Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mo
Anna sent Maureen three ideas for wedding hair—for Mo, not for herself.
For months, Anna had known that she wanted a chignon with loose curls woven in with daisies.
Anna too had received bouquets of daisies from their father when she was a grumpy teenage girl, and now the simple white blooms would make up her bouquet, the definition of simplicity and country charm.
Mo loved seeing Anna’s ideas for the wedding come together, and now that she had realized what a horrible sister and maid of honor she had been, she went about course correcting.
She was grateful for having worked so many weddings over the years.
After all, coordinating caterers and DJs was part of her day job.
Anna seemed so grateful that Mo had to remind her that making a spreadsheet was easier than checking dilation on a dog—at least the DJs spoke the same language as you, and at least you could tell the caterers when to arrive, unlike a puppy.
Mo skimmed through the wedding hair pictures, feeling for the first time that she was a set piece in the wedding.
She was being forced to care about updos again for the first time since prom when part of her wanted to straighten it and let it be.
She emailed her sister back. Thanks! I’ll take a look.
The wedding was in two weeks, and she had a lot to do between now and then that had nothing to do with her sister’s nuptial bliss.
Wedding season was in full swing at work too, two each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with cleaning and reorganization of the layout between each event.
Sloan brought Mo takeout between the two weddings on Saturday when she realized she’d forgotten to eat anything, planting a quick kiss on Mo’s cheek and staring around at the wreckage from the first event.
It had been a relatively small affair—only a hundred people—but the bride had chosen an Alice in Wonderland theme and at one point the flower girls had tossed hundreds of cards (all hearts) around the entire space.
They must have been formerly used in a casino and bought secondhand, because they all had hole punches through them.
Mo wondered if anyone had considered that someone might have to collect hundreds of cards afterward.
It was fifty-two-card pickup times fifty.
The burger helped, thankfully, and at least her blood sugar was level by the time she had to move the eight-tops and place the next set of silverware.
She got home around one in the morning on Sunday, the second wedding having moved on to the bars once the bride and groom left.
No official theme for this wedding, just “wealth.” Custom macarons in the wedding colors had been stacked nearly to the ceiling.
The couple had hired a band she recognized from her college album collection, and during the dancing portion of the event, after clearing most of the tables, Amy and Mo mouthed the song lyrics back and forth, using serving spoons as microphones.
Those were the moments she liked the job—especially when it was only her and Amy, after dinner service was complete and before they had to clean up vomit in the bathrooms.
The apartment was quiet when she got back, and Mo tumbled into bed, exhausted. She hated that she had to have an alarm set for the next day—at the ungodly hour of eight—but she would survive.
She didn’t even get to sleep until eight, though, because Mackenzie perched on the edge of her bed with pancakes the next morning. “You need a full and balanced breakfast today,” she said. “I can sense it.”
“You sense it?”
“Okay, Sloan did a tarot reading for you, and she said so.”
Mo yawned and sat up. She took the tray from her roommate and cut a piece of pancake. She took a bite. It was homemade, not from the box. It wasn’t as good as the savory crepe that Wes had made for her weeks ago, but it was sweet and fluffy. “Thank you for this.”
Mackenzie smiled and patted Mo’s legs. “We keep missing each other this week. No ratport or anything. You doing well?”
“It’s busy. I’m busy. You’re busy.”
Mackenzie nodded emphatically. The head librarian at her branch had delegated some of the programming planning to her, and the planning and running of events had eaten into her supposed off-hours.
“I love it, though. Do you love”—she smiled through pressed-together lips—“what you’re doing in the evenings? ”
Mo squinted at her. “I’m working.”
“Oh, when you’ve been at Wesley Spencer’s place, that’s working something , I bet.”
Maureen hoped the light wasn’t bright enough in here to see her telltale blush. She could feel it, though, starting at her chest and moving up to her cheeks. “I haven’t even seen him this week. And I don’t know what’s going on.”
Mackenzie laughed at that and patted Mo’s legs again. “Oh, sure, okay. I believe that. I noticed what his name was on your phone, by the way.”
Mo hadn’t changed it, true. She handed the phone to Mackenzie. “My sister did that. You can change it back to show you I don’t care.”
Mackenzie picked up Mo’s phone, looking victorious. When her finger was obviously swiping up, Mo reached for the phone again. “Hey, hey, hey,” she said. “No reading the texts!”
“I am not reading the texts; I am taking in the number of them. This is quantitative, not qualitative analysis.”
“Stop with your master’s-in-library-and-information-science-speak,” Mo said.
“Fine.” Mackenzie relinquished the phone again after a few more taps. “Here.”
Mo glanced at her contact for Wes, which had a picture of him that had auto-populated when she’d added him—something he had saved on his phone that shared with her phone.
She liked the picture, him smiling behind aviator sunglasses, his tangled mess of curls standing up.
It made her want to reach through the phone and brush it with her hands.
Then she glanced at the name Mackenzie had typed in.
“ King Sex God ?” Mo asked, laughing. She waved the fork at Mackenzie. “If you hadn’t made me a delicious breakfast, this would not stand.”
“I don’t think you do much standing around him. Ouch!”
Mo had hit her with the backside of the fork this time. “Keep it up, and you’ll get the tines.”
Mackenzie scooted off and ran to the doorway. “I’m glad you’re getting anything!”
Mo laughed, shoving the rest of the pancake in her mouth. She was tired after a night of dreams about getting all of it that she wanted, and the pancakes weren’t filling the need she felt the most right now, but they were something. And something made with love, that was for sure.
On her walk from the subway to work, Mo checked her email.
On a Sunday, she wasn’t expecting anything too serious, but she was surprised to see a notification from her writing email account.
That email was a sacred space—she didn’t even give out that email to her mom.
It was the place she got news from Yuri, and the place where so many years ago she’d gotten the ask for a phone call with her.
Her writing email had received multiple New Yorker rejections, including one saying, Keep submitting—this is promising, but not for us at this time.
It was the place where she had gotten acceptances and notifications of all the major moments of her writing life, and looking through the archived emails, you could almost sense her career’s dips and rises.
So what would this new notification bring: a dip or a rise?
Mo opened it, surprised to see an email from Gary, Estelle’s assistant.
Maureen had looked for news about Estelle’s condition, but she hadn’t found anything.
She was grateful to hear from him. She skimmed the message while walking, staying to the side of the walkway to avoid bumping into anyone.
By the time she arrived at work, she felt like she’d left her stomach on the concrete behind her.
Estelle was doing worse and had been checked into the hospital again.
She’d had a chance to finish the book and loved it, but—Gary put it as kindly as he could—Flor and Talia had also “tried to read it” too.
Tried to? Mo wondered what had caught them off guard.
Couldn’t they see how their grandmother’s original book needed a sharper critique on wealth distribution?
How it begged to take on traditional narratives of the home, of the hierarchy of women’s labor versus what men traditionally did?
Mo could see them scrunching their noses, saying, “Oh, this is too political for the classics,” as if A Tale of Two Cities weren’t political.
As if Shakespeare weren’t political. As if Thoreau, for all his “mom is secretly doing his laundry while he’s chilling at Walden Pond,” weren’t political.
Their grandmother’s work was political too, even to the act of it having to be published under her initials.
A few years ago, there had been talk of rereleasing it under her full name, but critics put a stop to it.
No, E. J. hadn’t identified herself as Emma Jean while writing it, and modern readers should take it with that context in mind.
Mo couldn’t respond to the email, mostly because her hands were shaking too badly.
She knew Gary was writing this while stressed about Estelle’s health, plus juggling Estelle’s daughters.
She felt deeply for him, this man who managed so many other people’s lives.
Mo hadn’t gotten to know him well, but from what she could see from their limited interactions, he seemed like a lake of a man—placid on its surface, but teeming with life and activity underneath that she might not understand or be able to see.
She would reply tomorrow morning after she’d gotten a full night of sleep, but for now she needed to focus not on the dreams that had brought her to New York but on the job that would keep her here.
As she began prep for the first wedding of the day, her phone chimed. “Sorry,” she said to Amy. “I forgot to silence it.”
Amy looked up from the saltshakers she was filling—the bride had bought them special for the occasion, not trusting the standard glass saltshakers to apply salt in a fancy enough manner.
“It’s fine. We still have half an hour before the rest of the staff arrives.
Bridal party and guests aren’t due for an hour. ”
Mo dug out her phone. A text from Wes, still listed as King Sex God.
She bit her lip at the name, trying not to think about the oral sex he’d given after breakfast at his place, her in the kitchen chair and him on the floor below her.
She couldn’t get that off track. His text scrubbed dirty thoughts from her head.
Hey, I heard from Gary and wanted to let you know Estelle isn’t doing so well.
Mo knew this, but now she wondered not how the messages they’d gotten from Gary had been the same but how they differed. What words of praise or adoration had Flor and Talia asked Gary to communicate to Wes, or had he heard those from the women directly?
Of course, Mo had already finished reading his manuscript on the plane ride.
She hadn’t been back over to tell him that.
She’d somehow refrained from texting him her favorite lines, but she had underlined three dozen of them.
She didn’t want him to know yet how much his book had moved her, and it didn’t seem like the full weight of her love of the book could be sent through text.
She thought of words that blurbs someday might use to describe the book— sad, but lyrical and thought-provoking —and yet those words alone didn’t demonstrate how it moved her.
His interpretation made Mo see the original text in a new way, even though it was set in the same time period and even though Eliza’s character was, well, very normal.
So normal that her flaws showed through in Clive’s eyes, so normal that Mo realized how adept Wes was at noticing people’s flaws.
She didn’t want to think about how many he might have noticed in her.
Mo considered a text back, starting and erasing one several times.
She settled on the shortest message she could, one that kept her cards close to her chest. Sorry to hear that.
Thanks for letting me know. She sent it, then read back how impersonal it looked.
How office-speak, how default-response. She waited for a few seconds to see if he would respond with something else, but he didn’t.
Maureen was too afraid of how he would take an honest statement from her now, a serious question.
She was afraid he’d misread her tone or read too deeply—or too correctly—into how scared she was that this was her last chance to make a project work with Yuri, maybe even to be able to rationalize staying in the city.
After all, she could fail much more cheaply from Iowa.
If he were there in person, all five foot ten inches of him, she could have told him.
It was so easy to say anything when she looked him in the eye, but when it was words on a phone—impossible.
And if that was the case for two writers, what chance did anyone else have?
She would see him this week. She could get her thoughts together better after she’d slept more and eaten more than a pancake.
When she wasn’t wearing an apron or thinking about how to highlight tropical orchid displays at the head table, they would talk.
They’d figure this out, one way or another, but for now, she had a wedding to attend to.