calling to him by name despite his obvious interest, because then I’d have to explain the lunk of a drunk with me.
“Ella Stewart?” he said in a confused but delighted tone. “I thought that was you. What are you doing back home? And is that...”
Just at that moment, Mom’s car pulled up. Mr. Finick bent, peered into the Mercedes, and waved at Mom. I hoped he’d go to the driver’s side and chat my mother up, but he straightened and came right over to us.
“Hi, Mr. Finick.” My voice came out like I was eighteen again. “How have you been?”
“Well, Stephen is at Stanford,” he bragged. I had vague memories of Stephen, who’d been in eighth grade my senior year.
“Oh, congratulations! He’s your youngest, right?” I started in with the banter, scraping up details.
“That’s right,” Mr. Finick agreed like a game show host, smiling widely. “And who’s this fellow?”
“Oh, this is Charlie Sticht. He’s my...” The word stuck in my throat. I wanted to say friend. I wanted to say roommate or even boyfriend. “Fiancé.” It came out charred. “Excuse me,” I added quickly, tapping my clavicle. “Frog.”
Mr. Finick’s eyes lit up. “So this is the fellow your parents have been bragging about.”
As he leaned in to shake Charlie’s hand, Mr. Finick’s nose wrinkled, and I died a little inside. “Celebrating early, are we? Well, good for you. You’ve got a real keeper here.” He slapped Charlie’s shoulder. “Honestly, I wish you two all the best. I hear the wedding’s coming right up?”
I nodded, swallowing against the lump still in my throat, and forced myself to smile. This was Charlie, I reminded myself. This was my choice.
“Well, a wedding is just the thing this place needs. Liven it up, you know? Bring the young people back.” Mr. Finick leaned down again to catch a glimpse of Mom in the car. She hadn’t come out but rolled down the passenger side window and cried out, “Hi, George!”
At Mom’s call, Charlie started down the steps to the car. He lost his footing and stumbled. I kept him upright, but it was an effort.
“So sorry, E,” Charlie muttered.
“Here, let me help you,” Mr. Finick said graciously, catching Charlie’s other arm.
I looked about helplessly to note who saw—the valets of course; they saw everything. And Mom was probably seething. I glanced nervously toward where Charlie had first appeared, not through the front of Rolling Green but around the side lot where the employees parked.
“Congratulations on your upcoming wedding. I hope to see my invite in the mail soon,” Mr. Finick said. I made a mental note to make sure he was on Mom’s list.
“She’s too good for me,” Charlie mumbled.
My heart twinged. I wished Charlie understood we were both flawed characters, especially since marrying him was my bargaining chip to get in good with my family. I thought again about my brother mentioning Dad’s health. Parents didn’t live forever. I had to make good while I had the time.
“Watch out, Ella,” Mr. Finick warned playfully, but when our eyes met, I saw he was serious. “In vino, veritas.”
That was a teasing remark people threw around in the club, same as they kissed their friends’ spouses as Theo had done for me earlier. Under the influence of alcohol, a person tells the truth. We made it to the bottom step, and Mr. Finick opened the back door with a flourish, as if he’d trained as the queen’s butler.
“Thank you. It was lovely to see you, Mr. Finick,” I said. “Congratulations on Stephen going to Stanford!”
Charlie said in a slightly slurred voice, “Ladies first!” and gestured to the open door.
I had no choice but to get in. As I sank down into the car, I glimpsed what appeared to be two familiar figures peeking out from around the building’s corner near the employee parking lot.
Jack and Hailey?! Here? Together?!
This was no hallucination, no wishful thinking. I froze, then reversed back to standing. How?! My heart leaped. I had to see them. But of course, as I rose, Charlie was already leaning down to close the door, and our heads knocked like coconuts.
“Owww!” I yelped.
“Shit!” Charlie cried out, slapping a hand to his nose. “That hurt.”
“Charlie!” Mom gasped. You did not curse at Rolling Green.
Holding my head, I looked to see if Charlie was OK. Blood spurted out from under his hand. Gasping, I yanked his fingers back. I’d gotten him right in the nose.
“Oh...blood.” Mr. Finick managed, going corpse gray. His legs buckled.
“Charlie!” I shrieked as Mr. Finick keeled over in a faint. “Catch him!”
“Whab?” Charlie demanded, nose pinched between his fingers.
The valets hurried down the steps. One caught Mr. Finick’s head before it hit the step. Charlie turned to see, lost his balance, and tripped over Mr. Finick’s legs. He went down like a cut tree, making a strange foghorn bleat through his nose that could’ve passed for timber if he’d been the joking sort.
At the last moment, he twisted to catch himself and barked his shins on the steps. “Christ!”
“Charlie!” My mother shoved her door open and flew out of the car. Charlie looked at her as though hoping for some kind of medical care or concern. Boy, was he wrong.
“You watch your mouth!” She came around the back of the car with lightning speed. Even lower and more fiercely, she added as she crouched near him, “We do NOT take the Lord’s name in vain at Rolling Green.”
But even with all that, my eyes strayed back to where I’d seen them. Nothing but the side of a building. It came on so quickly I didn’t realize how I felt until the sobs broke loose and I ugly cried on the steps of Rolling Green. They were gone. So completely I had to wonder if maybe the pressure was getting to me and I had hallucinated them.
Mr. Finick moaned.
Charlie muttered, “Of course. I am so sorry. I will never say that word again,” as though he were a five-year-old boy scolded instead of a grown man.
Having wrangled his promise, Mom stood immediately, letting Charlie figure out his own medical care. I couldn’t move my eyes from the spot I’d seen them.
“It’s OK honey.” She wrapped her arms warmly around me and patted the back of my head. Much more quietly she added, “Please stop, you are making a scene.”
* * *
After the ambulancecame and EMTs checked out Mr. Finick and Charlie, Mom linked her arm with Mr. Finick”s to steady him. Also, probably with plans to comp him a full late lunch and top-shelf drinks.
“Take him home.” Mom’s face pinched as she eyed Charlie. He gave her a sheepish grin in reply, and I suspected Charlie had sobered enough to fully understand the calamity of creating a scene on the front steps of someone’s business. “What are you gawking at?” she demanded before slapping her keys into my hand.
My one true loves. It had been them. I could even deduce that Hailey might’ve dropped off the cake—
“Oh, Mom, the bakery box is in the kitchen fridge. Do you want me to—”
“I’ll bring it.” She sighed, as though everything fell to her. Which in a sense, it did. “Just get him home and cleaned up.”
“Sorry, Mom,” I said earnestly. I mean, the whole point of coming home and getting married here was to help Rolling Green, not to cause further upset. Still, my misbehaving heart fluttered at what I’d seen. Honestly? As my mind tried to secure my thoughts, the flutter spread to areas way further south. It was as if I could taste their scents on the breeze.
“No. More. Problems.” Mom tapped a finger against my forearm with each word. “Got it?”
She put on her best game face and turned up the steps to go wine and dine Mr. Finick.
“Come on, Charlie,” I said.
He opened his own car door and slumped into the Mercedes. I got in the driver’s seat, adjusted the settings, and before I turned on the car’s engine, took one last look toward the mirage I’d seen.
Charlie’s breath hitched. His handsome face was still marred by dried blood he’d missed cleaning up, and his nose was shiny purple. Five weeks would be plenty of time for him to recover for wedding photos. The tears glimmering in his eyes, however, were a real problem. For a moment, I imagined he felt as trapped in this marriage as I did, and I felt a surge of kinship with him. Maybe he understood exactly how I felt, and wasn’t that a big part of love?
I drove the car through the circular drive, down the lane to the Rolling Green front gates. We didn’t pass any cars before I turned onto the main drag, and this was both good and bad; good no guests spotted my weeping fiancé but another bad sign Rolling Green was not doing as well as it once had. Out on the main street, I absently patted Charlie’s thigh in thanks for him keeping it together as long as he had.
“Mary,” Charlie said sullenly as the car gained speed. “Her name is Mary Marshall.”
I swallowed. He was trusting me. And in that, admitting there was someone else between us. I thought of Jack and Hailey. “Do you love her?”
Charlie squirmed, resentful but somehow unable to lie. “It’s complicated.”
“I can understand complicated,” I said softly.
“Well, she’s thirty, divorced, and has a seven-year-old son.”
“So?”
“She had her tubes tied,” he added angrily, as though this was an affront to him personally. He blew out a booze-fueled sigh. “I am Charles Edward Sticht III. If we marry...”
In the silence, I felt real repugnance for what Charlie must mean. With her tubes tied, there would never be a Charles Edward Sticht IV.
“Charlie, if you love her, that doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters, Ella.”
I laughed angrily. “You sound like the hugest snob right now.”
How was I mad at my soon-to-be husband not because he was cheating, but because he wasn’t willing to marry the woman he couldn’t quit? Except I was. I was so furious with him that I wanted to pull over to the curb and throw him out of the car.
“Oh, that’s rich.” He scoffed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?!” How dare he pull an attitude after he got drunk and embarrassed Mom and me at Rolling Green? On top of that, he was too wrapped up in a stupid tradition to marry the woman he clearly loved.
Charlie didn’t explode back at me. He just looked at me with these huge, wounded eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was full of pity for both himself and me.
“Come on, E,” he cajoled. “That’s why I fell in love with you—you understand what it takes to live this life. Sacrifice and knowing how to run a business while looking like a million bucks. When my father retires, I’ll take over Sticht Resorts and stand on the shoulders of giants. Sticht is a multimillion-dollar operation, and I have big plans for it, Ella. You know better than most how to run a place like that, how to do it well. It’s like...I never got the attraction of ”Cinderella”. All these girls boo-hooing about how great it was Prince Charming chose her over everyone else in the kingdom. But Cinderella would’ve made a terrible queen. She knew how to mop a floor, not run a castle. She had zero training in domestic planning or navigating court life.” He made an annoyed face. “What did she and the prince even have in common? I can’t marry a Cinderella. I need a partner who knows what they’re doing.”
They had love in common.I didn’t say it because part of me understood exactly Charlie’s side of things. After all, I had chosen him for the same reasons. But with the distance of having this be his problem, I could also see his fears were a little bit bullshit. “Are you sure? I mean, I know a lot of stuff about running a hospitality business, but anyone could learn. It’s not magic.”
He made a bitter face. “She wouldn’t take my name. Said she’d stay a Marshall like her son. Didn’t want him to be the odd man out.”
Now I kind of liked Mary. But I bit my tongue and tried for diplomacy. “You could adopt her son, change his name too. You could all be Stichts.” I smized, trying for lighthearted. “You could all be Marshalls.”
Charlie shook his head once, severely, unwilling to budge on his dour mood. “Then my oldest son wouldn’t be the fourth. It would break a chain of generations. My family would never have it.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then shut it. Mom had warned me a thousand times you couldn’t change a man, and I thought that with Charlie, and on this specific issue, Mother was right.
This uncomfortable thought hit: If Charlie’s fears seemed a little bit bullshit at a distance, could my fears—the ones I’d let control my whole life—be a little bit bullshit too? Maybe I wasn’t mad at Charlie but furious with myself and the choices I’d made.
No. I thought of my parents, of the Pray Away the Gay camps and the homesickness and the relentless fear that if I messed up even slightly, I’d be out on my own, penniless. I wasn’t respecting how serious Charlie’s concerns were. In his world, not creating a Charlie IV would ruin his whole life.
“I just want you to be happy,” I said, and that was the truth.
“How can you be...so easy? Ella,” he leaned across the car to grab my hand, “I’ve never had a better friend.”
I squeezed back. “Hey... Did you realize if I take your name, I’m going to be Ella Sticht?”
Charlie gave me a questioning look, and for a fleeting moment, there was this shared love and sadness. Just as I had never daydreamed of my new name, it was clear Charlie hadn’t either. He burst out laughing. “Elastic?! Oh no!”