Bitter Cake

I got to the Baker place at ten in the morning, which was early even for me, but the bride's mother had insisted the house needed to be spotless before the photographer showed up, and I've learned over fifteen years in this business that you don't argue with the mother of the bride, you just show up early and bill accordingly. So there I was, hauling my bucket and my bags of rags up a long driveway in the late June heat, already sweating through my shirt, and the whole backyard was still being built, white tents going up, string lights dangling from the deck rail like laundry line, and a catering crew I'd worked with before was unloading chafing pans from a van.

And that's when I saw him.

Richard Baker, forty-two years old, standing across the lawn in a pale blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up, helping two guys wrestle a folding table into place. My ex. My ex from two years ago, the one I dumped after eighteen months of dating that started great and ended with me throwing a candlestick at the wall and him saying something about my mother that I still hadn't forgiven. He hadn't seen me yet. I stood there by the side gate with my bucket in my hand and my jaw went tight all on its own, the way it does when the dentist hits a nerve, and I thought, well, of course. Of course he's here. His brother Josh is the groom, so he'd be here, and I'd known that when I took the job, and I'd told myself it wouldn't matter because I'm a professional and the guy is just a person, just some person I used to cook dinner for.

So anyway, I went to work.

The house was a nice one, five bedrooms, and I spent three hours on the upstairs bathrooms while somebody's playlist thumped through the floorboards and the caterers started arranging the buffet tables out on the lawn. I scrubbed toilets and wiped baseboards and did not think about Richard Baker even once, which took real effort, and I'm proud of that. Around two o'clock I came down for a water break and took my bottle out to the back deck where the hired staff keep their coolers, and that's when the bride found me.

"Akari? Akari Gavin?" Lynette Stockman came across the grass in her robes, basically, this flowing white getting-ready robe with BRIDE in rhinestones across the back, and her makeup was already done and she looked gorgeous and nervous. "Oh my god, it is you! I thought that was you on the schedule."

"Hey, Lynette." I set my water down and let her hug me, which surprised me a little, because we'd only worked together for a few months at the Marriott five years ago and I figured she'd forgotten me. "Congratulations. You look beautiful."

"Thank you, thank you. God, it's so good to see a friendly face today, everyone's been driving me insane." She laughed and fanned herself with a folded program. "You're doing the whole cleanup, right? Because my mother hired you and I told her, I said, Akari is the best, she used to cover my shifts and never complained once."

"Well, I complained plenty, I just did it quietly," I said, and she laughed again.

Josh Baker came up behind her then, the groom, thirty-nine, in his tux pants and a white dress shirt with no jacket, holding two glasses of champagne. He looked like a taller, calmer version of Richard, which was somehow worse. "So this is the famous Akari," he said, handing Lynette her glass. "Lynne talks about the Marriott days like they were summer camp. Richard said you used to cater his office parties, back in the day."

And there it was, dropped into my lap like a hot pan with no mitt. "Back in the day," I said. "Yeah, once or twice."

"He still talks about that crab dip," Josh said, easy, cheerful, completely unaware that he'd just handed me a live grenade, and Lynette elbowed him and said Joshua, and I smiled the smile I use for tipsy wedding guests and picked up my water bottle and said I needed to get back to it.

* * *

By five o'clock the ceremony was done, out there under the big tent, and I heard the applause through the kitchen window while I was scrubbing wine off the counter where somebody had already spilled, before the reception even started, which tells you everything about how this evening was going to go. The guests migrated to the lawn, the band set up, the catering tent filled with steam and shouting and the smell of, well, dinner, and I moved through the house turning on porch lights and stocking paper towels in every bathroom because at a wedding the paper towels disappear like cigarettes at a rehab.

The trash bins were around the side of the house, past the catering tent, four big black wheeled cans lined up against the fence, and I was back there with a roll of liners getting them ready when I heard footsteps on the gravel and knew before I turned around.

I turned around anyway.

Richard stood there holding a trash bag in one hand, the sleeves of that pale blue shirt still rolled, his tie gone, top two buttons open, and he looked good, which annoyed me more than anything else he could have done. He looked at my face and then at the name tag on my shirt, which I wasn't even wearing, so really just at my shirt, and his whole expression went flat.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said. "Mom of the bride hired you? Or did you just show up? Because I honestly can't tell anymore whether the universe hates me or you've got a plan."

"Nice to see you too, Richard." I kept threading the liner into the bin, because I'm not going to stop working just because a man I used to love is standing four feet away insulting me. "Josh mentioned you. Crab dip. Sweet that you remember."

"Don't do that." He dropped the trash bag into the can beside me, harder than he needed to. "Do not act like this is normal. You took a job at my brother's wedding, Akari. My brother's. What was the thinking there, exactly? You just needed a little weekend project?"

"The thinking was that it's a paycheck and a client I've worked with before, which is more thought than you've ever put into anything." I yanked the liner up over the rim. "You want to know something funny? I knew you'd be here, I just told myself it wouldn't matter. You're not the center of my world, Richard. You haven't been for two years."

He laughed, this short, ugly laugh I remembered, and stepped closer, close enough that I could see the sweat at his hairline. "You're here to make me uncomfortable. That's everything. You found out whose wedding it was and you took the job to get in my head, and now you're going to spend the whole night drifting past me with your little bucket, and everybody's going to wonder why the cleaning lady keeps staring at the groom's brother."

"Staring." I stood up straight then, because okay, that was rich. "Richard, you stared at me for a solid hour during setup. I was wiping down the buffet tables at noon and you were across the lawn gluing your eyes to me like I owed you money. Josh saw you. The caterers saw you. Your mother asked me if we knew each other, and I had to lie to your mother at your brother's wedding, so let's skip the part where I'm the problem here."

"I was not staring."

"You were staring so hard that a caterer asked me if I needed her to call somebody."

He opened his mouth, closed it, and looked out at the lawn where the string lights had just come on, all these little warm bulbs swinging in the breeze, and for a second he looked less angry and more like a man doing math he didn't like. "Fine," he said, finally. "Fine. Then we just stay out of each other's way. You do your bins and your toilets, I'll do my best man speech, and by midnight this is over and we never have to see each other again."

"That's been my plan since ten this morning," I said, "so thanks for catching up."

I turned back to the bins, expecting footsteps going the other way, and instead he just stood there a second longer, close enough that I could hear him breathing, and then he said, quiet, almost like he didn't mean to say it out loud, "You look good, Akari. Which is a hell of a thing to be mad about."

And then he was gone, around the corner of the tent, before I could think of a single thing to say back, which was probably the point. I stood there with a trash liner in my hands and my heart doing something I refused to name, and out on the lawn the band started up their first song, and I got back to work, because that's what I do, that's what I'm good at, and because the alternative was standing behind a trash can crying at my ex-brother-almost-in-law's wedding, and I have more pride than that.

Mostly.

* * *

By nine o'clock the toasts were underway under the big tent, and I was hiding in the catering tent refolding tablecloths that did not need refolding. Lynette had found me again earlier, grabbed my hands, and said, "Drinks later, I mean it, Marriott rules," and then got pulled away by a photographer, which was fine, because I didn't have time for drinks later, I had time for forty trash bags and a kitchen that was going to look like a bomb went off in it by the time the cake came out.

So there I was, folding, when the speeches started and the whole tent went quiet except for Josh's voice going wobbly over the microphone. I peeked through the flap. He was talking about Lynette, how he knew the second week he knew her, and Lynette was crying already and it wasn't even the good part, and honestly it was sweet, and I hated that it was sweet, because it made my chest do a thing.

And then Richard took the microphone.

Of course he did. He was the best man. He squared his shoulders and made a joke about Josh's hair in college that got a big laugh, and then he got sincere, and his voice did this low warm thing it does, the thing I used to fall asleep listening to, and I stood there in the dark half of the tent holding a tablecloth like an idiot.

That's when I decided to leave. Not dramatically, nothing like that, I just had actual work, there was a whole kitchen through the back door of the house that nobody had touched since the appetizers went out, and I knew from fifteen years of doing this that if I didn't get ahead of it now I'd be scraping frosting off cabinets at two in the morning. So I picked up a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of clean glasses and slipped out the side flap and cut across the grass toward the house, along the edge of the dance floor where the lights didn't reach quite so well.

Richard caught me at the corner of the house.

"Leaving during my speech?" He fell into step beside me, hands in his pockets, like we were just two people walking somewhere. "That's a little rude, don't you think? Everybody else clapped."

"Everybody else isn't working. Move, Richard, I've got a pitcher."

"You always had a pitcher. You always had a bucket or a rag or a schedule." He moved in front of me, actually stepped sideways into my path, and stopped. "One minute. Just give me one minute of basic human conversation, since apparently that's too much to ask from the woman I spent eighteen months with."

"You had your conversation behind the trash cans. It went great. Very mature, lots of points made." I tried to step around him and he shifted, and the toe of my shoe caught the leg of a folding chair somebody had left out on the grass, and I did that thing where you lurch and everything in your hands goes up in the air in slow motion while your brain screams no.

The pitcher did not go up in the air. The pitcher went forward, straight into Richard's chest, half a gallon of lemonade, ice and all, and then the glasses landed around his feet like dropped china at a cartoon wedding.

For a second neither of us said anything. The band played