She Raised Us on Our Dead Parents' Settlement, So We Crashed Her Gala novel · Chapter 1 of 40
Chapter 1: The Hope Harbor Gala
Dell asks the matron into a live microphone where her dead father's money went, and her sister hands her a trespass notice.
I was carrying forty glasses of champagne on a tray when Bernadette Gorski said my name into a microphone.
"And there is someone in this room tonight I want to recognize," she said. "Delphine Mazur."
I had not heard anyone say Delphine in eleven years.
I stopped in the middle of the ballroom floor, between table nine and the dessert cart.
Four hundred people in gowns and tuxedos turned to look at a woman in a black vest and a white shirt.
The Hope Harbor Gala was the biggest night of the year in Port Ansel, Ohio.
It was held in the yacht club, with the lake behind the windows.
I had taken the shift at the last minute from another server, because the catering company needed bodies and I needed the money.
I had not known it was her gala until I saw the banner.
Bernadette stood on the dais in a navy blazer with a gold medal of Saint Brendan on a chain at her throat.
Her silver hair was cut exactly as it had been when I was twelve.
She smiled at me down the whole length of the room.
"Delphine was one of my girls at St."
"Brendan's," she told the donors. "She struggled with honesty, God bless her, and we had to let her go."
"But we never stopped praying for her. Look how far she's come! Give her a hand."
They gave me a hand.
Four hundred people applauded a woman who had been put on a bus to Cleveland at seventeen.
I had left with a trash bag of clothes and sixty dollars a boy gave me.
I felt my face go hot, then cold.
I could set the tray down and walk out through the kitchen.
That was what they expected, and it was what she had trained me to do.
I put the tray on table nine instead.
A man in a dinner jacket reached for a glass automatically.
I walked straight to the foot of the dais, where a stand held a spare microphone for the auction.
I took it.
"Mrs. Gorski," I said.
My voice came out of the speakers a half second late, and flat.
The room went quiet in sections, table by table.
"I'm glad you remember me. I remember you."
I pointed the mic at the banner behind her. "Your Foundation says it has raised ninety-one thousand dollars tonight for girls in care."
"Delphine, dear..."
"So I have a question for the donors. Do you know what St. Brendan's billed for me when I was twelve?"
Her smile did not move.
"Forty-eight thousand dollars a year," I said. "Four thousand a month, paid from the settlement my father's death earned me."
"I know because I pulled the court docket last week."
Somebody at table four put down a fork.
"I ate canned beans and ramen out of a shared pot. My bed was a cot."
"The winter I was twelve, we had two blankets between three girls."
"That's enough," Bernadette said, softly, still smiling for the room.
"The cost of a girl at St. Brendan's was nine hundred dollars a month. You billed four thousand."
"I would like you to tell everyone where the other thirty-one hundred went."
For a second, nobody in the room breathed in or out.
Then a woman near the back said, loudly, "Is that true?"
And a man said, "Somebody get the girl off the floor."
Two men from the yacht club's security came up behind me.
One took my elbow.
I did not pull away, because I was not finished.
"Her name is Bernadette Gorski," I said. "Ask her about the Gorski Wing. Ask her who paid for it."
The mic was taken out of my hand, gently.
The security man's voice was close to my ear, tired and kind. "Miss, you need to come with me. Mrs. Gorski has asked."
Bernadette stepped down from the dais.
She crossed the floor in her good shoes, calm, and stopped in front of me, close enough that I smelled her lily perfume.
It was the same one.
For one second I was twelve years old, standing in a hallway.
"You always did make a scene when you were frightened," she said, very quietly, so the microphones would not carry it. "Go home, Delphine."
"Before I read the report to the room."
I turned my head.
A woman had come up beside her out of the crowd.
She wore a grey suit a size too big and round glasses, her light-brown hair in a neat bun.
She was holding a folded piece of paper.
She did not look at my face.
I had not seen her in eleven years, and I knew the exact set of her shoulders anyway.
"Ms. Mazur," she said, in a voice I had to strain to recognize. "This is a notice from the Foundation's counsel."
"You are no longer permitted on the premises."
She held out the paper.
At the bottom, in the witness line, was a signature in a small, careful hand.
Sabina Lipinski.
"Sabi?" I said.
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