“I just found out the wedding planner declared bankruptcy. It seems her assistant was embezzling money and never paid the deposit on the ballroom at the Belle Vista hotel, which is listed on the wedding invitations. No deposits were paid for flowers, food, the cake, the band . . .” His voice trailed off and I waited for him to say more. He looked at me intently. “Do you know what that means?”
I had a pretty good idea, but I let him say it. “It means we have no location for the wedding. It means two hundred or so guests are going to show up and find somebody else having a birthday party in that ballroom. The food and the rest of it, is fixable. But finding a location at the last minute”—Mason threw up his hands. “And here is the worst part—my ex has known this for weeks. She was going to take care of it and then tell me. Take care of it?” His voice started to rise. “Jaimee took care of it all right,” he said sarcastically. “If she’d told me when she first found out, we might have found another place. But now? It’s just about impossible.”
I’d never seen Mason so upset. Instinctively, I put my hand on his as a sign of sympathy. He squeezed it and sighed. “Sunshine, I knew you would understand.” So now I at least knew his ex-wife’s name. And I began to wonder about all the stuff he’d told me about them having an amicable divorce.
“I could get buses to take the guest somewhere, if we had a somewhere to take them.” He picked up his fork, then dropped it in frustration. “I could just kill my wife.”
He said it rather loudly and several diners looked toward us with surprise.
Then Mason pulled himself together and asked if I wanted cheesecake. When I nodded, he ordered us coffees and a piece of cheesecake with extra strawberries to share. “I’m sorry for venting this on you. I suppose you’ve figured this isn’t the first time my ex has made a mess of things and dropped them in my lap to fix.”
“So your wife’s name is Jaimee,” I said with a teasing smile. “My first peek behind the curtain. How about telling me your daughters’ names instead of calling them the youngest and oldest.” I’d gotten through to Mason and his mouth slipped into a grin as his anger dissipated.
“Thursday is the one getting married and her sister’s name is Brooklyn.”
“Thursday?” I said.
“It was Jaimee’s idea to give her a unique name.” He rolled his eyes. “And Thursday is happy with her name. Go figure that.”
“See, it isn’t so hard to let me into your life.”
Mason was back to his usual self and chuckled. “I have been keeping my family separate for so long—it takes time to change. I have to take baby steps,” he said. “I suppose you want to know why we got a divorce.”
From what he’d just said about Jaimee, it wasn’t too hard to figure, but I let him explain anyway. It was another baby step and I was glad he was taking it.
“For a long time I was all work, work, work and we barely spent any time together,” he said. “Then, when my daughters went off to college and I finally had younger lawyers working for me to handle of lot of the grunt work, I started spending more time with Jaimee.” He shook his head with disbelief. “I’m not sure if she changed or if I just didn’t know her in the first place, but I started not wanting to go home.” He beamed a big smile my way. “She wasn’t any fun like you are.”
After he paid the check, we walked down Ventura Boulevard holding hands. All the stores on the main street were closed and we looked in at the illuminated display windows as we headed back to the bookstore parking lot where Mason had left his car. Traffic had thinned out and the air had gotten the typical evening chill that made the summer weather so tolerable. You always needed a blanket at night and could turn off the air-conditioning and throw open the windows.
Mason pulled the car in front of my house and cut the motor. “Shall I come in?”
He’d been asking me that same question every time he brought me home and the answer had always been the same. We both stared at the front of my