Close To The Edge

“Well, this latest situation you’re embroiled in is embarrassing, to say the least. However, I have thought of a way for you to salvage a bit of dignity from the mess.” Charlotte heaved a sigh, and set her purse on the walnut credenza.

“Why don’t you let me decide what’s right for me, Mother? I’ve been an adult for some time now.”

She might as well not have spoken. Charlotte was continuing. “It’s not totally your fault, of course. I must say, I never expected Peter to behave so badly. But he is a man, after all, and you can be assured that people will be more forgiving of his boorishness than they would be of a woman’s.” She sat on the Louis XXIV armchair, and waved Jacey to the nearby matching settee.

She remained standing, attempting to make sense of her mother’s words. “Peter? My Peter? Why? What has he done?”

Charlotte looked coolly amused for a moment. “Well, he’s hardly yours anymore, now is he?”

The conversation was taking on the complication of a maze. “No, that is, we’re on a break, but…” Jacey shook the unusual muzziness from her brain and demanded, “Why don’t you just tell me what you’re talking about? What is this about Peter Brummond?”

As an answer Charlotte rose, went to the French provincial desk in the corner of the room and returned with a cream-colored envelope, which she handed to her daughter. With impatience mounting, Jacey opened the flap to withdraw a heavily embossed invitation and scanned it quickly. Then she stopped, stared harder at the note in her hand, and sat down heavily on the settee.

You are cordially invited to an engagement party for Peter Alexander Brummond and Celeste Emilie Longwaite, to be held…

“Good heavens, you really didn’t know? Don’t tell me he compounded his gauche behavior by not even inviting you?”

She tried to swallow, found her throat too dry. She had a mental flash of a very similar envelope lying, still unopened on her hallway table, with a pile of other correspondence she hadn’t gotten around to yet.

“No. I mean, yes, I received one, but I’ve been so busy…” Her voice trailed off as she continued to gaze at the invitation, as if she could make sense of it through sheer force of will. Peter was getting married. To someone else.

“You really have to open your mail promptly, Jacinda.” Exasperation sounded in her mother’s voice. “I’m surprised someone at the Auxilliary tonight didn’t mention this to you, and just think how difficult that would have been.”

Difficult. A wild laugh welled up in Jacey’s throat. She only barely managed to restrain it. Yes, she supposed it would have been difficult to hear from an acquaintance that the man she’d parted from three months ago in a mutual agreement to—“take a break for a bit and see where we’re at”—had, in that time, met someone else and proposed marriage to her. A proposal he hadn’t tendered to Jacey during their eighteen months together.

Not that she’d wanted him to. But still.

“I think Suzanne might have been referring to it tonight, but I wasn’t really paying attention,” she murmured, the invitation clutched tightly in her fingers. She raised her gaze to meet her mother’s, nearly flinched. There was a sort of impatient pity in the woman’s eyes that was somehow harder to face than the usual biting disapproval.

“Suzanne Shrever is an addlepated gossip. But I’m sure she’s not saying anything that isn’t being repeated ad nauseum in our circle.” An expression of distaste crossed her face. There was little Charlotte Wheeler abhorred more than being the target of gossip. “Damage control is of paramount importance at this point.”

“Damage control.” A blessed sort of numbness had settled over Jacey. “This isn’t a military operation, Mother.” She had a brief mental flash of Charlotte in uniform, stars on her shoulders, helmet and jack boots. She wasn’t so certain the woman hadn’t missed her calling.

“Reputations are fragile things, Jacinda. I’ve let it be known, quietly of course, that you’ve been seeing someone from out of town. We’ll have to act quickly so that you can line up an escort in time for the party. Had you answered any of my phone messages for the last week, we could have already gotten started on this.”

The words seemed to come from a distance. Anger burned through Jacey’s numbness. How dare Peter do this to her! The emotion was welcome, and she seized on it gratefully. It was easier to focus on than to acknowledge the rest of the tangled feelings crashing through her. Humiliation. Shock. Hurt.

A glance at her mother’s face had her shoving all that aside for the moment. She needed every wit about her in order to deal with Charlotte. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not going.”

“Of course you’ll go.” The certainty in her tone had Jacey’s jaw tightening. “Your failure to appear will only set people to talking even more. I’ll have Dorothy Genesson tell her bridge group that you’ll be bringing the new man in your life. She’ll hint about the seriousness of your relationship, and then we’ll let the word get around. You won’t have to stay long, but to save face you do have to attend, and appear madly happy with your current companion.”

Dorothy Genesson was as close to a best friend as Charlotte had. Both of them had been widowed for nearly ten years, and neither were eager to change that status. “Very Machiavellian, Mother. But there is no new man in my life.” Not that she had missed the lack overmuch in the last few months. “And I tend to think that beating the bushes for a man to playact with at the engagement party is even more pathetic than showing up alone, or not at all.”

“You always put the most negative spin on things. One does what the situation calls for.”

Just for a moment, Jacey thought of the biker she’d dropped earlier that evening. Somehow she didn’t think Charlotte would appreciate the association. “That’s always been my philosophy.”

“Excellent.” Her mother crossed to her and handed her a paper with a list of names printed neatly on it. Each was followed by an address and phone number. She must have taken it from the desk when she’d retrieved the invitation. “Dorothy and I put our heads together and came up with this list of five men. Each lives out of town, is single and would be a suitable escort. I assumed you’d like to do the contact and final selection yourself.”

The sheer gall of the action left Jacey speechless for a moment. Incredulity shredded that reaction, though, and quickly. “You’ve got to be joking. You expect me to call up some total strangers and beg for a date to my ex-boyfriend’s engagement party? This sounds like the plot for a very bad chick-flick.”

“Don’t be irreverent.” Charlotte sat down again. “You needn’t pursue a relationship with the man you decide upon, although any of the five would be quite appropriate, if you should decide to do so.”

“I’ll bet.” Cynicism flickered. She imagined that her mother had examined the bloodlines and portfolios of each and every candidate before placing his name on the list. “If I remember correctly, you approved of Peter, too, until quite recently.”

Voice sharpening, Charlotte said, “I won’t tolerate your impudence, Jacinda. Peter Brummond would have made an excellent match, and you have only yourself to blame for this fiasco.”

Settling back against the uncomfortable settee, Jacey readied for battle. This, then, was the crux of the conversation. Not the faux sympathy, nor the matter-of-fact plotting. If truth be known, she had far more experience dealing with her mother’s censure than with her understanding. “How exactly is that, Mother? Should I have had him shackled after we broke up so that he couldn’t meet anyone else?” She pretended to consider the idea. “Possible, perhaps, but leg irons are so difficult to come by.”

“If you had played your cards right, you could have finessed a proposal from him and this invitation would have your name on it, instead of that of some little social climber from Baton Rouge. You certainly had the time.”

“Finessed a proposal.” To give her hands something to do, she smoothed her dress over her legs. “That sounds very romantic.”

“You know what I mean. Romance is vastly overrated in these situations, at any rate. What matters most are similar backgrounds, breeding and position.”

She’d heard her mother’s views on marriage often enough to repeat them verbatim. They saddened and terrified her by turn. “If Peter and I had been interested in marriage, don’t you think it would have come up over the course of eighteen months?”

“If he wasn’t interested, you can blame that hobby of yours. What man wants to be married to a woman who insists on dealing with the criminal element all day long, and most weekends, as well?”

She opened her mouth, intending to straighten her mother out about her job again, then closed it. It was useless, and it really wasn’t the issue here.

Charlotte went on. “I just don’t understand you anymore, Jacinda. You never used to be so difficult. You were always such a pliable girl.”

Weak, Jacey silently interpreted. Scared of her mother’s displeasure, which could be earned so easily. Anxious to do whatever it took to please her, until she found that by doing so she was very rarely pleasing herself. It was shaming to admit, even to herself, just how much courage it had taken to stand up to Charlotte about her choice of careers. A lifetime of choosing the path of least resistance, she’d found, hadn’t prepared her for the task.

However, constant practice was making it easier.

The jackhammering in her temples made it difficult to concentrate. She rose. There was nothing left to say, at any point. “I have to leave, Mother. I…appreciate the worry you’ve gone through. But don’t concern yourself. I’ll take care of it.”

She began to cross to the door. Charlotte stood as well, just as the cook, Luella, entered with a tray of tea. “Don’t go yet. We need to develop a plan of action.”

“No, we don’t need to do anything. This is my problem, and I’ll take care of it in my own way.” Taking advantage of her mother’s unwillingness to discuss anything personal in front of the servants, Jacey continued with her escape. “I’ll call you in a couple of days, all right?”

There was no mistaking the disapproval in Charlotte’s silence, but Jacey was far past a time when it could change her mind. Slipping out the heavy front door, she hurried down the steps and to the car, a familiar sense of relief nearly swamping her.

Those who turn and run away live to fight another day. Her father’s oft-repeated saying sounded in her mind. It had always been accompanied with a conspiratorial wink. He hadn’t been one to confront his wife on many matters, opting instead for peaceful co-existence.

The rain had grown heavier. The streetlights shot the wet pavement with tiny splinters of light. She drove slowly, her headlights barely denting the inky darkness. Her earlier relief began to dissipate as the full weight of the situation struck her.

She supposed, by her mother’s definition, she and Peter had been perfectly matched. With his tall blond good looks, they’d made, Charlotte had often said, a handsome couple. Certainly he’d come from a family whose background and fortune had been deemed appropriate by her mother, as well. Jacey had known him since she was a child, and she’d wondered, the last several months of their relationship, if that long acquaintance was to blame for the lack of any real…passion between them. They’d seemed more like a couple married twenty years than two people supposedly in love.

She didn’t even remember now which of them had first proposed the idea of stepping back from the relationship for a while. It had been Peter, she was almost certain of it, but she’d seized on the idea with an eagerness that had been just as telling. And there was no use being less than honest, nothing she’d experienced during their time apart had made her regret the decision.

Traffic was light. Those who didn’t have to venture out into the rain were probably snugged warmly inside their homes. The idea of doing the same lacked the appeal it had presented an hour ago.

Truth be told, when she’d recognized Peter’s return address on the mail that had been delivered, she’d dreaded opening it. It had been easier to put it off until she had a free evening to devote to handling her personal correspondence. Hardly the reaction of someone pining for her lost love.

Grimacing, she turned on to St. Ann Street. She never would have described herself as contrary, Charlotte’s opinions aside. So why this welter of emotion now, brewing and bubbling inside her? Apparently, she was a bit more temperamental than she’d realized.