The rosé has taken Brooke’s good sense hostage. She blurts out, “And Gigi is your best friend from the internet.”
There’s a beat of silence and Brooke chastises herself. She needs to edit her words before she speaks.
Gigi laughs. “That makes me sound rather suspect.”
Hollis says, “Let me show you to your room. Dinner is just about ready.” She holds out a hand and Gigi grasps it, and the two of them head down the hall. From behind, it looks as though they’ve known each other all their lives.
Brooke whispers to Tatum and Dru-Ann, “She seems nice!”
“Sure,” Dru-Ann says. “But who is she?” She turns to Tatum. “Did Hollis tell you anything about her?”
Tatum blinks at her.
Dru-Ann says, “Are you really going to be like that?”
Brooke looks at the two women. “I guess I didn’t realize you two knew each other before,” Brooke says. “When did you meet?”
“Hollis’s wedding,” Tatum and Dru-Ann say together.
“Oh,” Brooke says. She didn’t know Hollis back then. She met Hollis when they were both pregnant. “What was the wedding like?” Brooke asks.
Neither Tatum nor Dru-Ann responds; the question just hangs there like a fart. It’s a relief when Hollis and Gigi reappear and Hollis shepherds everyone out to the deck for dinner.
17. Fake It to Make It
Caroline pans around the dinner table. For Hollis’s fans, this is the money shot.
Hollis is serving her cilantro-and-lime-marinated swordfish with avocado sauce, a summer squash tart with goat cheese and mint, a large green salad, and homemade baguettes with black pepper butter that, yes, her mother churned herself like a pioneer woman. This will be followed by peach cobbler with a hot sugar crust topped with fresh whipped cream, and tiny squares of Japanese chocolate.
Tatum smears a hunk of baguette with the peppery butter. The swordfish is so perfectly cooked and seasoned that it doesn’t even need the avocado sauce. She thinks, If I don’t have cancer, I’m going to learn to cook like this. I’m going to take classes at the culinary center, I’m going to buy a freaking butter churn. She isn’t going to worry about the money; she’s just going to do it. Do I have cancer? She watches Brooke pile salad on her plate and thinks, If I can count to five without Brooke speaking to fill the silence, that means the tumor is benign. She gets to four, then Brooke takes a breath… but Brooke stops herself and stuffs her piehole with salad. Tatum exhales. She should have called the doctor back right away; this is making her crazy.
Brooke was about to ask how everyone could eat and drink so much without worrying about gaining a hundred pounds. She starts out with only salad and a small piece of fish (no sauce). But the tart is a work of art—the discs of bright yellow squash have been snugged into the tart crust, dolloped with goat cheese, and sprinkled with fresh mint. She’ll have a small piece; it would be rude not to. But she won’t have bread. But then Gigi, who is sitting next to Brooke, hands her the ramekin of butter and says, “This is witchcraft. Let me get you the bread.”
Brooke accepts the butter, thinking, A piece of bread will help soak up the alcohol. Brooke has had a lot to drink. There were the two glasses of rosé with Electra (although Brooke would like to discount these, since she’s trying to pretend she never went for drinks with Electra) and almost an entire bottle of rosé tonight. Gigi is watching her with a kind smile, waiting for her to butter her bread, and what can Brooke do? Does anyone even count calories anymore? There are more fashionable ways to lose weight, like intermittent fasting or going keto, where you eat only steak, eggs, and broccoli rabe. Younger people have stopped caring about weight altogether because to care about being thin is to threaten body positivity. Does Brooke want to threaten body positivity? Well, no, but neither does she love her muffin top. She weighs the decision for a moment, then butters the baguette and pops it in her mouth. It’s so delicious that she doesn’t care if they have to roll her off the island in a wheelbarrow.
Hollis can’t stop staring at Gigi Ling. She’s every bit as lovely as Hollis imagined. I chose well, Hollis thinks. Gigi Ling is better than normal—she’s exceptional. Her accent is like music; Hollis would be happy listening to her read the phone book.
“Tell us about yourself!” Hollis says. She’s had so much to drink that she nearly adds, I know next to nothing about you!
“I’m an Aquarius and I like long walks on the beach,” Gigi says.
Gigi is funny! Hollis thinks.
“I know you’re from Atlanta,” Hollis says. “But where did you get the accent?”
“I was born and raised in Singapore,” Gigi says. “My father is Chinese, my mother was a country girl from Pine Mountain, Georgia. They met because my mother was a flight attendant on the Concorde and my father used to travel back and forth between New York and Paris for business.”
This is a cooler answer than Hollis could have imagined, but something is off…
“I thought your mother was Chinese? Didn’t you say something about her Cantonese recipes?”
Gigi’s mind stalls for a second. Shoot, yes. On the Corkboard, she’d written, My own mum passed away before she could teach me her favorite Cantonese dishes. That was back when Gigi was trying to get Hollis’s attention. She never dreamed she’d someday be sitting in Hollis’s kitchen relaying her origin story.
“I did!” Gigi says. How does she explain her mother’s “Cantonese dishes” when her mother grew up “a country girl” in western Georgia? It’s not impossible that her mother was Chinese American and learned the Cantonese dishes from her own mother or grandmother. Would that be believable? “My mother learned to cook once she moved to Singapore. My father used to say she made the best zongzi in the nation, even better than the private chefs, and there were a lot of those.” Gigi laughs, mostly at the absurdity of this answer. Gigi’s mother not only didn’t cook, she didn’t eat; she subsisted on Tab and cigarettes and was dead of emphysema at forty. But Hollis laughs along, and is anyone else even paying attention? Gigi moves to more solid ground: She attended the Singapore American School, then her parents split; her mother died, and, to honor her, Gigi attended her alma mater, the University of Georgia, for two years. Gigi then got it in her mind that she wanted to fly planes for a living, so she transferred to Embry-Riddle. She’s forty-three years old and has been a pilot with Delta for eighteen years. She most often flies internationally; she keeps her mouth shut about Rome and Madrid, but she mentions that, thanks to her travels, she’s become fluent in Italian and Spanish.
“That’s”—Hollis has a hard time coming up with the right word—“so interesting!” She looks around the table at her other friends’ faces, which are glowing in the candlelight. “Isn’t it?”
Tatum discreetly rubs under her arms. Is it her imagination or does that area feel tender and swollen? Lymph nodes, she thinks.
Dru-Ann is gazing at her bag on the blue silk chaise. What is happening on her phone? Has Nick called? By now he must be regretting what he said about hitting the brakes. He probably stopped by Dru-Ann’s house, and when he realized she wasn’t home, he might have gone to look for her at the Aviary. When she wasn’t there, would he have started to worry?
Brooke thinks, Hollis seems pretty obsessed—and for good reason. Gigi is fabulous!
It doesn’t take long before someone—the woman with the curly hair; Brooke?—asks the question Gigi is dreading.
“So, is there a Mr. Ling?”
“Only my father,” Gigi says.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Brooke asks. “Or… a partner?” She pauses. “I’m sorry, is that too personal?”
Yes, it’s too personal, Gigi thinks. “I was in a relationship,” Gigi says. “But it ended.”
Hollis is glad that Brooke asked. Hollis wanted to know if Gigi was with someone, but she’d never been brave enough to bring the topic up via text.
Gigi laughs. “So now I’m doing that hot-girl thing of ‘decentralizing men’ from my life.”
Is that a hot-girl thing? Dru-Ann wonders. If so, Posey Wofford doesn’t know it.
Tatum has been married to Kyle for thirty-one years. She has always had the goal of making it to sixty years, and she’s only halfway. She knows it’s not a “hot-girl thing” to be so in love with her husband, but she is. Please God, she thinks. Give me more time with Kyle.
“I’d like to decentralize Charlie from my life,” Brooke says.
“Is there something you want to share with the group?” Dru-Ann says. She’s kidding—the last thing any of them wants is to hear some deep, dark confession about the state of Brooke’s marriage. Right? Dru-Ann looks around. Gigi, Tatum, and Hollis are all gazing at Brooke with interest.