Chapter 2 Darcy
Maxine's apartment was above her catering kitchen, and that Thursday the smell of brown butter followed me upstairs. She had trays of cornbread cooling on the counter and a recipe card covered in crossed-out measurements. She read it again, frowning, before reaching for the honey.
"Taste this," she said, without looking up, and handed me a spoon.
I tasted it. "That's incredible. What is it?"
"Brown butter cornbread, but the honey's fighting me.
" She scribbled something on the card. "I'm testing it for the Whitlock wedding, they want something Southern but not, quote, 'a cliché.
' As if cornbread has ever hurt anyone." She finally looked up at me properly, taking in whatever was on my face. "Okay. What's wrong."
"Nothing's wrong. I'm just tired."
"You have your Westcott face on." Maxine set the recipe card down and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, the posture she used when she'd decided a conversation was happening whether I wanted it to or not.
We'd known each other since I was twenty-four and working front of house at a venue downtown, before any of it, before Tyler, back when my biggest professional worry was whether the walk-in cooler would hold through a June wedding.
She'd started her catering business the same year I met Tyler, and in twelve years she'd built it from a folding table at farmers markets into three vans and a staff of eight, and she still tasted her own cornbread like it mattered.
"It's the gala," I admitted. "Claudette's got Felicity doing all the important introductions. I'm doing the florist and the fire marshal."
"Of course she does." Maxine didn't sugarcoat things, which was half of why I loved her and half of why I sometimes avoided calling her for a week at a time. "Darcy, can I ask you something and you don't get to be annoyed at me for asking it."
"That's an ominous way to start."
"When's the last time you did anything for money? Actual money, actual invoice, actual deposit in your own account."
I opened my mouth to answer and then didn't, because I was doing the math and didn't like the answer I was arriving at. "I did the auction catalog for the Foundation gala. Two years ago? No. Three."
"Was that paid?"
"It was for the Foundation. Tyler's family runs the Foundation."
"That's not what I asked."
I picked at the edge of a cooling rack, not meeting her eyes. "No. It wasn't paid."
"You used to run a venue, Darcy. You used to have vendors who called you before they called anyone else because you were the person who fixed things when they broke.
I remember the Hendricks wedding where the tent flooded an hour before the ceremony and you had a new location locked in before the bride even knew there was a problem.
" Maxine's voice wasn't unkind. It was the voice of someone laying facts on a table and letting you look at them.
"When did all of that turn into calling florists for free? "
"It didn't turn into anything. I just started doing more for the family, and then that was most of what there was time for."
"Right." She went back to her cornbread, but I could tell she wasn't finished, just recalibrating. "I'm not telling you to blow up your life. I'm asking when you last thought about what you actually wanted to be doing with your Tuesdays."
I didn't have an answer for that, not one I liked.
I helped her plate the cornbread samples instead, and we talked about the Whitlock wedding, about the bride's mother who kept adding guests without telling anyone, about her youngest driver who kept getting lost on the same three-point turn near the Fan district.
Maxine told a long, ridiculous story about a groom who'd tried to smuggle his dog into the reception in a garment bag, and I laughed properly for the first time in days, a real laugh that came from somewhere lower than my chest.
"I forget how much I like just talking to you when it isn't about a Westcott event," I told her, wiping my eyes.
"That's because when it's about a Westcott event, you're working and I'm working, and neither of us gets to just be funny at each other.
" She handed me a second piece of cornbread I hadn't asked for.
"Remember the Hendricks flood? You climbed into that tent in your good shoes and started dragging out folding chairs before the fire department even showed up. "
"I remember you standing on the sidewalk yelling that I was going to electrocute myself."
"I was terrified. And also a little bit in awe, if I'm honest." Maxine pointed the spoon at me, half accusing, half fond.
"You didn't even hesitate, Darcy. That's the part I keep coming back to.
You just saw the problem and moved. I don't think you've let yourself do that in years, not for anything that was actually yours. "
"I don't know how to answer that without it sounding like an excuse." I set down the cornbread, suddenly not hungry for it. "It's easier to say yes to the family than to figure out what I'd even be saying yes to on my own."
"I know it's easier. I'm not asking because it's easy. I'm asking because I miss watching you do the thing you're actually good at."
"I still have the note that bride sent us," Maxine said. "She remembered us moving the wedding into that ballroom. She remembered your name, Darcy. I hate that you need me to remind you how good you were at the work."
Before I left, Maxine's phone rang, a supplier calling about a delayed shipment of table linens for a wedding that Saturday, and I watched her handle it the way she handled everything, three calm sentences and a backup plan already forming before she'd even hung up.
It struck me, watching her, how much I missed having problems that were mine to solve rather than favors I'd agreed to absorb.
"You're good at that," I told her, once she'd set the phone down.
"I've had a lot of practice at panicking productively." She grinned, wiping flour off her hands onto her apron. "You used to be better at it than me, if we're being honest. I learned half of what I know watching you work a room that was one bad decision away from falling apart."
I helped Maxine put the cooling racks away before I left. We could talk easily about somebody else's wedding, but I still hadn't answered her question about my own work. On the drive home I kept counting backward, trying to remember the last payment I'd received for an event.
The drive home took longer than it should have, traffic backed up near the bridge, and I spent most of it with the radio off, turning Maxine's question over without meaning to.
When's the last time you did anything for money.
I tried to count backward through the years and kept losing the thread somewhere around when Edmund's health scare had put more of the Foundation work on my plate, then losing it again when Claudette had asked me to take over the spring gala planning "just this once," four springs running now.
Somewhere in there my calendar had filled up entirely with other people's obligations, and I couldn't point to the day it happened.
It hadn't happened in a day. It had happened in a hundred small yeses, each one reasonable on its own.
That night, after Tyler had gone up to shower, I went looking for a folder I hadn't opened in years.
It was in the back of the hall closet, behind the extra linens, a soft blue portfolio with my name still on the spine in gold foil, a gift from my first boss when I'd left the venue to get married.
Inside were photographs of events I'd run.
A garden wedding with three hundred lanterns I'd strung myself the night before because the hired crew canceled.
A corporate gala where I'd rebuilt the entire floor plan two hours before doors opened because the client's numbers had been wrong.
A black-tie fundraiser where I'd talked a headline band's manager down from canceling over a contract dispute, standing in a loading dock in November without a coat because I hadn't wanted to leave him alone with his temper for the ninety seconds it would have taken to grab one.
There were letters of reference in there too, three of them, one from the venue's owner that used the word indispensable, and a card from a bride who'd written that I'd made her wedding feel like it belonged to her and not to anyone else's expectations of what it should look like.
I read that one twice. I couldn't remember the last time anyone had described anything I'd done for the Westcotts in those terms. Mostly what I heard now was that I was reliable, that I was good with the practical things, that things ran smoothly when I was involved, all of it true and none of it the same as being told a piece of work belonged to me.
I sat on the floor of the hallway with the folder open in my lap and felt something in my chest that I hadn't let myself feel in a long time, a hunger for work that was mine, that ended in an invoice with my name on it, that no one could hand to someone else because she'd grown up at events like this.
My phone buzzed. A text from Joanna, all caps urgency about the calligrapher for the place cards, who'd apparently used the wrong font on the proofs and needed someone to call and fix it before Friday.
I looked at the folder in my lap, and then at the phone, and then I closed the folder, slid it back behind the linens, and called the calligrapher.
Tyler came down while I was still on the phone, hair damp, and mouthed everything okay?
at me. I nodded and held up a finger, one minute, and he waited by the kitchen island until I'd finished, watching me with the mild, affectionate patience of a man who assumed this was simply what my evenings were for.
"Joanna again?" he asked, when I hung up.
"Place cards." I set the phone down. "It's fine. I fixed it."
"You always do." He meant it as a compliment, crossing the kitchen to kiss my temple, and I let him, and didn't tell him what I'd been sitting on the hallway floor doing twenty minutes earlier, because I didn't have the words yet for what it would mean to say it out loud.
He poured himself a glass of water and leaned against the counter, studying me in the unhurried way he had, the way that used to make me feel like the only interesting thing in a crowded room. "You seem like you've got something on your mind."
"Just tired. Maxine asked me an annoying question today and I haven't shaken it yet."
"What kind of annoying question?"
I considered telling him. The words were right there, close enough to reach.
When's the last time you did anything for money.
But it was late, and he had an early call in the morning, and some instinct in me, old and well practiced, decided this wasn't the moment to hand him something he'd have to sit with.
"Just whether I ever think about going back to event work.
Actual paid work, not the Foundation stuff. "
"Do you want to?" He asked it easily, without any weight behind it, the way you'd ask whether someone wanted to try a new restaurant.
"I don't know. Maybe someday." I said it lightly, matching his tone, folding the real answer back down small enough to carry. "It was a long time ago. I've got enough on my plate right now with the gala."
"You could do anything you wanted, you know that." He meant it as encouragement, I understood that even then, but it struck me as strange to hear, praise for a hypothetical version of me who existed somewhere outside the actual texture of my week. "You're the most capable person I know."
"I know," I said, and reached up to straighten his collar, an old habit, an excuse to touch him. "I'm going to go to bed. Don't stay up on your phone."
He laughed, said he wouldn't, and did anyway, the blue light of it still on when I fell asleep an hour later, the blue portfolio folder tucked back behind the linens where it would sit, unopened, for a while longer yet.