Chapter 5 - The Glass Room
The reception hall of the Glenview Oak Country Club was called the Conservatory, an enormous hexagonal pavilion built of structural steel and triple-paned glass that jutted out over an artificial lake filled with ornamental koi.
Inside, the noise was deafening. A ten-piece brass-heavy wedding band was playing Motown covers from a raised stage draped in white velvet. Above the dance floor hung four circular chandeliers made of twisted wrought iron and three thousand hanging crystal prisms that threw fractured rainbow patterns across the linen-covered tables.
In the center of the room, positioned on a raised circular dais of polished white laminate that had its own dedicated overhead spotlight, stood Grandma Evelyn’s cake.
It was surrounded by a velvet rope held up by four brass stanchions, like an exhibit in a municipal museum.
A crowd of forty guests was currently encircling the dais, champagne flutes in hand, pointing at the delicate sugar petals and the microscopic lace piping.
"Look at the beadwork on the third tier," a woman in an emerald-green cocktail dress was saying to her husband, leaning over the brass rope with her phone camera zoomed to three times magnification. "That’s not silicone molds, Arthur. That’s hand-piped royal icing. You can see the tiny tail on each individual pearl. Who did they get? That French place on Rush Street?"
"Must have," her husband replied, swirling his gin. "The girl's father told me at the bar they spent six figures on the weekend. Said he wasn't going to have his only daughter cut into grocery-store sheet cake."
I stood twenty feet away, near the dessert service station, watching them.
Beside me, Grandma Evelyn stood with her back pressed against an oak pillar. Her navy suit looked small, dark, and threadbare among the sea of jewel-toned silks and tailored Italian wool. She had refused to sit down at Table 14—the table near the kitchen service doors where our name cards had been placed between two of Ashley’s college sorority sisters who had spent forty minutes complaining about the quality of the prosecco.
"Do you want some punch, Grandma?" I asked, looking down at her pale profile.
She shook her head. Her eyes were fixed on the cake. Her lips were slightly parted, and her breath was coming in that short, shallow rhythm that always made my heart clench.
"They didn't put the little card out, Leo," she murmured.
"What card?"
"The little card I wrote," she said, her fingers fumbling with the latch of her purse. "I wrote out the flavors on a piece of cardstock with my calligraphy pen. Almond sponge with raspberry coulis on the bottom two, and dark chocolate with salted hazelnut praline on the top three. I put it in the box with the extra dowels so the waiters would know how to describe the slices."
I looked at the base of the silver-plated stand.
There was a card. But it wasn't Evelyn’s.
It was a custom-printed, gold-embossed tent card in a small silver easel that read:
CUSTOM DESIGN BY ATELIER DU SUCRE — SPECIAL THANKS TO ASHLEY'S BRIDAL SUITE.
Atelier du Sucre was the boutique bakery in River North that had quoted Ashley eleven hundred dollars three weeks ago.
Ashley hadn't just stolen the cake. She had rebranded it to protect her social standing from the indignity of having her guests know that the centerpiece of her six-figure wedding had been baked in a sixty-year-old Magic Chef gas oven on Maple Street by a woman who washed her own lard tins.
"Leo," Evelyn whispered, her hand suddenly gripping my wrist with a desperate, surprising strength.
Her fingers were freezing.
"Grandma?"
"My chest," she breathed, her voice dropping into a wet, clicking rattle. "It feels... like someone’s sitting on the breastbone. Just for a second. The air won't... it won't go down into the bottom of the lungs."
"We're leaving," I said, turning to grab her coat from the chair behind us. "We’re going to the car right now. I’m taking you to the emergency clinic in Des Plaines."
"No!" she snapped, her eyes widening with a sudden, fierce flash of elderly pride that stopped me in my tracks. "No, Leo. You do not make an ambulance scene at your brother's wedding. You do not drag me out of here while the band is playing and make everyone look at us. If I sit down... if I just sit in the lobby where the air is cool for ten minutes, it will pass. It’s just the excitement. I just need a glass of tap water."
"Grandma, you're in arrhythmia. I can see the carotid pulse jumping in your neck."
"Ten minutes," she pleaded, her voice breaking into a dry sob that she instantly smothered with her white cotton glove. "Just let me sit by the fountain in the foyer. But don't you make a scene, Leo. Don't you dare ruin Daniel’s day over my old heart."
I looked at her for five long seconds. I knew that stubbornness; it was the same iron will that had kept her standing behind that county clerk's counter with bone-on-bone arthritis for ten years after my grandfather died so she could pay off his medical debts without filing for state relief.
"Ten minutes," I said, my teeth clenched so tight my jaw clicked. "Then we're in the truck."
I led her out of the roaring glass pavilion, through the double mahogany doors, into the carpeted silence of the main clubhouse foyer. I sat her on a velvet bench beside an indoor marble fountain where the air was ten degrees cooler and smelled of chlorinated water instead of perfume.
I walked to the bar, got a glass of ice water with two lemon wedges, and set it in her hands.
"Drink it slowly," I said.
She nodded, her eyes closed, her forehead resting against her knuckles as she breathed through her nose.
I reached down, took the heavy walnut gift box from the carpet beside her feet, and turned back toward the glass doors of the ballroom.
May you like
"Where are you going with that?" she asked, her eyes fluttering open, clouded with exhaustion.
"Daniel needs his carving set, Grandma," I said, my voice smooth, quiet, and completely devoid of inflection. "He’s about to cut the cake."
