An arc of balloons swayed over the iron entrance gate. Alice—amateur French horn player and faculty sponsor of the fifth-grade jazz band—was already there, just inside the garden, and as soon as she saw us, she gave them the go-sign to start honking out a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Kids filled the park, and parents stood holding glass champagne flutes, and as soon as Max arrived, they all cheered.
As Max and Babette took in the sight, she turned to me. “What did you do?”
“We did not go over budget,” I said. “Much.”
We stepped into the garden, and their daughter Tina arrived just behind us—looking svelte and put-together, as always, with her third-grader, Clay, holding her hand. Babette and Max pulled them both into a hug, and then Max said, “Where’s Kent Buckley?”
Tina’s husband was the kind of guy everybody always called by his first and last name. He wasn’t ever just “Kent.” He was always “Kent Buckley.” Like it was all one word.
Tina turned and craned her neck to look for her husband, and I took a second to admire how elegant her dark hair looked in that low bun. Elegant, but mean. That was Tina.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Conference call.”
There he was, a hundred feet back, conducting some kind of meeting on the Bluetooth speaker attached to his ear—pacing the sidewalk, gesticulating with his arms, and clearly not too pleased.
We all watched him for a second, and it occurred to me that he probably thought he looked like a big shot. He looked kind of proud of how he was behaving, like we’d be impressed that he had the authority to yell at people. Even though, in truth, especially with that little speaker on his ear, he mostly just looked like he was yelling at himself.
A quick note about Kent and Tina Buckley. You know how there are always those couples where nobody can figure out what the wife is doing with the husband?
They were that couple.
Most of the town liked Tina—or at least extended their affection for her parents to her—and it was a fairly common thing for people to wonder out loud what a great girl like that was doing with a douchey guy like him. I’m not even sure it was anything specific that folks could put their finger on. He just had a kind of uptight, oily, snooty way about him that people on the island just didn’t appreciate.
Of course, Tina had never been “a great girl” to me.
Even now, beholding the party I’d so lovingly put together, she never even acknowledged me—just swept her eyes right past, like I wasn’t even there. “Let’s go in,” she said to her mom. “I need a drink.”
“How long can you stay?” Babette asked her in a whisper, as they started toward the building.
Tina stiffened, as though her mother had just criticized her. “About two hours. He’s got a video conference at eight.”
“We could drive you home, if you wanted to stay later,” Max said then.
Tina looked like she wanted to stay. But then she glanced Kent Buckley’s way and shook her head. “We’ll need to get back.”
Everybody was setting out their words carefully and monitoring their voices to keep everything hyper pleasant, but there were some emotional land mines in this conversation, for sure.
Of course, the biggest emotional land mine was the party itself. When we stepped inside and Max and Babette beheld the twinkle lights, and the seventies band in their bell-bottoms, and the decorations, and the mountains of food, Babette turned to me with a gasp of delight and said, “Sam! It’s magnificent!”
In the background, I saw Tina’s face go dark.
“It wasn’t just me,” I said. And then it just kind of popped out: “Tina helped. We did it together.”
I’d have to apologize to Alice later. I panicked.
Babette and Max turned toward Tina for confirmation, and she gave them a smile as stiff as a Barbie doll’s.
“And, really, the whole town’s responsible,” I went on, trying to push past the moment. “When word got out we were planning your sixtieth birthday party, everybody wanted to help. We got deluged, didn’t we, Tina?”
Tina’s smile got stiffer as her parents turned back to her. “We got deluged,” she confirmed.
That’s when Max reached out his long arms and pulled us both into a bear hug. “You two are the best daughters a guy could have.”
He was joking, of course, but Tina stiffened, then broke out of the hug. “She is not your daughter.”