to lose five pounds before his laughter stopped me. I’d been had.
There was a fake spider on Mitzi’s keyboard, which stopped all progress in the office for twenty minutes while we talked her down from her chair, and a bloody gash on Kim’s knee, which turned out to be ketchup.
I was so exhausted by the end of the day that I went home and fell asleep on the couch and Chase had to carry me to bed.
No fooling.
Friday, April 2
Mitzi was two hours late for work today and came in white as a sheet. Her hair, a never-a-strand-out-of-place do, looked as though she’d combed it with an eggbeater, her jacket was missing a button, and she had a run in her stockings.
“Are you okay?” I hurried to her as she stood propped against the reception desk. “Did you fall?”
She looked at me hazily, as if she recognized my voice but couldn’t remember my name. “I’ve had the most terrible morning.”
Kim and I helped her to her desk while Bryan ran for water and Betty fluttered helplessly around us.
When her color started to return, Kim demanded, “What happened to you, anyway?”
“Shh. She probably came from the doctor. She said she had to have some tests this week.”
“No tests,” Mitzi bleated. “I had my teeth cleaned. The stress was enormous.”
The stress of having her teeth cleaned had caused this? I hope I’m nowhere near the delivery room when Mitzi goes into labor.
Chapter Eight
Saturday, April 3
“Do we have to go to this party?” Kim bleated as we neared Mitzi and Arch’s neighborhood, an upper-crust outpost where traffic doesn’t make noise, children are born with silver spoons in their mouths and crabgrass never grows.
“Do you want a little cheese with your whine?” I asked sweetly. “Or do you want us to drop you off here and let you walk home?”
“You’re a hard woman, Whitney.”
“You’re the one who made me promise that I’d get you here, no matter how often you protested or how many excuses you had.”
“I left my vulnerable, defenseless child with a babysitter I hardly know, and you made me come anyway!”
“Wesley is as defenseless as a munitions factory, and the babysitter is the girl next door.”
Kim grinned slightly. “That’s true. Wesley has been a challenge lately. But he’s growing so fast and learning so much. I don’t want to miss anything….”
“Kim, he’s learned to burp at will. That is not a good reason to stay home and videotape him. Besides, you said yourself that we’re here to support Mitzi because she’s been under a lot of stress lately.”
Kim quieted at that. We at Innova have formed an unspoken club, one that centers on making sure that whoever is having a bad day gets extra support. Even Harry has noticed Mitzi’s uncharacteristically weak moments, and once told her to “Go make yourself a cup of tea or something.” Meanwhile, Betty Noble, whose sister adopted two children, is showing real tenderness toward Kim.
Bryan, however, is absent from the office more and more, especially from the rooms Mitzi inhabits. I’ve weighed the idea of setting up a mini workstation in the men’s room, so that when he’s hiding, he doesn’t fall behind in his work. I’ve also been waiting for the right moment to approach him about his behavior, but so far he’s managed to elude me. I’ve considered calling his girlfriend to see if something is seriously wrong with him. Unfortunately, she can be as vague as he. Talking to Jennilee is like having a conversation with the Cheshire cat as he fades in and out.
I was pleased to see Bryan and Jennilee pull into the driveway of Mitzi’s house just ahead us. The house is a huge white wedding cake of a mansion with a colonnade over the walkway that spans the entire front. The portico is huge, with oversized wooden doors that drifted open silently to reveal a tall, gray-haired butler looking down his nose at us as we huddled together like Tin Man, Dorothy, Lion and Scarecrow on their first visit to the Wizard of Oz.
“I didn’t know Mitzi had a butler!” Kim hissed into my ear.
“She doesn’t. She hired him for the occasion.”
“Rent-a-Jeeves? Really? Cool!”
Chase and Kurt, blissfully unaware of anything other than the fact that there was bound to be great food inside, hurried us past the intimidating butler and into the house. Mitzi drifted across the foyer in a vision of teal chiffon that made her skin look like porcelain and her eyes like jewels.
Sometimes it’s difficult to remember this elegant side of Mitzi when she’s setting up a security camera in the break room to see who has been stealing her imported designer water out of the refrigerator or calling every office supply store in town to find a pen fat enough so that her fake nails don’t click together when she writes.
“You came!” For a moment, Mitzi looked truly delighted. Then she burst that bubble. “I thought you’d never get here. They’re replaying a face-lift and tummy tuck in the living room and a gall bladder horror story in the den. Worse yet, Arch and his friends are debating bunion treatments in the living room.” She pushed at Chase and Kurt. “Go ask them about the Super Bowl or something. Find out if they think the Yankees or the Red Sox will win.”
I patted Chase’s arm. “Go on, dear, ask that. I’m sure the answers will be interesting.”
He rolled his eyes as he and Kurt walked off, first to the buffet table and then to the big-screen television in the entertainment room, where, no doubt, Mitzi thought someone from the National Hockey League was facing off with the Gophers basketball team. Such is sports in Mitzi’s world.
“Nice party.”
Mitzi gazed around absently. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Kim took her by the arm. “Now, if you’ll just show me where the chocolate is, nobody will get hurt.”
“You can’t say I’ve never done anything for you,” Mitzi said obliquely, and pointed toward the dining room.
There, Kim and I found the sort of treasure we might have expected at the end of the rainbow. A chocolate fountain, running with the thickest, sweetest chocolate this side of Hershey, Pennsylvania. Around it were piles of fresh fruits, tiny cakes, pretzels, handmade marshmallows, cookies and anything else that could be dipped in chocolate.
Kim rushed right in to spear a bit of pound cake and thrust it into the dark, sweet waves.
“Just pick me up when the party’s over,” she instructed. “I’ll be right here. I don’t plan to move for hours.”
“I still don’t understand what you people see in that stuff.” Mitzi spoke as if chocoholics everywhere were a species to be pitied. “Oh, by the way, there’s Black Forest Cake, German Chocolate cake and a double Dutch fudge cake on the buffet table.”
Kim’s eyes glazed over with bliss.
“What’s this about, Mitzi?” I hissed. “Chocolate everywhere?”
“What else could I do? I don’t want to be tempted to eat the leftovers.”
By midparty, Harry and Betty and their spouses had also arrived, making us a little island of software geeks in a world of medicine. We were in Mitzi’s vast dining room, packing food into our mouths like chipmunks and debating the merits of key lime pie over chocolate pecan turtle cheesecake, when Mitzi’s husband, Arch, strolled in.
Now, Arch, although the kind of man you know is just itching to wash his hands every fifteen minutes, the kind who alphabetizes his socks—Angora, Black, Cashmere, etc.—is a really nice guy. He’d have to be—or else stone deaf—to put up with Mitzi. In fact,