Chapter Twenty-Four
Wedding day
It was dark, early.
Naomi hadn’t slept in hours, but that was part of the job. The work of a wedding planner on the day of the wedding was never done. Thankfully, Max Parker-Roth was waiting at the venue for her. “You ready?” he asked.
She nodded. “Ready as I’ll be.”
“Carpets and tables are settled. I directed the movers when they arrived.”
“Good. And the yichud room for Judith and Ash?”
“Yep. I even have the gorgeous table we got for Samuel set up right outside of the sanctuary area.”
“Good. Thank you,” she said.
“What’s next?”
“Where do you want the chuppah frame?”
Duty never ends. Because as she turned around she saw Isaac, Abe, and a few other people as they piled out of a large British vehicle, probably owned by Jacob, Judith’s boss.
“I’ve got my stuff coming,” Abe said. “I’ve been in touch with my helper, and he’s still good to go.”
His helper.
Jason.
She couldn’t let herself think about him now, couldn’t let herself think about what she was trying to say.
But she was a professional. “Thank you,” she managed. “Thank you.”
Abe nodded, as she watched Isaac remove the chuppah frame—made from what looked like large hockey sticks.
With help from Abe and Jacob, they placed those two large wooden hockey sticks, standing on the bimah area, where the chuppah would hang.
“Things are coming together.”
Naomi nodded. She could see the vision coming together.
All she had to do was figure out what to do about what would come afterwards.
*
Jason had left Steven’s house early in the morning, driving the rental vehicle filled with equipment to the venue. No traffic, no congestion on the roads. Just the first lights of sunrise.
He needed to figure out how he was going to get through this wedding. This was Ash’s day, and like Lev had told him, this wasn’t the moment where he needed to figure out his own future.
But Lev and Artur were both right. He’d needed to figure out how to fix things with Naomi. And he’d actually managed to figure out what he wanted to give her. He’d even told his brother what he was going to offer right before the two of them went to bed.
Granted, his brother’s response was to look at him as if he had seven heads. “You want to propose what?! After all of that, you want to go back and propose that?”
“Why not? Isn’t that putting faith in the business, putting faith in her? Creating something so that she has a safety net if things don’t go well, or, go too well. Putting my reputation, or whatever it is, on the line? Also, she has to, you know, agree to the concept for it to take any effect.”
“But why would she?”
“What?”
“Agree to the concept?”
“Well,” Jason said after thinking for a bit. “I don’t know. But what I do know is that this is risking a lot. See, I think what she was trying to do was save me from myself, you know? Save the chef, save the knishes.”
His brother, predictably, shook his head. “I swear it’s not knishes you’re talking about.”
“Cannolis, the world. Doesn’t matter. The point is that she stuck her neck out, fell on her sword, to make things safe for me. But I stepped in the puddle anyway. I’m going to climb up the tower, you know, drop my coat on a puddle. All of those things. For her.”
“You’re going to propose an Events by Greenblatt’s division, give a right of first refusal to Naomi on her services, and in exchange, have the back-end booking for her events done by the people who work in that division—which gives her time to…”
“Plan? Whatever anybody does in their spare time. And also, it’s not people. It’s a dedicated person for her and a dedicated person for me, so that she’s not stuck doing the planning for me. Because that’s what started all of this in the first place.”
Eventually Steven agreed and thought that he’d come up with a brilliant plan. Now all he had to figure out how to offer it to her in a way that wouldn’t take the spotlight from Ash on his wedding day.
But as of then, he had work to do. He pulled the rental truck up to where he was being directed, and prepared for the start of what would be a very long day.
*
Only a few hours before the wedding was supposed to start, most of the larger items had been organized and settled, and Leah was doing her final preparations. Which meant she meandered her way into the room where her sister and cousins were getting their makeup applied.
“You look gorgeous.”
And they did. The gorgeous blue bridesmaids’ dresses they wore fit their curves and their body types perfectly; they’d made a great choice with a designer who had a variation for each of them. Liv and Leah had made the perfect choices.
And Judith?
She was a showstopper in the perfect dress.
“You look beautiful,” she told her cousin.
“You are gorgeous,” Judith said. “Inside and out, especially for pulling this off for me. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Be happy,” Naomi said. “That’s all I want from any of the people I plan things for, but especially you, Judith. You deserve every single bit of joy that’s coming your way.”
“I’d hug you, but I’d get you messy and I’d rather not do that. Except…”
And Naomi knew exactly what was going to happen, wondering if this would be the time she answered properly. “Yes?”
“How is it going? Have you made your decision on what you’re going to do?”
A general, easy, quick sort of question that avoided the specifics if Naomi wasn’t interested in discussing them. This was when Naomi wondered what was going on with her cousin…
Before it occurred to her she had a unique opportunity to ask both of her cousins and her sister a very specific question.
Because she’d heard enough about what had happened with Leah, and she had been on the scene for Livvy.
But she didn’t know much about what had happened with Judith.
She asked by way of an answer. “I have a question for you,” Naomi said.
“Great,” Judith replied. “Tell me.”
Even as she asked, Leah and Liv sat on the edge of their seats.
Naomi said, “I want to know…how did you go up to Ash, and this goes to you two as well, so Artur and Samuel, and tell him? You know? That you’ve messed up. How did it…work with you?”
“I just laid my cards out on the table,” Judith said as the makeup artist told her to stop moving as she spoke.
“And promised him I’d listen to him when he talked to me.
Both the words he said, and the words he didn’t say.
That I wouldn’t let my own wild, rampaging thoughts keep me from… him, really.”
Livvy nodded. “Same. Basically. You were there for that, so you should know about how mine went.”
“Yours had to do with professionalism,” Naomi said, both remembering and clarifying at the same time. “You had to listen to him when you were in a professional situation.”
“But in our case, with that in particular,” Livvy went on to explain, “the professional tied with the personal. If you’re intertwining, you have to make sure of both things.
Not just that you’re on the up and up, but that the communication is there.
There’s no way having two parts of your relationship, or your lives, are going to be so close and functional without good and consistent communication. ”
“Otherwise,” Leah interjected, “you end up with what happened to me, which was that I realized that I couldn’t let my professional life be my entire life.
That in order to get what I wanted out of a relationship I needed to set professional boundaries and remember that all these professional things I was doing meant nothing if I didn’t have someone to share them with. ”
Naomi nodded. Which meant all she had to do is tell him, somehow, in a way that he’d listen, that he meant much more than her research, that his views and opinions were primary. No matter what she’d learned.