Dead Certain

contentment. After Russell died, I’d sleepwalked through the years, hiding inside a carapace of work and obligation. Lacking energy for anything else, I’d allowed my personal life to follow the path of least resistance, resuming my relationship with Stephen Azorini, avoiding complications, and doing only what was required.
    But reaching the point where I was arriving at the Founders Ball on Elliott Abelman’s arm had been anything but uncomplicated. As perverse as it may seem, I took this as a good sign. Not that I was going to get anything like a chance to enjoy it.
    No sooner had we entered the ballroom than one of my mother’s friends—I couldn’t for the life of me remember which one, they all look alike—grabbed me by the elbow and told me in an urgent whisper that my mother was looking for me. It was a message that was repeated a dozen times by a dozen stylish matrons as Elliott and I made our way through the crowded room in search of my female parent.
    The theme for this year’s gala was “Starry Nights,” and as if to illustrate the point, the entire interior of the ballroom had been draped in black velvet—the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor. Illuminating this artificial night were thousands and thousands of tiny white lights pushed through the fabric that covered the ceiling. The overall effect was beautiful and romantic. It was also an awful lot of trouble to go through for a charity that was about to disappear.
    We found my parents in the center of the room. As always my mother looked beautiful. She wore a simple sheath of pewter-colored satin designed to complement an old-fashioned choker of diamonds and rubies that she wore only once a year to the Founders Ball. The necklace had originally belonged to her great-grandmother, a gift from her husband, the man who’d given the city Prescott Memorial Hospital.
    My father was at her side, looking handsome in his genial, silver-haired way, and no doubt already half in the bag. That my father was an alcoholic was something that I hadn’t consciously considered until college. That was when I realized that other people’s fathers didn’t start their day with an eye-opener at breakfast and switch to gin and tonics at noon. Of course, it was hard for me to be too critical. After all, my father was sweet even if he was ineffectual, and I was pretty sure that if I were married to my mother, I’d want to be drunk most of the time, too.
    Whether it was a form of familial telepathy or just from having been so often at the receiving end of her temper, I could tell even from a distance that my mother was furious. All I could do was pray that it wasn’t at me.
    As promised, when introduced, Elliott shook my father’s hand and called him sir. Father, as Elliott had predicted, seemed pleased. Mother, whose scrutiny of Elliott I’d been actively dreading for months, seemed to take barely any notice of him. Instead her attention was focused, laserlike, on a handsome figure across the room.
    “Can you believe he’d even have the gall?” she demanded. “The nerve of that man showing up here!”
    I followed her gaze, fully expecting to see Stephen Azorini and Miss Norway. Instead, I was surprised to see Gerald Packman, the CEO of HCC, warmly shaking hands with the mayor and his wife.
    “I should call security and have them escort him out,” she fumed.
    “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I countered, secretly worried that she might actually do it. The trouble with Mother was that she was like the little girl in the Mother Goose rhyme, the one with the little curl. When she was good, she was very, very good; but when she was bad, she was horrid. The plain fact was that Mother was capable of almost anything when she was angry.
    “Then I want you to go over there and find out what he’s doing here.”
    “Mother,” I protested, “anyone who buys a ticket can come. His money is as good as anyone else’s. Ten to one he’s here as someone’s guest.”
    “Well, that doesn’t mean I have to be in the same room with him,” she huffed, and taking my father by the arm, promptly marched out, leaving Elliott and me speechless.
    “And to think that I was afraid tonight was going to be boring,” declared Elliott finally. “Is this what all these things are like—cocktails and intrigue?”
    “Oh, no,” I deadpanned. “Later there’ll be dancing.”
     

CHAPTER 11
     
    I couldn’t help admiring the way that Gerald Packman worked