“Brilliantly. They’ve sold out every venue. Next year it’s stadiums. I’m not sure when we’ll fit in the wedding, but fit it in we will.”
Her sister met Toby Robinson at a star-studded foundation event in New York City the previous year. After a whirlwind romance that led to pictures in the society pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times (coverage suitable for the socialite philanthropist stepdaughter of a former senator), and the glossy pages of People, Hello!, and US Weekly (dating tattooed, dreadlocked lead singer and songwriter for an English band rooted in the visceral music found in the world’s slums) Toby proposed onstage at Wembley Stadium as they closed out the final concert of last year’s tour. The video went viral before the final encore. The publicity for the foundation went a long way toward soothing their mother’s horror that her older daughter, a graduate of Miss Porter’s, Stanford, and Yale who had the ear of powerful people on five continents, was marrying a rock star who hadn’t finished high school.
“Have you set a date yet?”
“If only it were that easy,” Freddie said, uncharacteristically wistful. “I mentioned to Mother I’d love to have a small ceremony in his parents’ garden in Stoke-on-Trent. It’s a gorgeous garden, full of roses, enclosed by this stone wall built from rocks his ancestors took from the fields hundreds of years ago. Just us, family, a judge. Cake and champers. And the graves of the plague victims from 1666.”
“You can’t exactly uninvite the plague victims,” Alana said. “And what does Mother think of that?”
“Having lost the opportunity to barter me off to an eligible up-and-coming politician, Mother sees the wedding invitations as legal tender. The last time we talked, she’d pared her list down to six hundred and forty-three.”
“Six hundred guests?”
“On our side, Lannie. On our side alone.”
“Does Toby know six hundred people?” she asked, envisioning a balanced ceremony, twelve hundred white chairs aligned in rows, Freddie’s side crammed to overflowing, Toby’s side populated by his parents, his sisters, the other band members/wives/children, and Toby’s personal assistant.
“By a conservative estimate, he knows six thousand people, but only considers about twenty of them close enough to invite to our wedding.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I. Did you call me for a reason?”
“I went to the town hall meeting last night.”
“You hate politics. You also hate meetings, crowds, and potentially contentious situations. This is why you’re my research guru, and I do the meetings.”
“The library budget was on the agenda.”
“Don’t tell me they cut it. Please do not slash the last remaining hope I have for the future of our country before I have another pot of coffee.”
“Actually,” Alana said, “they asked me to come up with a proposal for updating the library. I mean, I know how much the library means to the community, but they asked me to do the proposal.”
“And why wouldn’t they? You are the research librarian for the Wentworth Foundation.”
“It’s not research. It’s a proposal and a presentation.”
“To all eighteen residents of Walkers Ford, South Dakota?”
Alana rolled her eyes. “Nineteen. Lisa Sturdyvent had her baby last week. Michael Christopher. Seven pounds, eleven ounces. Mother and baby both healthy.”
“Well, then. A buzzing metropolis.”
“Don’t make fun of this, Freddie. This matters here. I don’t want to mess it up.”
“I’m sorry, Lannie,” she said, her voice gentling. “What do you need?”
“I can do the research. It’s the proposal I’ve never done.”
“It’s simple. Do the research. That part you know. Then go through the research, identify the best solution, then anticipate objections, and counter those in the proposal. A good position paper is as much persuasive as it is factual. Surely you’ve read the position papers we craft after you obtain thousands of pages of data for us.”
“Of course,” Alana said, stung. “I’ve just never written one.”
“I’ll send you some of the shorter ones from the foundation’s infancy, when we weren’t getting invited to sit at the big-boy table. Oh, this is brilliant!” Freddie had picked up Toby’s slang, but stopped short of imitating his accent. “This will be good training for you. Then when you get back you won’t have any reason to object to taking on a larger role in the foundation.”