Or I was just grasping at any excuse to make myself feel less guilty about what I was doing with Fen.
Maybe at Jasmine’s lunch we could just avoid the subject of Eddie. I could talk around him, like I talk around things with Norma. Deflect and distract. I was good at that.
And who was going to be attending this thing, just me and her and the twins? She did make a point of saying that it would be when Serj wasn’t at home. I guess that was better, since there wouldn’t be any awkward questions from him about the apartment.
Ugh. Was I kidding myself? Was this too much?
I thought about trying to back out of it. I even asked Fen what to do. He just texted back:You don’t turn down Jasmine Sarafian. Not if you want to keep all your teeth and toes. Looks like you’re stuck hanging out with my kooky family.
Isowanted Jasmine to like me. I wanted to go back to when I was in mom-love with her and she made me feel like everything was going to be okay. Could it be like that?
I guessed I was going. It was only lunch, after all. Maybe itwould be okay. And if it was painful, how long could lunch last with one kooky family?
Bring on the kook.
Velvet was feeling better—tons less crampy—so she was going back out with her friends. Which was more bad news for me. But when I told her where I was going for lunch, she let me borrow a striped top, one that didn’t resemble a baggy sack—huzzah—and it matched pretty decently with a full skirt and black ballet flats I’d packed.
There. Perfectly acceptable. I almost looked collegiate—Exie said so, in fact, and lent me a pretty red bracelet to complete my ensemble when I passed off Frida to Starla after she agreed to watch the pup for a couple of hours. Dad was running an errand for Mad Dog, so I was relieved I didn’t have to bear his silent judgmental gaze. But I did have to bear Norma’s when she caught me on my way out and motioned for me, saying, “Hey, come here.”
I thought I might be in trouble for doing something personal in the middle of the day, but she handed me a bottle of wine. Not just any bottle: a really expensive one from Mad Dog’s ex-wife’s vineyard. “Do you need me to take this to Rosa?” I asked.
“No, you should take something for the boy’s mother. It’s polite. Don’t tell Mad Dog I gave this to you.” She turned to the room and pointed. “Not a word out of any of you, hear me?”
Norma was breaking the rules? WHAT WAS HAPPENING?
“I can’t accept this,” I told her, feeling awkward. For one, I couldn’t stand owing Norma any favors. And secondly, everyonethought I was going to this lunch because of Eddie. And I was… technically. Only, it was a lot more confusing because of all the time I’d been spending with Fen.
“Hush,” she said, pushing the bottle into my hand. “And don’t make us look bad.”
Exie gave me a wide-eyed look behind Norma’s back:Hell hath frozen over.
This was getting too weird, and I didn’t want to be late. After Starla confirmed that we wouldn’t need our shared car, I pulled out of the garage and texted Jasmine to let her know I was on the road. Then I felt weird asking where she lived because I felt like I should know. So I texted Fen instead. I felt bad about that, too, but he seemed okay about it:If you apologize one more time, I will punish you by forcing you to listen to Steely Dan on repeat. Wait, that was me all morning in the record shop, thx to my aunt. FML.
He gave me the address, which I plugged into the GPS. Other side of the lake, where she’d pointed it out from the apartment window. The exclusive neighborhood below Mission Bluff. The GPS advised me not to take the normal road into town but to instead head through the property and exit that way, taking some weird back road into no-man’s-land.
It was another lovely day at the lake, and the trees that weren’t evergreens were lush and full. Everywhere I looked in the cozy woods along the private road, branches glinted with sunlight that filtered in through the canopy. The road meandered around some of the lodge’s outbuildings, like the caretaker’s cottage and a littleplace called the Poker Shack. I turned at the junction for the Grotto Cabin, and instead of going one way toward the lake, I drove the other way—where I’d never gone, to the back of the property. Where it ended.
There was a tiny public road that joined up to the lane back here: Bluff Road. No exit gate from the lodge’s property, I just drove right onto it. No wonder Kamal was all tied up in knots about all the potential “security holes” around the lodge. Anybody could just waltz right in.
Or waltz right out…
I drove without seeing any other cars for a couple of minutes, then the sun broke through the trees to my right, and the lake came into view. Weird to see it from this side. It was only a few yards away from me, and the road ran parallel with the water for a long, lazy stretch. I passed by an old state ranger building and, on my left, a quirky mailbox painted with black-and-white dalmatian dog spots next to a long driveway—I could spy a red house at the end of it, set farther back into the woods up a hill.
Immediately on my right, I spotted the Sarafians’ stone villa behind a fancy gated drive.
It was no lodge, not by miles. But it was stunning in its own way, so much closer to the water and more of a classic lake house, a couple of stories high, nestled in pines, with almosttoomuch flagstone in the landscaping and greener-than-green grass.
Instagram-pretty, especially in the bright midday sun.
The gate automatically opened when I drove up. I pulled into the driveway near a white catering van and let out a long breath.“You can do this,” I mumbled, steadying myself as I slipped my phone into my side skirt pocket, grabbed the wine, and exited the car.
Like a lot of the bigger places on the lake, this house had a lot of stone-covered terraces all around it, to maximize the outdoor living space—more time spent looking at the lake and the mountains. The entrance was tucked under one, two doors behind decorative ironwork gates, and when I rang the bell, one of the gates opened. An older Armenian lady with dyed reddish-brown hair and a small, tight mouth stared at me over a pair of black eyeglasses for several moments.
“Yes?” she said, a little impatient.
“Uh, hello? I’m Jane Marlow. Mrs. Sarafian invited me to lunch,” I told her. “Are you Ms. Makruhi?” Fen had told me that was the name of his family’s housekeeper. I thought that was right.
She looked surprised. “Yes, come in. This way.”
