Simmer Down

very happy. The four of us spent all our time together. Oliver was practically family to us. As difficult as he could be, it’s just unimaginable that he’s gone.”
    “Fifteen years,” I echoed. “A long time.”
    Sarka smiled. “Barry and I got married six months after we met. We just had a small ceremony with our families and a couple of friends. I wanted to keep it simple, and I couldn’t see paying thousands of dollars for one day, even though my parents wanted us to do some big, elaborate ceremony. Do you know the original Filene’s Basement downtown? I got my dress there. I was even on television that day. All the news stations were down there filming the annual wedding gown sale, and there was a shot of me pulling a dress up over my clothes. Barry and I thought it was hysterical—my parents would’ve had a fit if they’d found out I bought my dress for only two hundred dollars. I told them I went to New York and bought one at Kleinfeld. Why waste all that money when I could go to Filene’s Basement? Oh, it was such fun!”
    It was hard to reconcile the Sarka who’d had a great time getting a bargain wedding dress with the snooty, haughty woman she’d been at Food for Thought. I bent my head down as I sipped my tea in the hope of hiding the expression on my face.
    “Sounds like you got to have just the kind of wedding you wanted,” Adrianna said, tilting Sarka’s head to the side while she shaped her hair with scissors.
    “It was. My parents said that if I wanted a simple ceremony, we could all fly out to Greece, and they’d arrange everything. That was the last thing I wanted. I spent my entire childhood traveling from one country to another. Not that there weren’t nice things about traveling, but I didn’t have any kind of stability growing up. The minute I made friends at one school, my father would be transferred for work, or my mother would decide we needed to experience Africa, so we’d pack everything up and relocate. I think that’s why I don’t like to travel anywhere now. I just want time at home with my husband. Barry loves to travel, though, so we’ve just decided that he should go alone when he wants to, and we’ll just make time for ourselves when he returns from his trips.”
    “Well, your house is just amazing,” I said. “It’s such a nice place for the two of you to be together. I really admire how you’ve decorated. Did you do this all yourself?”
    Sarka nodded shyly. “Thank you. I’m still a bargain hunter. Some of the furniture I’ve redone myself. I got that coffee table at a Boy Scout fund-raiser for sixteen dollars. I stripped it down and then stained it, and I think it came out pretty well. Even the couches I got when a furniture store was going out of business.”
    “Tilt your head down for a minute,” Adrianna instructed Sarka. “Is Barry going to be working more now that Oliver is gone? I imagine there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of.”
    “Oliver had him working all the time anyway, so it won’t be much different now. There were times when it felt like we never saw each other. Oliver was exceptionally good at the financial aspects of their clubs, but Barry is the one who really knows how to open a new place and get it up and running and keep it successful, so he was dealing with a lot of the daily grind of owning so many places. I’d like things to calm down a little, maybe have a baby. I’m not getting any younger, so if we want to be parents, we should do it sooner rather than later.” Maybe getting pregnant would encourage her to eat enough to put some weight on?
    She continued. “But we might adopt. As much as Barry wants to open a fine dining restaurant, he’s very good at what he does for Full Moon, and he doesn’t want to lose that. I’ve told him he should sell his share and open the kind of restaurant he’s always wanted. Like the restaurant we’re going to tonight with Dora.”
    “Dora told us you were going to Simmer. My boyfriend, Josh Driscoll, is the chef there, so we’ll be there, too,” I said proudly.
    “Oh, that’s right! Barry told me Josh made him a fantastic meal in the kitchen there. That was so generous of your boyfriend to do that. Barry really needed a morale boost. Opening a new restaurant must be so exciting for Josh. And for you. He was cooking at the gallery the other night, too, right? Those charity art events aren’t my style, but Barry and Oliver needed to go, and Dora asked me to go