“Rory could take her. If she remembers. Or maybe I could do it. I do have this thing on that day, though.” Hopefully the game would conflict with my Tinsley meeting, and I could back out of my offer. Because I did not want to do carpool for Charlotte and her friends. I’d discovered that transporting a bunch of four-year-olds was like moving multiple serial killers in between prisons.
“You can’t take her,” she scoffed. “They banned you from all of her games because of how you screamed at that referee. He will personally throw you out again if he sees you there.”
“But how would he recognize me, given that he’s completely blind?”
Aubrey sighed. “They’re four-year-olds. They’re not playing for the World Cup. Let me just send out a couple of texts and see if someone else can drive.”
So I tended to get a tad bit excited when it came to sports. Especially sports that my family members were participating in.
“Okay, Elia’s mom said she would do it. Come into the kitchen. I’ve got you all set up in there.”
By “all set up” she apparently meant she’d raided a stationery store Viking-style and arranged the entire inventory on the table. “What’s all this?” I asked.
“It’s what we need for the reunion. Here’s everything that needs to get done.” She handed me a list, and it was seriously longer than the Bible.
“Classmate search, website, mailings, invitations, T-shirts, venue, decorations, theme, awards, slideshows, videographer, photographer, DJ ...” And there was more. It kept going. “I repeat, what is all this?”
“The stuff I’m taking care of for the reunion.” She was in her fridge, taking out juice boxes and putting them in a diaper bag on the counter.
“You said you wereonthe planning committee. Not that you were theentireplanning committee. Don’t you have minions to do your bidding?”
“Yes. I have you.”
So not what I had signed up for.
Once she added some fruit snacks and organic animal crackers to the bag, she came over to grab the list from me. “Don’t try to eat the elephant all at once. Just take one bite at a time. I want you to start with the classmate search. We need to find mailing addresses for all the members of my class. Everything here on the table is color-coded and organized for the different stages of the reunion. The search pile is in the red folder.”
She handed it to me, and it had a list of names and potential phone numbers to try.
“You do realize they medicate people with this level of organization, right?” I asked. “And why mailing addresses? Have you heard of this thing called evites? Or computers?”
“I’m not doing anything as tacky as an electronic invitation. These will be real embossed invitations on a heavy ecru-colored cardstock. Because this is going to be the best ten-year reunion Westlake has ever seen, and it all starts with the invite.”
I sat down in the chair, already feeling defeated. There were hundreds of names on this list. “Why do you care what people who haven’t seen you in ten years think of you or this reunion?”
She was rearranging the contents of the bag. My guess was she was color-coding and organizing it, too. “I don’t care what they think. It’s just important to me.”
“That’s the definition of caring.”
“Whatever, Reunion Monkey. Start making phone calls.”
It occurred to me that the only reason my sister would be packing a bag was if she was going somewhere. “You’re leaving me with all this? Where are you going?”
“Justin and I are going to have dinner in the city tonight. Where we will drink grown-up drinks and eat grown-up food and pretend we’re still interesting adults who know how to make actual conversation with each other.”
Justin and Aubrey had met in law school, married immediately after graduation, both joined my father’s law firm, and gotten pregnant with Charlotte right away. Then they’d bought this home to be near our parents. It was all either a sweet ode to family bonding or a warning for a relationship that was bordering on codependency.
“What about the kids? Who’s going to watch them?” I hoped the answer wasn’t me. Much as I loved my niece and nephew, they were like mini emotional terrorists ready to take out themselves and everyone around them in order to get their way.
“Mom and Dad are going to take them for the evening. I’m just going to drop them by their house, and then I’ll be on my way. And I wouldn’t leave you alone with all this. I got a volunteer who wants to help out.”
As if on cue, the doorbell rang.
“And there he is now,” she said.
“He? You’re going to leave me alone in your house with a strange man?”
“Oh,” Aubrey said with a wicked gleam in her eye that suddenly made me very, very afraid, “he’s no stranger.”