Cook's Big Day

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

Wednesday, 10 p.m. – 2 days, 17 hours before the wedding

“Oh, no!” Angie collapsed onto the sofa in the living room of her penthouse apartment high atop San Francisco's Russian Hill. A tragedy had struck.

She had spent the day packing the apartment for her big move across town to the home she would share with her fiancé, Homicide Inspector Paavo Smith, and had even turned down seeing Paavo that evening because she felt too hot, sweaty, and dusty. How had she accumulated so much junk? She had a pile of donations for St. Vincent de Paul to pick up, and a much larger pile of boxes of things to take with her.

But when she pulled a pale green sweater from the closet and put it in the donation bag, deciding she never did like the color, thoughts of her wedding washed over her and she realized that something was less than perfect.

That, more than weariness, caused her collapse.

How could anything so heinous happen? She had spent the last five months meticulously planning every exciting, joy-filled detail of her Big Day, such as when to do her hair and make-up; when to put on her wedding dress; what to use to decorate the pews in the church; what to use to decorate the car she and Paavo as well as her family would ride in; how to decorate party favors for the guests; the size of candles on the tables; even the timing of her departure with her husband—husband, such a beautiful word!—to their tower suite at the Fairmont Hotel where they would spend the night before leaving on their Hawaiian honeymoon.

She had thought about and planned her wedding day for so long that the possibility of anything being less than perfect was simply unacceptable. She had lain awake at night going over lists. She had lists of everything she needed to do, plus what everyone else involved with her Big Day needed to do. She even had lists of lists.

The difficulty was that not only did she want everything to be perfect but also different. As part of a large Italian family, she'd been to many, many weddings. Plus, all four of her older sisters had had their own “special” weddings. She didn’t want just another run-of-the-mill wedding that would blend into the stew of family get-togethers. Her wedding day, somehow, needed to stand out from the crowd.

The wedding ceremony itself would hold no surprises. It would take place in the church her family attended when she was growing up—the church where her parents and sisters had gotten married, Saints Peter and Paul, in San Francisco's North Beach district.

That meant she had to concentrate on the reception.

A monumental struggle ensued to get the owner of La Belle Maison to add her to his reception calendar in something less than the sixteen months most people had to wait. Finally, desperate, she had called her cousin Richie, who seemed to know his way around the city and its movers-and-shakers better than anyone else she could think of. True to form, Richie had been friends with the owner, John Lodano, from way back. About a week after talking to him, Richie was able to get her onto La Belle Maison’s schedule in only four months. It cost her father a bit extra, actually, quite a bit extra, and it meant everything else needed to be speeded up, but it was worth it. She was able to work out a time for the ceremony with the church, and then she had to deal with her caterer, the great Chef Maurice, owner of Wholly Matrimony Caterers and renowned for his fabulous wedding feasts. For a generous bonus, she had gotten him not only to prepare Saturday’s sit-down reception dinner, but Friday night’s rehearsal dinner as well.

And that was where the problem came in.

She had arranged for the rehearsal dinner to be held on a small cruise ship that would sail around the bay while Chef Maurice served a delicious Italian meal. The wedding dinner wouldn't be Italian, but French, so she decided the rehearsal should be a nod to her family's ethnic heritage. She would also include Finnish desserts, a lingonberry pie and cloudberry mousse, in honor of Aulis Kokkonen, the man Paavo called his “step-father,” who had raised Paavo after his mother had been forced to leave him. It wasn’t until Paavo was an adult that he discovered the complete circumstances that caused him to end up with Aulis Kokkonen, and he appreciated the elderly Finnish man even more after learning the whole story and the dangers involved.

Chef Maurice had assured her the rehearsal dinner would be perfect. But now, she realized, the table setting was not.

She was tempted to call her sisters about the tragic lapse she had just discovered. Her four sisters had stepped in as her “wedding planners” when she couldn't find any professional planner who was able to meet her strict requirements. But now, they refused to discuss her wedding arrangements any longer. They told her in no uncertain terms that everything was going to run well.

“Well?” she had repeated. “Well? Since when is 'well' good enough?” Not in her book.

That was when they stopped answering her phone calls or text messages. She even posted messages to them on f*******:, but they also ignored those. She suspected they might even be laughing about her perfectionism. The nerve.

What should she do? The green sweater had reminded her that she had ordered little thank-you boxes of perfume for her bridesmaids and cologne for the groomsmen, and she planned to give them out during the Friday night rehearsal dinner. But the boxes would be wrapped in lime-green paper and tied with lime-green bows rather than the white paper and ribbon as she had originally thought. That meant she didn't want the caterer to use the lemon-yellow napkins she had chosen, but preferred that he use a white ones. She didn’t want her table setting to look like an advertisement for citrus fruit.

Okay, even she had to admit that the color of gift wrap clashing with the color of table napkins was small, but she had wanted everything to be perfect. The thought of the imperfect table setting was like a toothache.

Since her sisters were ignoring her, she decided to take matters into her own hands and put in a call to Wholly Matrimony. No one answered, as expected that time of night.

She left a message. “This is Angie Amalfi. Something very important has come up regarding Friday night's dinner. Please call me as soon as possible.” But then, before she hung up, she remembered her sisters saying not only would they no longer take any calls from her, they had told everyone else involved in putting on the wedding not to as well. What if Chef Maurice and his staff wouldn’t answer her message? How vile was that?

“Or better yet”—the more she thought about her sisters telling the chef not to talk to her, the angrier she got—“I'll be there in the morning.”