Darryl grunted. “She’s the one talking to your dad.”
“Deirdre’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland,” Darlene added. The proud mother wore a long-sleeved, scoop-neck cocktail dress in a stunning shade of turquoise with a matching pashmina artfully looped around her neck. As she reached out to touch her son’s shoulder, the pashmina shifted. What I saw nearly stopped my heart; I had to press my hand to my chest to get it going again. Knocking about in her cleavage on the end of a pure silver chain was my mother’s favorite jade-and-silver necklace. There was no mistaking it; Daddy had had it made in Japan by a jeweler working from an original design. When I could breathe again I said, “That’s a lovely necklace, Darlene.”
She reached up to caress it. “Thank you. Your father gave it to me.” She smiled, revealing even white teeth. “An early Christmas present.”
No wonder it was hard to breathe. Rage was taking up the space in my chest normally reserved for my lungs. Lucky for Daddy that all these people were around, because I felt like picking up one of Darlene’s country French kitchen chairs and clobbering him with it. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your conversation,” I seethed, then turned on a furious heel to seek out the moral support of my husband.
I found he’d migrated back to the dining room, where he was hovering over the cheese board, still talking to the woman in the red plaid suit. Before I could tell him about the necklace he said, “Hannah, I’d like you to meet Darlene’s friend, Virginia Prentice.” He turned a dazzling smile on Virginia. “My wife is George’s daughter. The middle one.”
Virginia, who I guessed must be around seventy, grinned at me with a crimson mouth carefully outlined in a darker shade of red. “Are your sisters here, Hannah?”
“I’m afraid not. Georgina’s in Arizona with her in-laws and Ruth had to work tonight.”
Virginia shifted her drink so that she was holding her plate and her glass in the same hand. She selected a jumbo shrimp and dredged it through a puddle of cocktail sauce. “Too bad they’re missing the party!”
I speared a crab ball for myself. “Ruth sent along a bottle of schnapps, although it’ll never be noticed among all that loot. Honestly, Virginia, I’ve never seen so many hostess gifts!”
Virginia wrinkled her eyebrows. “Hostess gifts?” She brightened. “Oh, you must mean the stuff on the hall table. Those aren’t hostess gifts, my dear.”
“They aren’t?”
“You look so surprised. Surely you know!”
“Know what?”
“Those are wedding gifts.”
“Wedding?” Paul slipped a steadying arm through mine and clamped it firmly to his side.
“Your father and Darlene are getting married at the courthouse in Annapolis a week from next Friday.”
“New Year’s Eve?” I croaked.
“Oh, yes. On New Year’s Eve, just before midnight.”
Paul’s grip on my arm tightened. “Well, we knew they were thinking about it, of course, but we didn’t realize it was so…” He paused, and I could feel him staring at the side of my face as if checking to see if it would crack and explode. “… So imminent.”
“I think it’s sweet, don’t you?” Virginia waggled her fingers in the air. “Then they’ll slip away on their honeymoon, driving into the next millennium together.”
I was sorry that I had eaten that crab ball because I was in grave danger of throwing it up all over Darlene’s clean oak floor and tasseled Oriental carpet.
“Have you met our daughter, Emily?” Paul asked.
“I may have.” She sipped her drink, something clear on the rocks with a twist of lime. “What does she look like?”
“She’s not hard to spot,” Paul offered. “Not with our granddaughter grafted to her hip.”
“My, yes! Cute little thing,” Virginia burbled. “They’re in the living room, I think, looking at the tree.”
I certainly didn’t have an overwhelming desire to look at Darlene’s tree, but at least if I did I knew I wouldn’t see anything of my mother’s on it. As far as I knew, all the family Christmas decorations were either hanging on our tree or still packed away in boxes at my house. I decided to find Emily, if only to get out of that dining room, which was suddenly filled to overflowing with Darlene’s laughter as she swanned in on Daddy’s arm. It was either that manic cackling or me.
But Paul had other ideas. “It’s time,” he said, “to greet the happy couple.” His teeth flashed shark white in the candlelight. “Shall we?” He tipped an imaginary hat to Virginia, then dragged me across the room to a table where Daddy was fixing three cups of eggnog, one each for himself and Darlene and another for a white-haired guy on his right. The Bobbsey Twins, Darryl and Deirdre, had wandered off somewhere.
Paul came straight to the point. “I understand congratulations are in order, Captain.”
Daddy refused to look at me directly and the lobes of his ears changed from pink to red, almost as red as the white-headed guy’s sweater. The left side of his mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “Yes.” His arm snaked around Darlene’s shoulders. “We both realized rather suddenly that we weren’t getting any younger, and with the millennium almost upon us, we thought it might be fun to start out the new century together.”
Perma-grin firmly in place, like Br’er Rabbit, I lay low.
Daddy shifted his weight from one foot to another and said, “Have you met Darlene’s neighbor, Marty O’Malley?”
Mr. O’Malley raised a hand. “No relation.”
My laugh was forced, but I welcomed the change of topic. “You must get that all the time!”
Although they were approximately the same height, the man whose hand I was shaking bore absolutely no resemblance to Baltimore’s newly elected mayor, Martin O’Malley. Marty O’Malley the mayor was broad-shouldered, muscular, and dark-haired, while Marty O’Malley the neighbor was slim, solid, and straight as a tree, with a generous head of pure white hair and an infectious grin. I’d doubt we’d catch Baltimore’s new mayor wearing red-and-green striped suspenders, either.
“Oh, I do, I do,” Marty said. “All the time. And when I show up at restaurants, I get all kinds of grief, as if I’d gotten my reservations under false pretenses!” He waved a Heineken at me. “I can’t help what my parents named me. Besides”-he leaned closer, until his mouth was almost touching my ear-“the mayor’s thirty years my junior, so it’s he who should be apologizing to me for the inconvenience!”
“What do you do, Mr. O’Malley?”
“Nothing, my dear. Absolutely nothing.” He cackled. “I’m retired.”
Virginia Prentice, accompanied by a youngish woman in a silver, bead-encrusted sheath, joined the growing knot of people clustered in front of the drinks table. “Nonsense! You’re the busiest person I know, Marty.”
Marty ran his thumbs up and down the inside of his suspenders. “Not during the winter, I’m not. Been reading a lot, though, Virginia.”
“Have you read The Perfect Storm?” Virginia wanted to know.
The young woman, who was introduced as Eileen, shivered inside her silver sheath. “No, and I don’t intend to. I might never go sailing again! No, I’m reading that new book by Phyllis Talmadge, Flex Your Psychic Muscles.”
Marty puffed air noisily out through his lips. “Who believes in all that crap? Might as well waste your money on the psychic hot line.”
Eileen bristled. “I believe in it.”
“I looked for that Talmadge book in the Compleat Bookseller the other day, but they were all sold out,” Darlene complained.
“I bought my copy from Amazon dot com,” Eileen said.
“No, thank you!” Marty’s eyes narrowed. “I prefer to support the independents.”