Wish Upon a Star (2 page)

After a long pause in arrivals, when I thought I might be through with my lonely coatroom mission, four women swept through the mahogany door at the same time. They gushed to greet one another with air kisses and exclamations of undying friendship. Or undying gossip. Whatever.

Two wore severe black gowns, as if they were attending a formal funeral. One sported cascades of pearls spilled across far too much décolletage. The fourth was the belle of this fashion-disaster ball. She had obviously received the William Prince Of memo—she wore a shocking orange gown, a shimmering garment that cascaded from her ample bosom to her dyed-to-match slippered toes. As if she feared being overlooked, she had settled a diamond-studded tiara on top of her gray-streaked updo.

Pearl Woman thrust her mink into my hands at the same time that Orange Tiara loaded me down with a silver fox. The coats weighed more than I did. The furs slipped against each other, and I struggled to balance both of them, but the fox slithered down to the ground.

Orange Tiara shrieked as if I’d stabbed her.

Before I could stammer out an apology, Jack glided across the foyer. I realized that he must have been watching me from the hallway, waiting for me to screw up so that yet another Skellar relative could become a proud Concerned Catering employee.

“I am terribly sorry, madam,” Jack murmured, scooping up the offended coat in one arm as he offered the enraged matron support with the other. “That clumsy girl should have paid more attention. Please, accept my apologies and send the cleaning bill to Concerned Caterers.” He produced a business card out of a breast pocket, all the while muttering more oily platitudes. I stared at the spotless floor in front of me, furious with myself for initiating the debacle, but defensively positive that the fur had not been the slightest bit damaged.

As Orange Tiara finally sailed into the parlor, Jack turned to me and hissed, “Watch it, Hollister.”

I swallowed my frustration and turned back to wait for more latecomers. Once Jack was gone, I tried to distract myself from the freezing foyer temperatures by speculating on the menu.

It would be something Dutch, I was sure, in honor of New Amsterdam and the original Knickerbockers. Maybe the appetizer was rich Gouda cheese, liberated from its red wax wrapper and melted over crusty bread. I wasn’t usually a big fan of cheese, but the thought of that creamy goodness, toasty hot from the oven…
That
was comfort food. That could make anyone forget a lousy audition, forget a freezing coatroom. I swallowed hard, suddenly ravenous.

I waited the requisite half hour after the last arrivals, making sure that no other Alliance matrons would need my coat-slinging services. Then, without giving Jack a chance to scold me, I scurried back to the kitchen to help with whatever food remained to be served.

A recycling bin near the door was filled with chartreuse-labeled bottles. Sure enough, that was the jenever. And it looked like the Alliance had made an admirable dent in New York City’s supply of the stuff. With that many empties, a healthy number of our society matrons must be totally smashed.

And they hadn’t had any melted Gouda appetizers to slow their absorption of alcohol. Apparently, the chef had whipped up some authentic Amsterdam treat. I’m sure it had a fancy Dutch name, but the translation was “fried herring on a stick.” Now it was
cold
fried herring on a stick, returned on almost every diner’s plate. So, the appetizer hadn’t been a grand success.

Jack was in an even worse mood than before. I watched him berate two of his cousins, telling them that they obviously hadn’t done their jobs, selling the hors d’oeuvres as delectable Dutch treats. If even Skellar cousins were bearing the brunt of Jack’s wrath, the rest of the night was going to be a sheer nightmare.

Eager to look busy, I lifted one of the silver warmers and stared at the plate beneath. Grilled asparagus. Innocent enough. Tiny roasted potatoes carved into roses. They were actually pretty. And stew.

Pungent, gloppy, lumpy stew.

A twist of nausea swirled through my belly and I slammed the warmer lid back onto the plate. As a Skellar cousin started toward the door with a full tray, I asked, “What is that stuff?”

Her pale face looked ghastly against her chartreuse-and-orange shirt.
“Kippenlevertjes met abrikozen.”

I didn’t speak Dutch, but I thought I recognized that last word. “Apricots?”

She frowned and nodded. “With chicken livers.”

Our Customers’ Happiness Was Our Concern? Really? Concerned Caterers might want to consider a new slogan, if it was going to continue in the Dutch line of business.

Before I could say anything, the pastry chef ordered me over to his station. Following instructions, I arranged twelve parfait glasses on a serving tray. With Jack paying eagle-eyed attention from his perch by the double doors, I composed my dozen desserts, following directions from the harried chef. Sorry bites of fruit were spooned out of a hotel tray, rescued from the sweet wine where they’d been allowed to macerate for far too long. Three scoops of ice cream followed—two vanilla, one strawberry. Alas, the frozen confection, um, wasn’t. The ice cream was half-melted, so that it settled into a streaky mess at the bottom of each parfait glass. The pastry chef himself topped each deflated little mound with strawberry sauce, the unfortunate crimson streaks looking like a roadmap straight to the emergency room.

“Um, what is this called?” I finally dared to ask.

“Knickerbocker Glory,” he growled. “No seconds.”

I didn’t think that was going to be a problem.

“Great,” I said, faking a smile so perfectly that I should have received an instant Tony Award on the spot. Unfortunately, when I had laid out the parfait glasses on my tray, I’d assumed that I would have the full range of motion in my lifting arm. I hadn’t counted on my tiny T-shirt cutting off the blood flow at my shoulder. I longed to invent a new catering tray, some type of molded plastic that would fit my shoulder, that would make it impossible for me to spill catered food treasures.

Gritting my teeth and compensating with the ordinary tools of my trade, I barely made it past Jack without disaster. My job wasn’t made any easier by the defeated stream of returning caterers, bringing back dozens of untouched plates of
kippenlevertjes.
A few of the
abrikozen
had been pushed around by adventurous diners’ forks, but the entrée looked to be a near-complete failure.

At least I carried my desserts across the crowded dining room without incident. I placed the first Glory on the plate of the oldest woman at my table. And the second. And the third. It was my dumb luck that the fourth Glory went to the drunkest woman in the bunch. Orange Tiara.

She may have gotten a late start at the party, but she’d clearly made up for lost time, downing more than her share of the chartreuse jenever. Now, she was declaiming eloquently about her family lineage, some ancient relative, her great-(emphasis with one hand), great-(emphasis with a forearm), great-(emphasis with a lurching torso), great-(emphasis with a nod of her head and a flying diamond tiara)—

And a cascading tray of melted Knickerbocker Glories.

Eight of them. Crashing down on two sedate black formal gowns, one décolletage covered with pearls and a tiaraless orange ensemble.

The dress was definitely not made better by a cascade of melted pink-and-white ice cream.

“To the kitchen, Hollister!” Jack shouted, and I realized that he’d followed me into the dining room. He fluttered around the table, doing his best to extinguish the cries of surprise and outrage. He flung business cards left and right, promised dry cleaning, door-to-door transportation for salvaged clothes, everything short of his nonexistent firstborn child.

Including punishment. Of me.

With one officious glare, he ordered me back to the kitchen to await my fate. I staggered through the doors and huddled miserably in the corner, trying to stay out of the way of the rest of the Skellar family.

Jack didn’t keep me in suspense for long. “You’re fired!” he snapped, immediately commanding the attention of every person in the bustling room. I would never have believed that a working kitchen could become so quiet, so quickly.

“But—”

“No ‘buts’! You showed up late, you ruined a fur coat, you dumped an entire tray of desserts! Are you drunk?”

“No, I—”

“Don’t make any excuses to me!”

“But she—”

“Out! Now! Before you destroy anything else!”

“What—”

He whipped a cell phone out of his pocket, sending a flock of business cards flying around the room. “Do I have to call the police to get you out of here?”

He was totally serious.

I looked around the kitchen. Two dozen eyes were locked on me, eyes that shimmered with shock (a couple of the women who had started about the same time I had), with horror (a couple of the guys, who realized that they might just be next in line for Jack’s unfair attention), with just a hint of glee at the scandal they were witnessing (the entire horde of Skellar cousins, who were probably already planning a family reunion to welcome whoever was going to take my place.)

My cheeks flamed red, certainly brighter than the glittering lion stretched across my chest. I turned on my heel and fled the kitchen, scarcely taking time to snatch up my bedraggled, fortunately furless coat and my beaten-up leather tote.

As my heels slammed down on the frozen sidewalk outside the Van Bleeker, I tried to accept that I had just lost my job. My Survival Job. The job that preserved my dignity, that let me contribute to the rent, to the groceries, to the life I shared with Sam.

I was going to be sick.

Three
. (You didn’t forget, did you? I’ve only told two-thirds of my disaster trifecta.)

I fished out my phone and pressed the first number on my speed dial. Amy. My sister. We’d talked at least once a day, every day, ever since she’d phoned me during my freshman year in college with the staggering news that our parents had been killed in a car crash. In the intervening seven years, Amy and I had become more than sisters. We were best friends.

“Hey,” she answered halfway through the first ring. “Are you watching this?”

“Watching what?”

“Food Channel. The history of distilled spirits.”

“I don’t even want to hear that phrase.”

Amy grunted, and I could picture her shifting position on her too-deep sectional couch. “What’s going on?”

I told her the whole tragic tale, starting with my audition and ending with my rushing up Fifth Avenue, clutching my coat closed over a chartreuse-and-orange T-shirt, trying to decide if I could blow money on taking a cab home to the Upper East Side refuge that I shared with Sam.

Amy made all of the appropriate noises, clicking her tongue in dismay at the casting director, sighing in exasperation at Jack’s family-oriented insanity. When I’d finally run down, she said, “Don’t worry. Catering is really outside of your silo.”

I gritted my teeth. I hated when Amy lapsed into business-school-speak, an all-too-frequent occurrence, since she’d left her job as a bookkeeper for a law firm and started taking management classes at Rutgers. Unaware of my annoyance, she said, “What about your job at the Mercer? Can you take on more hours in the box office there?”

I sighed. The Mercer Project was a theater down in the Village. Despite their small house, they’d gained a reputation for doing some really innovative shows. For the past three months, I had worked two shifts a week in the box office, selling tickets, enforcing the no-refunds-no-exchange policy and dreaming of the day when I’d be cast in one of their productions. “I can try. I work tomorrow afternoon. I’ll talk to them then.”

“You know that if you need anything, if you need to borrow any money—”

“Thanks,” I said, before she could complete the sentence. Like I was going to borrow money from my sister. She was struggling to make her own ends meet, with her husband over in Germany, serving in the army while Amy stayed stateside to finish her business degree. Every spare penny she had went toward child care for my nephew. Speaking of which… “Where’s Justin?”

“I sent him to bed early.”

“Another bad night?”

Amy sighed. “Only if you count getting into a fistfight during recess at school. And refusing to eat his dinner. And using the F-word twice, when I told him that he couldn’t watch TV.” Justin was not handling his father’s deployment well.

“Oh, Ame, I’m sorry,” I said. Not that there was anything I could do. Not that there was anything anyone could do, short of getting Derek home.

“The worst part—” Amy groaned “—is that I’ve got cramps from hell tonight!”

Ah, the joys of sisterly communication. I listened to Amy complain about her body’s overly sensitive hormonal wiring. She’d always had a worse time than I, every single month. She was the one who got out of gym class on a regular basis, who stayed home with heating pads and Motrin.

Motrin. I wondered if I had any with me. My back still ached, a low, throbbing pain, and my headache had returned with a vengeance.

Amy had complained of backaches and headaches when she’d been pregnant with Justin. She’d said that Tylenol didn’t even start to take the edge off of them. She wouldn’t take anything stronger, though. Couldn’t, out of concern for her baby, and because of her persistent nausea.

My belly twisted, as it had when I’d seen that hideous liver-and-apricot concoction, spread out on the catering plate.

Back pain. Headache. Nausea. And I’d had a craving for those imaginary Gouda appetizers, too.

I’d read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting,
memorized every page so that I could help Amy.

Oh. My. God.

Today was May 21. I counted back. Four weeks. Five. Six.

Oh. My. God.

Sure, I was on the pill. But I’d had strep throat a while back, picked up from Justin when I babysat him one night for Amy. Strep throat, treated with antibiotics. Antibiotics that weakened the pill.

Oh. My. God.

“Hello?” Amy was saying, a slight ring of annoyance behind her voice. “Erin? Did you hear me?”