Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

Starting late on a midsummer party, she’d expected half her list to have other plans but it turned out people were avoiding big-city crowds this year for fear of terrorist attacks and were delighted at the invitation. The chef was talking about a fourth boar and the temp agency hired to manage the parking said the field usually occupied by the sheep Jeffrey had purchased years ago to qualify for the family-farm deduction would have to be cleared away for the overflow. It all appeared to be coming together. Everything but the fireworks.

No one could be found to do the fireworks. Local governments had the firms all tied up in annual commitments and the big corporate parties had long ago been booked. Her assistant, Lauren, had scoured New England for anyone with a match and an explosive but come up dry. Finally, only days before the event, practically on her knees in the back of a restaurant in the North End, Glenda had managed to pry a nephew off the team for the Boston Pops show for a perfectly ridiculous sum of money and a promise to allow him to indulge his creative side. By the third, the house was overrun by staff, and Glenda retreated to the chaise in her bedroom, where Lauren took all her calls, while she hunkered down with a master guest list and the table charts. Spread on the coffee table in front of her was a map of the dining tent and a basket of little white pin flags onto which Lauren wrote the names of the guests as Glenda called them out.

After resisting her plan as belated, Jeffrey, once he sensed momentum, had in typical fashion reversed course, invited everyone and their accountant, and demanded certain pairings at dinner, leaving her a phone book’s worth of Korean industrialists and German bankers, her knowledge of whose social skills was a virtual black hole.

“What on earth am I supposed to do?” she said, holding up table number twelve, trying not to move her lips and thus crack the teal mud caked to her face. “Put Sarah Finch next to some Brazilian sugarcane magnate? It’s absurd. I try to get a few friends together and this is what he does to me.”

With Jeffrey’s secretary, Martha, weighing in on his behalf via speakerphone, whole armies of financiers advanced across the map from wasteland tables doubled up by the kitchen tent to the very borders of the social center, only to be beaten back again by Glenda’s Sweet Briar classmates and a protective guard of village worthies airlifted into a kind of improvised DMZ ringing the single-digit tables of note. It was close quarters for a while, with Martha insisting the head of Credit Suisse and his wife could under no circumstances be expected to make conversation with the high-school badminton coach (“Mrs. Holland, the bank is paying for this, you realize?”), but with a few tactical retreats, Glenda was able to keep the ranker forces of tedium at bay, setting up Jeffrey at his own table with the absolute necessaries and forcing the remainder back to the periphery. By seven o’clock, once she and Lauren had tidied up the charts and sent them downstairs to the calligrapher for place cards, she was done for. A martini, a chicken Caesar, an Ambien, and two Ativan later, she was ready for a sound night’s sleep before the big day.

When, shortly after dawn the next morning, the driver delivering the mobile air-conditioning units backed his truck into the last of the six black Escalades containing EverSafe International’s full-event protection team, he found himself quickly surrounded by twenty-odd men in ill-fitting dark suits and wraparound sunglasses, wielding everything from stun guns to Glock 9s and shouting at him to get out of the vehicle, put his hands above his head, and lie facedown on the freshly sprinkled grass.

A year or so later, to the Hollands’ minor cost and irritation, they would discover through their lawyers, before settling out of court, that the driver of the truck, a Mr. Mark Bayle, was in fact a veteran of the first Gulf War whose nearly cured PTSD had been massively reactivated by that morning’s incident, causing him pain, suffering, anxiety, and eventual unemployment. At the time, however, the accident’s most immediate effect was to whip Glenda, woken by the shouting, into a kind of pre-event seizure roughly six hours ahead of schedule.

If all Jeffrey Holland had been required to explain away that morning was how he’d approved the head of corporate security’s recommendation for a complete vulnerability assessment, perimeter protection, and tactical team on his property without either noticing that he’d done it or informing his wife, he would have been in excellent shape. As it happened, however, the NASDAQ had closed at a five-year low on the Monday of that week; WorldCom had announced another exaggeration of profits, placing on life support the bank’s single largest loan recipient; and to cap it off, on the afternoon of the third, the Massachusetts and New York attorneys general had announced a joint investigation of Atlantic Securities’ favoritism in the distribution of IPO shares. In short, it wasn’t shaping up as much of a holiday for Jeffrey. By the time an outraged Glenda bolted through his study door in her nightgown shouting about the thugs in the driveway, he was already an hour into a conference call with the general counsel and half the board, trying to account for internal policies he’d never heard of, let alone read.

By one o’clock the air outside had reached ninety-eight degrees, and many in the small army assembled to feed and entertain the Hollands’ guests had begun to wilt under the pitiless sun. An assistant to the chef’s subcontractor for the wood-burning ovens had fainted at his station, knocking his head on an ice chest and requiring removal to an air-conditioned bedroom at the back of the house. Trying to manage both her boss and the party, Lauren had set Glenda up on a couch in the library, where she could receive emissaries from the feuding vendors without either standing up or entering the furnace of the outdoors until both were absolutely necessary. The band claimed the caterer had done them out of electricity and the florist warned that if the technician sent by the air-conditioning firm to replace the traumatized driver didn’t figure out how to operate the machinery soon her creations would wither and die. These, at least, were people in Glenda’s employ. The fire marshal was another matter. While he’d kindly expedited her request for a permit for the show, upon inspection and discussion with the nephew in charge he had determined that the barge from which the fireworks were to be launched was floating at an insufficient distance from the shore of the pond, which would now need to be ringed with flame-retardant tarps.

“My God,” Glenda exclaimed, sunken into the corner of the couch. “Have you no mercy? Can’t you see what’s going on out there? Flame tarps? Where in creation do you expect me to find those? Not to mention the fact that they sound hideously ugly. Couldn’t we just give it a miss?”

The man, a stolid, bearded fellow in white shirt and epaulets glanced wearily at Lauren, who started searching her phone for the town manager’s number.

“If you only knew what it took me to retain that young man. When I think of what I paid him. He could send his firstborn to college. I’m begging you,” she said, managing another sip of her drink. “We did invite you, didn’t we? You and your wife?”

Once Lauren had led the marshal from the room, Glenda decided that, all in all, the best thing might be to nap.

DOWN IN THE FIELD, a high schooler in red vest and bow tie pointed Evelyn Jones along an aisle of luxury sedans, and up against a barbed-wire fence. She applied her lipstick in the rearview mirror and then made her way through the parked cars toward a crowd of guests bottlenecked at the gate, where some kind of checkpoint had been set up.