Every Other Saturday by M.J. Pullen Page A

the hall and headed into her bedroom. Downstairs, she heard the doorbell ring and the sound of Elizabeth and Dave’s voices. His first time ever setting foot in her house, and five minutes later he was playing host. The whole setup was surreal. She shuffled to the bathroom to reapply some lipstick and hyperventilate a little.
    # # #
    “So he’s going out with someone tonight?” Caroline handed Julia a centerpiece filled with flowers, and then called out to a man in an impeccable black chef’s uniform, just a shade darker than his skin, carrying an enormous silver bowl of ice. “No, Louie, not there. Put that with the punchbowl in the garden.”
    “It’s going to rain,” Lusala “Louie” Okeke, Caroline’s indispensable second-in command, said definitively as he turned to her with raised brows.
    “How much?” Caroline said with a smirk Julia remembered well from their childhood. She looked down again to scan her ever-present clipboard. “We’re going to need the four-tier cupcake stand. Well?”
    “Twenty dollars,” Louie said.
    “You’re on. And you close out the Bonner wedding for me next weekend.”
    “What? No way. That’s worth way more than twenty dollars.”
    “Fine,” Caroline said. “Twenty bucks. Be dull.”
    Louie gave Caroline a long look, one eyebrow raised. “Was she always like this?” he asked Julia.
    “Worse,” Julia said. “There was pinching involved when we were kids.”
    He gave an exaggerated shudder and carried his ice bowl back in the other direction. “How would you survive without him?” Julia asked her sister.
    “Bite your tongue. I don’t like to think that question, much less ask it out loud. Every couple of years, he threatens to go out on his own and I have to give him a raise. He’s seriously overpaid.”
    “He is not .” Julia knew her sister well enough to know that whatever Caroline paid her right-hand man couldn’t possibly be enough.
    Caroline ignored her. “So this Dave guy, he’s starting the whole Jewish Date thing tonight?”
    “J-Date. Yeah, he has his first date tonight. It’s sort of ridiculous.”
    “Why ridiculous? No, see, spread them out. Like this. The cupcakes will sit in the middle on the little sticks. We’ll put them out when the ceremony starts so they don’t dry out. So, you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
    “The cupcakes?”
    “The dating thing. Dave Whatshisname. From the Cave.”
    “Bernstein. Come on, you know who he is.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Ben reads his blog. Fair warning, he tried to get me to get you to get an autograph for him.”
    “An autograph? From Dave Bernstein?”
    “I know. Men are idiots. But, his blog is kind of a big deal.”
    Julia rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Any woman who would go out with him under these circumstances is an idiot, too.”
    “He’s cute, though, right?”
    Julia focused on getting the wooden skewers perfectly even on the centerpiece she was arranging, remembering the scent of Dave’s aftershave or whatever it was, and the crisp lines of his purple shirt. “I guess. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
    “What’s he…” Caroline started, but was interrupted by one of the waitresses who had a pantyhose emergency, and the two of them raced off to the bathrooms, leaving Julia to the flowers and her thoughts.
    Julia moved from table to table, adjusting the centerpieces. She heard the quartet warming up in the background, and thought of her wedding to Adam. Because they had means, and truthfully, cared far more than Julia or her family, Adam’s parents had been the driving force of the event. They’d chosen the pricey hotel ballroom and the rabbi and the kosher caterer, and even convinced Julia to cover her tattoos during the ceremony. The only thing she’d asked for, through all the plans and the ever-expanding guest list of people she didn’t know, was to walk down the aisle while a friend’s punk band played “Lover’s Rock” by the Clash.
    To his credit, Adam had