“Oh, that’s fantastic, Ernie! Congratulations! Is it Paula or Emmy?”
Ernie had five daughters. This was the reason, he liked to declare, he’d never be able to retire: all those daughters, all those college educations, all those weddings. Eden was pretty sure Ernie never actually wanted to retire. Not as long as he was still able to hoist the hood of a car, rub his hands together and say, “What seems to be the problem?”
So Ernie plucked her from the crowd like a flower from a bouquet and delivered her to where his wife was standing, over by the front window, and soon she was lost in her favorite kind of conversation, one about flowers and celebration. She didn’t think about Gabe Caldera at all.
Except for wondering whether he was watching the back of her.
Or maybe her profile.
The entire back of her felt almost fuzzy with heat, as if she’d activated a heretofore unknown Gabe-sensing laser in her very cells.
About ten minutes—hereinafter her definition of eternity—they moved past each other on the way to the wine table.
And stopped in front of each other.
He said, “Forgot also insightful. Smart. Warm. Funny. Beautiful... scared yet?”
She looked up into his face searchingly.
His eyes glinted a wicked dare.
“You know that roller coaster at Frontier World that has a ninety-five-degree drop, and three loops?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I rode that thirteen times one summer.”
“Wow.”
“Got my name in the paper and everything.”
“That confirms practically everything I just said.”
“Didn’t scream or throw up even once.”
“You really can’t ask for anything more than that from a woman.”
She would have laughed, but the oxygen in the room had gone 100 proof, and she was kind of breathless. She knew for damn sure she couldn’t blame the wine.
And for about two seconds they stood, an island in the crowd, sort of smiling at each other, sort of basking in each other’s presence, and didn’t speak while a lot of invisible things seemed to be taking place between them. Conversation had reached shouting volumes, as it invariably did about an hour into these things. Eden could hear Casey Carson laughing uproariously over the murmur of the crowd. Glass of wine number three usually made Casey laugh that way. She deserved it tonight. She’d set the hair for twelve bridesmaids in a raucous octogenarian wedding today while Eden had done the flowers: calla lilies. Simple and beautiful, white as the bride’s hair.
Badfinger’s “Day After Day” suddenly erupted from the speakers.
“Oh!” Eden said. It was an involuntary expulsion of delight. Her hand flew up to her heart and covered it.
“What’s the ‘oh’ for? Please say it’s because you just noticed and love my aftershave.”
“This song. I love this song,” she confessed. “It just gets me right here.” Which was similar to where Gabe “got” her, but with him points south, so to speak, were also engaged. “Dorky, maybe, but man.”
“Oh,yeah,” he agreed, loudly, given that was how anyone could be heard at the moment in the Misty Cat. “This one and ‘Baby Blue’ are a couple of the tunes I sing in the—”
“Gabe Caldera!” Meredith Blevins, head of the Hellcat Canyon Planning Commission, do-si-doed a few people to get to Gabe and lassoed him with a chummy hand through the elbow. “Come talk to Paul Stansfield. He’s thinking of running for school board next fall.”
He was steered away, and because that’s what people did at these things, he went, casting a wry glance over his shoulder.
Eden remained standing still.
Thoughtfully.