Chapter 4
Despite every woman in my family threatening me with death, I go back to work on Monday. I didn’t even actually sprain my wrist, just bruised it pretty badly. And the concussion was mild enough that I could drive. In sum: I simply fell off my bike like a dweeb.
I watch Sunny and Emoni shuffle furniture around in my office. Sunny places a cushion on my chair.
“Guys! I hurt my wrist, not my ass.”
Emoni tsks. “That mouth.”
“Always so foul since you were little,” Sunny says as she lowers a blind so that the beam of sunshine on my desk disappears.
“Well, geez, guess who I picked it up from?” I say as I reach to help Emoni pull an ottoman under my desk. She swats my hand.
“Nice try.” Sunny helps us. “The bad influence was always Evette.”
There’s a familiar beat of silence, a pause in the buzz of energy whenever Mom is mentioned. Mom was the glue between all of us: Sunny’s sister, Emoni’s niece, Halmoni’s daughter. We feel the pain of her absence acutely.
“Your mother would have been the worst matchmaker,” Emoni finally says.
“Evette was the most cynical romantic I knew,” Sunny confirms, perching herself on my desk.
“Because she didn’t choose to be with her fated.”
Halmoni, with her soft ballet slippers and tiny bones, has slipped into the room without us noticing.
“Subtle as always, Halmoni,” I say.
“It’s true. We all knew your dad was wrong for her from the beginning. But she never listened to me.” Fondness crosses her features rather than vexation. Halmoni has long since come to terms with her daughter’s rebellious nature. “But we got a pretty good granddaughter out of it, I suppose.”
“Thanks,” I say dryly and roll my eyes. It’s a joke and I’m reacting to it as a joke, but somewhere inside me, a tender spot feels poked.
My mom rejected her fated and picked my father.
She was a romantic, a rebel, and just as stubborn as her mother.
My father left us. Maybe because he wasn’t her fated, but definitely because he wasn’t able to handle fatherhood.
We have no relationship and never will. He didn’t come to my mother’s funeral and that was all the closure I needed. He’s more dead to me than my mother is.
Halmoni touches my brow. “I heard you hurt your head,” she says with a frown. “We can’t have you hurting your head. It might affect your readings.”
“It was just a little concussion.”
Halmoni inspects my face further, her eyes incredibly sharp. “You also have some scratches here.” She touches my right cheekbone. “A woman should take better care of her face.”
I bat her hand away. “Okay, okay. Enough, I’m fine!”
I shoo them out and have about a second of peace before Shreya knocks on my open door.
“Come in.”
Her eyes scan my face behind her metal-framed aviator glasses. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, god, I’m fine,” I say, pushing my chair back to look up at her. “Everyone’s fussing over a few scrapes.”
She sits down across from me with a folder in her arms. “Oh, good. Today’s going to be a little hectic.”
“My favorite,” I say, without a trace of sarcasm.
Being a workaholic is a no-brainer for me.
I love this job—One she will need to match with someone more yielding.” I push two more matches out. “They’re not going to be that for her.”
Three are left. I pause, trying to weigh whether I keep my cards close or show my certainty. Shreya is so absorbed that I decide to keep it closer to the vest. “Let’s invite all three of these Peters to the next event for Gemma’s matches.”
Shreya nods, looking slightly disappointed. “So none stuck out as, like, ‘the one’?”
I shake my head. “They’re all good possibilities.”
When she gets up to leave, she rotates her head a little, as if getting out a crick. “Did you ever talk to that physical therapist?” I ask her in my sternest boss voice.
“Ugh, no. I haven’t had time with my parents in town,” she says with a grumble. Shreya’s parents moved to Canada when they retired, but they’ve been camping out at her place for the past couple weeks while visiting.
“Take it from me, you don’t want to mess around with your upper back,” I say as I start opening up a website. “Check your email in five minutes.”
She gives me a suspicious look. “Okay, boss.”
When Shreya leaves, the door is left open and I hear her talking to Matteo and Lily.
“Let’s send invites to these three guys,” she says.
“It’s totally this one,” I hear Lila say. “Biggest nostrils.”
“No way, it’s this one,” Matteo argues. “He’s tallest. The tallest guys always beat out the shorter ones.”
I smile to myself. The employees at One the other a woman in her fifties whose past love was a lover she had on the side as a duchess in Regency England), then I meet with Sunny to start planning for this season’s big matchmaking event—the one I’ll be sending Gemma and Peter to.
—
Sunny and I have kicked off our shoes and are sitting on the sofa in Sunny’s office.
She has a diffuser and humidifier running with Joni Mitchell playing in the background.
Even though, on the surface, she and my mother seemed like polar opposites, so much of Sunny reminds me of my mom: their need to always have music playing, the way they cross their legs when sitting down, and of course, the way they laugh. That throaty cackle.
“LACMA confirmed the date,” I say as I scroll through my to-do list on my tablet. “We just need to put down the deposit.”
Sunny raises an eyebrow. “Good job, kiddo.”
“You can thank Connie, who’s pregnant with her second child,” I say with a wink. Connie was a client who we matchmade several years ago. She’s also the director of Curatorial and Exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Very handy.
We have our client list printed out and make sure that everyone has their fated matches invited. Double-check, then triple-check. We absolutely cannot get this wrong. Let’s just say it’s happened in the past and I still have wounds from the absolute burning we got from Halmoni.
“Open bar and catering, right?” Sunny says as she pushes her reading glasses up—a beautiful pair of oversized clear frames.
“Yes, and I have just the spot for the food,” I say.
“Mar’s too busy this month so she gave me a good rec for a place near the museum.
” Marcella runs a very popular oyster bar in Echo Park, and she’s opening a sister location in Venice.
I make a mental note to get her a bottle of chill-out-don’t-kill-your-contractors wine because construction is the worst.
“Oh!” I sit up. “I forgot to say that Connie is going to hook us up with a couple open galleries. It’ll be a great way for couples to walk around fairly privately, and a great icebreaker.”
“Look at you,” Sunny says fondly. “You’re killing it.”
I bask in her compliments. “Thank you.”
“You really remind me of your mom sometimes,” she says with a bittersweet smile. “She was always so much more fearless than me—willing to put herself out there and get stuff done.”
“In so many ways she wasn’t eldest-daughter material,” I say with a laugh. “She didn’t listen to Halmoni at all.”
“Yeah, but she did all the bad stuff so that I had an easier go of it,” she says.
“How?” I love when Sunny starts talking about Mom. She knew a side of her that no one else did, not even my grandparents. I soak up every story greedily.
“Everything!” she says with a laugh. “I mean, tattoos, getting caught sneaking out of the house, refusing to be a matchmaker—anything I did after paled in comparison.”
Halmoni appears in Sunny’s doorway wearing her purse and sunglasses. “I have to go get my nails done. I’ll see you all later for your birthday dinner?” she says.
I get up and grab my purse, too. “I’m getting coffee, let me walk out with you.”
“How are you feeling, Cassia?” she asks as we walk downstairs, arms linked.
“Hm? What do you mean?”
“With your birthday.” She squeezes my arm.
The question hits harder because I know this is a difficult time for both of us, not just me.
“Oh, you know. I’m good, don’t worry about me, Halmoni.
” But she does. All the time—whether it’s fretting over my bike accident or the carbon monoxide detectors in my old house.
She only had eight years to be a carefree grandmother before she had to become a mother again.
“Just make sure you don’t work too much.”
I start laughing. “Look who’s talking!” Everyone thought she would retire ages ago. Yet here she is, approaching ninety and still coming in most days. I very much take after her. We’re in the lobby when Shreya calls me over from the front desk. “Cass, someone’s here to see you.”
I check my phone. “Do I have another surprise reading?”
“No, he didn’t make an appointment. He just wanted to see you but I couldn’t get any other info…”
I stare at her. “And…?”
She flushes. “He’s hot.”
Halmoni rolls her eyes and says bye to us as she heads to the door.
“He’s in the waiting room,” Shreya says in a hushed voice.
When I turn around to see who this person is, I find myself face-to-face with Ellis. “What!” I exclaim. Happily.
Dimple time. He glances down quickly before he looks up at me. “Okay, don’t be freaked out.”
I tilt my head. “Okay. I’m not.”
“Oh.” He looks embarrassed. “Um, hi. Do you remember me, then…?”
“Of course. Ellis. You saved my life.” I smile widely. Flirting with young guys is always so low stakes.
He just looks at me for a second, then he seems to snap out of it.
“Oh, ha. I didn’t really do anything.” It’s as if he’s seeing me for the first time, his eyes sweeping over me, drinking in the details of what I look like in my element.
I remember what I looked like when he last saw me, wearing a bike helmet and nineties-coded workout clothes. Sweaty and mildly humiliated.
Today, my long hair falls over my shoulders in natural loose waves. I’m in a crisp, oversized men’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up to my elbows, thrown over a mini, lace-trimmed slip in butter yellow. Under Ellis’s interested gaze, I’m glad I shaved my legs this morning.
“Saved your life?” Halmoni is back outta nowhere.
Ellis looks over at me with a little bit of alarm.
I summon patience. “Halmoni, this is Ellis. He was there when I had my bike accident. He was the one who called nine-one-one.”
With a loud clap of her hands, Halmoni rushes over to greet Ellis. “Omo, omo. Thank you so much. She’s the most precious thing in my life.” She’s gone from elegant matriarch to cartoon Miyazaki crone.
I widen my eyes at Ellis; he catches it, hiding a smile. Sunny, then, marches in. Oh, god.
“What’s with the ruckus?” she snaps. But her expression immediately shifts after spotting Ellis. She sends a sweeping, appreciative look down his tall frame. “Hi.”
“This is the young man who helped Cassia after her accident,” Halmoni says.
Emoni joins in the mix, head popping out of her office, and she’s fumbling with her reading glasses before squinting at Ellis. “Oh, handsome!”
Sunny looks at him curiously. “Why are you here?”
Ellis looks overwhelmed and trapped and exactly how most people feel when confronted with the combined focus of these three women.
“All right, good job, family. We’ll see you all later,” I say as I push Ellis out the door. He does an awkward bow-and-wave hybrid as we duck out.