In their workaday world they help other people create memories, but along the way they have created enough memories of their own to fill a book. And the children! V. Jaime Hamlin has four boys, three of them triplets; Patrie Grace has three girls and two boys. Jaime is a caterer whose reputation as a cook is beyond the pale. Patrie is the stalwart wedding planner and events coordinator. Their businesses are separate but intertwined. Exactly like their lives.

Interviews by Julia Rappaport

Jaime: This is our 25th year together. Twenty-five years ago. What year was that? It was 1982 because that was when the boys were born. That’s when I met her and then in 1983 we started. I don’t even remember what we were doing. We hadn’t even started the Oyster Bar. We had Feasts, the food store over in Edgartown, and I think Patrie, she came and worked in the store with us, I think. And then it just kind of evolved. It was one of those. She was just always there and always willing to help and lend a hand.

She’s a very linear thinker in a very logical and orderly way and that is very helpful to me who, I kind of think, Oh this! And, Oh my God then there’s that! And she just keeps me on task. Her mantra is one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. Just stay on task.

So she had four kids and I had four kids so, you know, we’d have these big families with a million kids.

And then when [ex-husband] Raymond and I, when things started falling apart, it was like there she was again. She kind of became the fearless leader. She just took over, getting organized the staff all together for me because I started to get busy and I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t do the staff and the cooking. So she kind of took over that role and has every year refined and improved it to an extraordinary degree.

She has her own business, which is called With Grace. And then I have my business and I hire her as a consultant, sort of, to organize my staff and train my staff.

I run the kitchen end of things; she runs the floor end of things. She runs all the staff, she takes care of the look of things and makes sure everything nice is lined up, all the glasses are perfect.

I do all the menus, I do all the food, I do all the ordering and she does everything else.

I’m sort of the excitable type. I get ahead of myself a little bit and Patrie is a very orderly and organized woman. And I’m very organized too, but she, let me think about this for a second . . . where I will sometimes just blurt things out, Patrie has a polite and gentile way of saying hard things to people, which I sometimes can’t do. Like firing someone. She has a lovely way of doing it. And I just would say, I’m sorry, you know, you can’t work.

Disasters that we have averted, disasters that [customers] have never known about: It was a really, really hot day and we were up at the Flanders farm and a very famous cake baker on the Island had made this gorgeous wedding cake. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. It was so beautiful I said, Patrie, go stand next to the cake. And she stands next to the cake and five minutes later a waitstaff comes into the kitchen and says, There’s been an accident. And Patrie said, There’s been an accident? And she said, Oh yeah. The cake just slid off the plastic layers it was on onto the ground. Here’s what Patrie did. She said, Pick up the table! Put it over the cake! And call the baker! And we did.

And nobody knew the cake was actually under the table. And it was enormous. It was like that tall, like four feet tall. The baker came back, rummaged around, found more cakes, put it together, slapped some icing on. We threw flowers all over the whole thing and nobody knew. But that’s the kind of thing she’s so good at where I just go, I don’t think I can deal with this! Can you take care of this? I just don’t think I can look!

Patrie just fluffs everything over.

We’ve had some pretty horrible disasters, but they never knew. They never knew anything bad was going on.

We had a party on Chappy once and the rain was coming through the middle of the tent, sort of like a waterfall. And Patrie somehow managed to — she’s able to like look at a situation, a disaster shall we say, and somehow make the silk purse out of the sow’s ear. And make it all look like, Oh this is how its supposed to be! This is the natural waterfall in the tent we’ve arranged for! And that’s a huge ability. Her mantra is, there’s never a problem, there’s only a solution.

She is a woman of action and empathy and passion and creativity and I think she’s a wonder. She’s an amazing, amazing woman and I am blessed in so many ways to have had her as my friend for so many years and to be able to work with her successfully for this long. We still scream and laugh on the phone about things on Monday morning. She’ll call and she’ll say, Oh my God! Did you see what happened when the bride’s dress flew up and you could see her butt? Just silly things that happened that we can just scream over on the telephone.

So we went to Vegas for a catering conference. Vegas is like Disneyland for adults. We’d be walking down the street — this was like 10 years ago, 11 years ago — and Patrie, you know, she’s a gorgeous woman, and literally men were walking up to her and asking her out. I was like, hey, what am I? Chopped liver? But she had these silver shoes on. We called them, you know, her blank-blank pumps. I go, it’s the shoes Patrie. And then finally, we had spent so much money we didn’t have enough money to leave a tip for the chambermaid. So I said, just leave her the shoes. I said, those will never fly on Martha’s Vineyard. So she left the silver shoes for the housecleaner.

I can’t really think of anything about her that I don’t love. She’s beautiful. She’s talented. She’s just an amazing person and I love her.

I certainly wouldn’t be as successful as we are today without that. She probably would have started this kind of business, her own business, anyway. But you know, our businesses work really well together because obviously we recommend each other and our Web sites link to each other, but I just think we’re really pretty good at what we do. We’ve been doing it for a long time and we’ve been doing it together. So what they get when they get the two of us together it is a pretty powerful duo.

[Breaks into song] Friendship, friendship. It’s the perfect blendship. When other friendships have been forgot, ours will still be hot!

Patrie: You know that expression, I’ve got your back? I really feel like it’s like that’s what we trust in each other. It’s like, I’ve got your back.

Jaime and I met because my then-husband, Jeff, and her then-husband Raymond, so our former husbands Jeff and Raymond, were doing carpentry together. And we began a great friendship at the time with the four of us. We spent most and many holidays together with both of our large families.

It was just immediately, all the way around, a great, fun connection.

I think I was pregnant [when we met]. Well, Jaime was definitely pregnant with the triplets because we always have this one story of her: we were walking across the ice to the Chappy ferry. We lived on Chappaquiddick and Jeff and Raymond were, I think, doing a job over there and Jaime was pregnant with the triplets and she fell and she couldn’t get up because her belly was so big! She was like a bug on the ice! It was terrible and terribly funny at the same time. She was laughing. She was crying she was laughing so hard.

I was very drawn to her in so many ways. I think in particular just her beauty and her generosity and her kind of command of this catering business that she was into and committed to. And she was fun, supportive to be around, and I just thought it was going to be a good fit for our family as well.

Something I think we both have in common is I think we both have a really strong aesthetic sense of just the visuals and the kind of feng shui flow of the beauty of it and the people and, of course, the food.

Besides absolutely loving and adoring Jaime the person, I mean her food is just mind-blowingly phenomenal every time and it’s never gotten stagnant. Every winter we have some little dinners and she tries out new things and you know, she’s always growing in it. It’s always teaching her. She’s creative about it. I do believe she loves it. It’s like she’s really doing her art and I suppose the same could be said about me in terms of my love of people. Supporting things just being the best day, the best event.

Jaime’s a real get-done person. I have definitely learned more organizational skills from her. It’s not my natural tendency. I’m not a real planner, I’m not a real organizer, even though I am an organizer, I mean, that’s what I do. But I’ve really watched and learned a lot of that go-to-it, get-it-done, make-it-happen command from Jaime. She’s a powerhouse. I mean she’s just incredible. But Jaime can get really wound up and kind of — panicky’s not quite the right word — but she can almost spin out of control at times. And I’m calm. I’m really the calming influence for the family, for the businesses, for the clients, for the staff.

When I speak with other caterers and other coordinators, it becomes so apparent to me the gift we both have, this relationship, because it does make the whole show from soup to nuts, from the presentation to the flow of it, run pretty flawlessly.

We joke that we won’t write the book together until we’re out of the business: the stories of what people never knew. Like the fallen cake up at the Flanders farm. It was so hot it slid off the layers, we whisked a cocktail table over it and then we had staff underneath the table with trays like scooping the cake out, whisking it into the kitchen and I got just white cakes delivered and made another cake and the reality is, it’s a very rare bride who notices anything once the day begins. The whole thing is to get to that day. So when it was cake time, there was cake.

I’ll just say that I did once go out and listen to some music the night before a wedding that I was running for Jaime and I had not yet met the couple and was propositioned by a very nice gentleman only to get to the wedding the next day and find out it was the groom. I mean, we’ve had the mother of the bridegroom fall into the septic system. We’ve had just things.

We’ve been there for each other through the ups and downs of our lives and we’ve watched each other’s children grow.

One sweet thing is, you know, on Oct. 4 we’re going to be doing [my daughter] Nisa’s wedding, so that’s such a come-around because Jaime was one of the first people around after Nisa was born.

Oh that’s so much of the beauty at this point of life I think is getting to see the children come around and their children and be at their weddings.

All of our kids now have worked with us. Because last year [sons] Eli and Marlin bartended as well. So we have had all the kids on the job. [Daughter] Reade’s helped me out on the floor and Nisa’s in the kitchen. And now [daughter] Iris is on the floor and [Jaime’s son] Duncan on the floor with us and [Jaime’s sons] Nicholas and Alexander in the kitchen and [Jaime’s son] Mac on the bar. I mean, we could have our show if we could get them here at the same time.

You know, Jaime and I just both love family and love our children and it’s like, when I see all the kids on the job it’s like, this is what it’s all for. The intimacy. And I guess it brings me to thinking that’s what Jaime and I bring to it more than anything is love. We love to cook, we love to eat, we love people, we love family, we love our kids working with us, we love to laugh, we love beauty, we love each other and we love to bring that to the job.

I don’t tire of encouraging people to do an event here because it’s still unsurpassable in the memories it creates.