"Oh, sorry" she said nervously, balancing her glass and flipping open her cell phone. "Hello? Jim! Hi! How are you?" Ryan backed off. Jim? Who the hell is Jim?
"Who's Jim?" Ryan mouthed. He couldn't help himself.
"My boyfriend," Mara replied, holding the phone to her ear and turning away.
Boyfriend? What? She'd never mentioned that before. Not even the night when they had fallen asleep on the beach together. He watched her walk away.
"Ryan?" a voice called behind him.
He turned around.
"Hey, remember me?" asked a pretty redhead in curvy black Lycra. She smiled at him disarmingly.
"Camille Molloy!" He smiled. "How could I forget?"
He wandered over to her side, and they were soon in animated conversation.
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Meanwhile Mara was having trouble with the reception on the other side of the tent. "Can you hear me now?" she yelled.
Jim Mizekowski was cute like a bulldog, stubborn, with small- town boy written all over his John Deere hat and his rusted Nissan four-by-four pickup. In the background Mara could hear Dave Mathews playing--Mara knew that Jim liked to play Dave when he was feeling "deep."
"Are you there? Is that better? God, I feel like I haven't spoken to you in ages," Mara was saying just as Madison began tugging at her skirt. "What, honey? No, not you, Jim... . I'm working... . It's not really a good time right now."
"Mara, I feel sick," Madison complained, looking a little green around the edges.
"Hold on, sweetie ... Jim, I'm sorry, but one of the kids is ... No, please don't hang up on me!"
"Gurrrgle," Madison said, clutching her tummy. She had had one too many cucumber sandwiches from the buffet table and started spewing green-and-white chunks all over the grassy floor.
Mara gave Eliza a pleading look. She didn't want to hang up on Jim. Not when he hadn't called her in so long. "Liza, please," she mouthed.
Eliza sighed and took Madison by the arm. "I told you not to have that last one," she scolded.
"I want my mommy," Madison whimpered, white spittle flying from her chin.
Eliza knew Madison's real mommy was probably a million
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miles away, so she chanced a look at Anna, who was greeting friends and looking untouchable in a new Valentino sheath and a massive ostrich-feathered hat. She guessed the last thing Anna wanted was to be bothered by a vomit-covered stepchild, so she carted Madison away to the parking lot to clean her up by the restrooms.
"Madison, if you have to go again, just make sure you don't do it all over my new shoes, okay?" Eliza asked, kneeling down to wipe away the puke from Madison's embroidered French blouse.
Eliza grimaced at the smell. "Ugh! I'm out of tissues!" she complained, and looked up to see the cute gardener from the Perry house who'd been giving her eye the other day, standing next to her, holding a towel.
"I thought you might need this," he said, offering it to her. His dark curly hair fell over his eyes, and he was wearing a blue one-piece work suit with J. Stone scripted on the left-hand pocket.
"No thanks, I've got it under control."
"Suit yourself" He shrugged.
"Don't you have, like, a tree to prune or something?" Eliza asked superciliously, still wiping the front of Madison's shirt and rubbing the mess into the fabric instead of the other way around.
"I'm off today. I do the landscaping for the field; I thought I'd make sure they didn't ruin my top seed," he said. "I'm Jeremy."
"I know who you are," she snapped.