I kind of miss Iris; it hits me around four o’clock.
“Jade?” she’d screech, “It’s teatime!” Every single afternoon. That first day I thought I’d have to sit like a princess with a crisp linen napkin draped over my knee and sip tea with my pinkie out; we’d have crumpets and an etiquette lesson in her proper, sunny, blue and white living room that always had fresh flowers delivered from the flower elves.
Nope. Teatime meant the bar was open; Iris liked her martinis. Terence would enter the parlor, his flip-flops clapping on the marble floor, and weave his way behind the bar wafting Maui-Wowie. He wore board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt that worked with his long hair and surfer tan. Our butler. Iris loved him.
Terence made the perfect martini. He mixed three items, placed exactly five ice cubes in a silver martini shaker (clink, clink, clink, clink, clink), slowly stirred with a glass rod, strained the liquid into a chilled martini glass, added three olives on a glass toothpick, and presented a frosty martini glass to Iris on a fancy silver tray. She winked at him every time.
That’s when Iris started with the stories. I knew that no one ever believed her stories; they were all unbelievable.
I was her companion; since she was ninety-something, my job meant I drove her everywhere, waited while she had her hair done, visited with friends, or went to her knitting group. I never saw Terence except at cocktail time. He spent his days surfing. Nice job.
She let me be, getting that I didn’t want to talk about myself. Iris laughed a lot, which made her blue eyes sparkle. I began tea time with beer, then Iris suggested a Dubonnet, then I tried the martini. I stuck with the Dubonnet, sweet and calming.
Trickster Iris hid keys from her friend Helen, an old lady who didn’t like anybody except Iris, and had no use for me. But Iris defended Helen with a ferocity I had never seen before. I wished I had a friend like that. Iris died in her sleep a while ago, quietly and without drama. I did not discover her body, her friend Jen Conrad did, and that was good with me.
When I learned of her death, I couldn’t catch my breath. I’m not a crier–that’s for the weak. But as it sunk in, my heart got heavy and I had a hard time breathing. It hurt.
Her friend Helen had a crooked back and a huge hair on her upper lip. I swear that thing moved on its own. She seemed pissed with the world; bored, unhappy, or friendless. She wore cotton dresses of dainty prints with lace collars, like a schoolmarm from the fifties. Helen barely spoke to me and showed me she didn’t approve of me at all in different ways. Iris kept her under control by just being . . . well . . . Iris; she told me I must accept Helen for what she is, and to consider her bark worse than her bite. Iris never took matters too seriously. Everything is temporary, dear.
Iris’s funeral was done to the instructions left with the funeral director. She was very precise in that bagpipes would accompany her white coffin up and back down the aisle in the church. The pallbearers all looked alike: tall, dark and handsome. They wore matching suits and ties, and you couldn’t tell one from the other. They turned out to be Chippendale dancers.
Friends of Iris’s laughed. I didn’t see the humor, and it pissed me off.
There were few tears; the service felt like open mic night at a comedy club. Everyone trooped over to Heritage Art Park, a community of old houses now coming together as an art colony, for her Celebration of Life right after the church service.
After that, a small crowd followed us back to the manse for a private party. This event came together at Iris’s direction once again, a private affair just for about a hundred of her closest friends. Iris’s parties were the stuff of legend, and I guess this one topped them all.
I entered the manse for the last time. My bag was packed and I felt so heavy, so lost. A familiar feeling.
The house smelled like a garden shop and looked worse with the flowers brought over from Heritage Park. Caterers had set up bars around the compound and waitstaff skittered everywhere, carrying silver trays. I went up to what had been my room, cleaned out the bathroom, and packed last-minute items.
An impulse hit me to throw on Iris’s diamond tiara. I knew she would love the thought, and I didn’t care if people considered it disrespectful. It was my way of bringing Iris to her own party.
I crept to her bedroom and opened the door, inhaling her perfume and her energy. The bed where she had died, crisp and made up, looked normal. Fresh flowers sat on the night stand as usual. I made my way over to the closet and opened the drawer I knew held the tiara. Iris never locked anything for security; to her they were just things. According to her, it’s why God made insurance brokers. Her perfume filled the air; I touched some of her clothes as I passed them, then pulled back my hand. This was all too sentimental. I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip.
It was over.
I balanced the tiara on my head, holding my breath. I turned to see myself in a mirror and in the reflection spied a box about three feet tall and two feet wide plopped in the corner. Covered in wallpaper that matched the walls of the closet, it was practically invisible. I slowly crept over to the box, threw back the flaps and took a peek: a mound of scrapbooks, boxes, pictures, and papers sat on top of each other as though they had been tossed in. I quickly folded the top back over and left.
None of my bidness.
My heart squished when I passed the yellow room and saw the ratty old backpack, filled with the few things I had brought with me a year ago, waiting beside the dresser. Not wanted any more. Time to move.
Story of my life.
Helen frowned at me so deeply when I appeared in the living room I thought that hair on her upper lip might cut her. “How dare you?” She
hissed. “Take that off.” Helen and I had a terse relationship; she tolerated me because Iris had taken me in, but clearly loathed me; now she would be rid of me and wanted me to know my place.
“Is that the tiara Iris wore to Buckingham Palace, or the one she wore to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball?” Jen Conrad asked with a wink. Her BFF Renee snorted and people around us laughed. I smirked at Helen and moved on.
Iris’s tales, many and impressive, were local lore. She was a shameless name dropper of people she couldn’t possibly have known. Not one person made fun of her or mocked her stories; they were for entertainment purposes only.
Helen slunk over to the other side of the room and glared at me. Jen grabbed my arm and asked if I was okay. I had to nod, unable to speak. She hugged me and moved away. Jen was the one person I felt comfortable with; a friend of Iris’s, a bit younger, she was the owner of one of the retail shops at Heritage Park. Iris had taken me to her shop every Tuesday to learn to knit and get to know the group that had formed there, including Helen.
The band played swing music from the forties, and guests indulged in food and alcohol and stories. Some people left early; an elegant party in the late afternoon was not their idea of paying respect to the dead.
They must not have known Iris very well.
Iris always said you knew a party was a success if it showed up in the papers. Well, this party would be in all of them, thanks to Robert Graham, the social writer for all the reputable papers in town. Wearing a dark green velvet jacket, he nodded and waved to me in passing and kept chatting with others in the room. Young, with light blond hair, Iris called him “Our Man About Town.” She gave him lots of scoops and inside information, and she was not above planting a rumor from time to time just to stir things up. I watched a few of her quiet missions take place when she thought someone needed a lesson. I don’t think I’m wrong to say she enjoyed making people think about how they treated others, but she was no better.
By five o’clock the last partiers were out the door and I began to feel like a tire going flat. An unbelievable urge to throw myself on the floor and have a two-year-old tantrum took over me, but Helen was still there, sharp eyed and bitchy. She strode over to me in her orthopedic shoes and put out her hand.
“What.”
“The tiara. Give it to me.” That damn hair was shaking.
“No. I’ll put it back. I’m not stealing it.”
“Give. It. To. Me.”
“No.” I thought Helen would have a heart attack. I kind of enjoyed the power of it.
“Jade, can I talk to you a minute?” Iris’s attorney Carl Henshaw said, thankfully interrupting. In his early thirties, short, soft and bald, I had him pegged as a drone, a loser, a corporate sellout. He and I had met several times and had what Iris called a nodding acquaintance.
Uh-oh.
