Chapter 35 vacilando
vacilando
That evening, I ran into Juliette on my way back to my cottage.
Her arms were full of folders, and for the first time since I met her she looked frazzled.
She barely paused to say good-bye to me as she made her way toward the parking lot, and then she tripped on the uneven gravel.
The papers went flying, and so did a curse.
“Sophie, you don’t have to help, I’m fine,” she said as I picked up a few of the papers. They were guest lists and a run of show and checklists for the party next week, pages and pages long.
“Oh, this is . . . a lot.”
She righted herself and took the papers back. “Over five hundred guests with all of Oliver’s plus-ones.”
“Oh yikes.”
“I know.” Juliette looked one piece of lukewarm news away from a nervous breakdown, and for her?
That was a lot. “But I want to make it perfect, and so it has to be perfect, but we don’t have enough flowers to source the bouquets and the catering service just told me that their freezer truck caught on fire so I’ll have to find someone else and—”
I put my hands on Juliette’s shoulders. “Breathe.”
“Okay,” she squeaked.
“Hey, ladies!” Wykofski shouted from the other path that led to the parking lot. “Everything copacetic?”
An idea came to me. I let go of her shoulders and shouted back to him, “Got anything to do tonight, Wykofski?”
He didn’t even give it a think. “Don’t think so.”
“Wanna play a game of Scrabble?”
Juliette was shaking her head. “Oh no, I can’t, I have so much work to do—”
At the same time, Wykofski lit up like a Christmas tree. “You mean it? Bro night?”
“Bro night,” I confirmed.
He gave a yelp. “Heck yeah! I have the game in my truck! Lemme go get it!” And he was off before Juliette could finish sputtering out an excuse.
She wilted and gave me a forlorn look. “I don’t have time.”
To which I replied, putting a hand on her shoulder, “Yes, you do. Besides, everywhere is closing about now. You can’t get back to work until tomorrow.”
“But . . .”
“Trust me.”
Not ten minutes later, we were in the kitchen at the old wooden breakfast nook.
Juliette had taken the corner with the bench, and Wykofski had taken the other bench.
There were three chairs, so I took the one in the middle, and Wykofski opened up the box and gave everyone their game pieces, though Oliver interrupted us just as we were about to start.
He peeked into the kitchen, his T-shirt patched with sweat from a run. He took out an earphone, surveying the disaster of letter tiles. “What’re you doing in here—oh, Juliette,” he added flatly. “Hello.”
Beside me, Juliette went ramrod straight and started spinning a vowel tile she was currently holding. Her face grew cold. “Oh. Oliver. Hi.”
Wykofski pulled out a chair. “Sit down, join the fun!”
“What’re we playing?” Oliver asked. Juliette watched him silently. If Wykofski recognized the ire between the two of them, he played it off immaculately. “Scrabble? I haven’t played this in years.”
“It’s a good exercise for the brain,” said Wykofski. “We got room for one more if you wanna play.”
Juliette said, her voice sharp, “I’m sure he has things to do.”
Which Oliver took as a challenge. “Actually, I don’t. I’d love to play,” he added to Wykofski, and decided to join. “Juliette, how’s the bicentennial coming?”
She narrowed her eyes. “We’d be fine if you hadn’t automatically registered everyone for a plus-one.”
“Everyone’s going to bring a plus-one anyway,” he chided.
“No, we’re accounting for people who aren’t going to be there—and wasting time.”
“You clearly don’t know your audience,” he replied dryly.
Her shoulders stiffened. “I’ll have you know—”
“I think we need some snackaroonies,” Wykofski interrupted, rising to his feet, and went over to a cupboard that I thought was bare, and pulled out a jumbo box of Goldfish crackers.
It was his secret stash, apparently, and after shaking out a bowl and putting it in the middle of the table, he instructed both parties to take a handful.
Somehow, it alleviated the tension. Arguing while eating the snack that smiles back did make one feel silly.
I arranged my letters, though I didn’t have very many words to choose from. Hopefully someone else had an m. “That reminds me, though. Did Yafir give you an updated budget?”
“He was going to,” Juliette replied, nibbling on another cheddar cracker, “but he had to slip out early yesterday and hasn’t been back. His wife has a tummy bug, and now so does the baby.”
I shook my head. “Poor Shiva.”
Wykofski agreed. “And Yafir sympathy-pukes.”
We all winced.
And then Oliver cracked his knuckles. “All right,” he said, looking around, “who’s going first?”
No one liked it when I played a gardening term.
“Mingus is not a word,” Oliver argued, pointing to the board. He’d only managed to get two words down, the and dog, which seemed rather apt because Reggie had come in while we set up the game, plonked down next to Oliver, and put his head in his lap.
I said, “Mingus is a word.”
“I’ve never heard of it before,” Oliver argued. “Right, Juliette? You used to work in books. Mingus isn’t a word.”
Juliette shook her head. “I was never an editor. Though I’ve definitely heard it used before.”
Oliver wilted. “You’re joking.”
“I’m very serious,” she replied, omitting the fact that I had been the one to use it before at the bar. “It’s a flower, right?”
“The Mingus dahlia,” I said. “And I would argue that to bloom a Mingus dahlia—because they’re assholes that need perfect pH levels and sunlight and a prayer—is to Mingus a dahlia.”
“That makes no sense,” Oliver grumbled.
Wykofski scratched his chin. “I mean, seems legit to me.” He was also the only one at the table who hadn’t yet scored any points. At least that was until I ended my turn and he reached over to my Mingus and set down a handful of tiles. “Dioecious. Boom!”
Oliver’s mouth dropped open. “Now that is absolutely not a word!”
“It’s a plant that has different male and female flowers, requiring both to get it on and create baby plants.
I learned that after Eula got on me for ripping up some of those—oh, what are they over there on the left bank of the Reservoir?
” He snapped his fingers, trying to recall the name. He couldn’t mean—“The pussy willow!”
Juliette, mid-drink, spewed her tea across the board.
It went on like that for a few more rounds. I played mulch from the m in Mingus. Juliette played quixotry, which we all had to look up. Wykofski took crwth, which felt like cheating, but after Juliette googled we learned that it was a bowed lyre. Oliver played rabbit, and then ignus.
“And ignus is a word?” I argued dryly.
“It’s the past tense of ignite, obviously,” he replied.
They let me do Mingus, so I let it slide. Between Wykofski, Juliette, and me, we were neck and neck, while Oliver spent most of his time complaining that he couldn’t place the word archaic because the last letter would’ve spilled off the board.
On the last round, Oliver played dentil.
I squinted. “Shouldn’t that be an a instead of an i?” He smirked. “Not that kind of dentil.”
“Oh, is that one of your fancy architect words? You could’ve used them the whole time and you didn’t?” I asked.
He shrugged, pushing a few letters around on his tray. “It didn’t seem very fun,” he said, and Juliette gave him a thoughtful look, as if he had taken off a mask she hadn’t realized he’d been wearing. “Speaking of fun, Mingus is a proper noun. It is not an approved Scrabble word.”
I pointed out, “You could’ve argued that.”
“But then you let me play ignus. It worked out,” he added with a wink, checking the board. “Though I think that means Wykofski won. By a landslide.”
Wykofski pushed himself up from the table. “We all bring different strengths. Words are easy, if you know which way to put them. At least that’s what my English professor at Yale said.”
“Speak for yourself,” Oliver mumbled. “My professor had a hard-on for— Wait, you went to Yale?”
The handyman laughed, taking all the coffee and teacups over to the sink. “Nah. Not my style. Dropped out after a semester.”
Oliver stared after him in disbelief. “But you got in. And you’re working here?”
I glared. “Wow, rude much?”
“I mean—you know what I mean,” Oliver supplied, but when none of us came to his defense, he shrank back into himself a little. “Okay, yeah. I see where I went wrong.”
In reply, Juliette clicked her tongue to the roof of her mouth. “Don’t judge books by their covers. Not even the pretty sparkly ones with sprayed edges.” Then she leaned into him and mock-whispered, “I collect them anyway.”
“Sorry, my guy,” he said, turning back to Wykofski. “I was rude.”
“Nah, I get that a lot. My ma always told me to chase what makes you happy. I think more people should do that. Jules, do you need me to walk you to your car?” he added, thumbing in the direction of the parking lot.
“I can walk her,” Oliver said, then turned back to Juliette. “If that’s all right.”
The events and relations director blinked, surprised. She looked at me, then back to Oliver. “I … okay. I guess you can.”
“As an apology,” he went on, standing and outstretching his hand to her, “for being an asshole.”
So she took his hand, and that was that.