A Cosmic Kind of Love(2)
I made a coffee and pulled my laptop out of my purse, my stomach seesawing at the thought of breaking things off. I’d been dating since I was fifteen years old, and I’d only ever had to break up with two boyfriends in the past thirteen years. The rest had either broken up with me or ghosted me. Still, the thought of having to break things off with George made me anxious.
Maybe I didn’t have to break up with him, I thought, as I sat down at my desk and flipped open my laptop. Maybe I could just tell him I found some of his teasing derogatory and he should do better not to be such a freaking tool.
Suddenly my cell chimed behind me on the counter and then chimed again and again and again.
“What the . . .” I turned to grab the phone, some kind of sixth sense making me dread the sight of the notification banners from my social media apps. Tapping one—
“Oh my God.” Nothing could have prepared me for the video someone had tagged me in.
The video someone had tagged my mother in for her prominent role.
I’d totally forgotten she was attending my aunt Julia’s bachelorette party tonight. In typical Aunt Julia fashion, she’d forced everyone out on a weeknight to avoid the weekend crowds. Aunt Julia was my mom’s best friend from high school and had been terminally single for most of my life. Then, three years ago, she met Hopper. He was a couple of years younger than her, divorced with three grown kids, and he and Aunt Julia fell madly in love after meeting in a supermarket, of all places. Now they were finally getting married, and I couldn’t be happier for her.
However, my mom, who’d been divorced from my dad for less than two years and had to watch him move on to a younger woman, was in a fragile place right now. So I could be mad at Aunt Julia for allowing my vulnerable, postdivorce mom to get recorded at the bachelorette party giving a male stripper a lap dance while sucking the banana he held in his hand.
Yup.
My mother, ladies and gentleman.
I shuddered.
Noticing all the shares on the video, I came out of the app and slammed my phone down on my desk. Part of me wanted to race out of my apartment, jump in a cab, find my mom, and drag her out of whatever strip club in Newark they were in.
Yet there were only so many times that I could rescue my mom and dad from themselves. This was their new reality postdivorce, and I needed to let go. Maybe if I didn’t have a pile of work to get through, I might run after my mom.
Who would undoubtedly find the online video mortifying once she sobered up.
Sighing, I grabbed my phone and called my aunt. To my shock, she answered. The pounding music from the club they were in slammed down the line.
“Hey, doll face!” Aunt Julia yelled. “I’ve changed my mind and you’re allowed to come! Do you want the address?”
Aunt Julia had decided she wanted a bachelorette party that allowed her to do whatever the hell she liked without feeling weird in front of me or any of her friends’ grown kids. I was relieved to be left out of the invitation.
“No,” I replied loudly, “I’m calling because that video of Mom is all over social media!”
“What video?”
“The lap dance! The banana!”
“Oh shit,” she cackled. “You’re kidding? Okay,” she yelled even louder, “Who put the video of Maggie online?”
Realizing she was talking to her friends, I stayed silent.
“Jenna, you creep!” Aunt Julia yelled good-naturedly. “Take it down!”
“It’s not funny, AJ!” I called her by the nickname I’d given her as a child.
“Oh, it’s kind of funny, honey, if you’re anyone but her daughter!”
“Just make sure she doesn’t do anything else lewd that ends up online. Have a good night!” I ended the call before she could reply.
It was clear they were all drunk. Aunt Julia was usually on my side when it came to calming Mom in any postdivorce antics—I’d never had to worry about my mother in any way until her marriage fell apart and she started acting unpredictably.
However, there was no reasoning with drunk bachelorettes.
“Shake it off,” I whispered to myself, willing my pulse to slow. “You cannot undo what has already been done, but you can focus on your work so you don’t lose your job.”
I was an event organizer. I worked for one of the best event-management companies in Manhattan: Lia Zhang Events, owned by my boss, Lia Zhang. After college, I’d planned to go backpacking across Asia, a lifelong dream of mine, but the reality was I needed money to pay for that. So I’d gotten a job as a manager at a large Manhattan hotel, and when the event planner quit three weeks before a big wedding, I’d stepped in to take over. I’d met Lia at the fourth wedding I planned for the hotel, and she was so impressed by my work she offered me a job. The pay was hard to resist because it would take me closer to my backpacking dream.
Four years later, I was still working for Lia, had been promoted to senior event manager, and almost everyone I knew had talked me out of my backpacking trip.
My latest project was planning Darcy Hawthorne’s engagement party. She was a true-blue New York socialite. If we got this right, Darcy would more than likely hire us to plan the wedding.
The issue was that Darcy, an environmental lawyer and elegance personified, was marrying her complete opposite. Her fiancé, Matthias, was a French artist and musician. He wanted a “modern, stripped back, yet artistic party with a rock band” while Darcy was all about traditional opulence. She was a flowers-and-string-quartet kind of woman. It was my job as their planner to find a compromise, so I’d asked Darcy and Matthias to email me images and music for inspiration.