Snowbound with the Best Man

by Allie Pleiter

  Bruce laughed at himself. He wasn’t a guy for metaphors—that had been Sandy. The only match you need to worry about right now is Darren’s match with Tina. You’ve got to help find a way for this wedding to happen.

  I’ve not asked for much, Lord, Bruce found himself praying. In fact, I’ve not asked for anything. Or even paid attention to You lately. I didn’t see the point when all I’d do is complain. But seeing as weather seems to be Your department, could You step in here? Reduce the catastrophe factor by even a little?

  He doubted God would suddenly lend an ear to the crisis pleas of a man who’d abandoned church until this weekend. Still, maybe the fact that he was asking on someone else’s behalf would earn him a shred of attention from the Almighty. Surely God was on the side of happy marriages.

  Carly made a small, sleepy noise, and he glanced through the barely open door to see her small figure shift under the blankets.

  Thank You for her. I’d never have made it without Carly. I’m not sure I’m making it now, but she’s such a gift to me.

  Even as a baby, he’d loved watching her sleep. The way her eyelashes fluttered, the rosy curve of her cheek, the way her little pink mouth always hung just a little bit open, the way one hand still clutched the pink bear Sandy had picked out for her first birthday. When I look at her like this, I can believe You’ll let her turn out okay. He could cling to the hope that the gaping hole in her heart would heal faster than the one in his. Dear God, let her grow up into someone Sandy would be proud of.

  I don’t know how to do this.

  He’d said those exact words one night during Carly’s first fever as he and Sandy stayed up the whole night.

  No one knows how to do this, Sandy had said. Everyone’s just making it up as they go along.

  So make it up as you go along. Bruce picked up the receiver for the monitor he’d been wise enough to pack so he could venture down the hall while she slept. Sleep wasn’t going to happen. So he might as well buck up and go see how Darren was faring. If nothing else, he could tell the groom-to-be that any first year of marriage ought to feel easy after the strain it was taking them to actually get married.

  Bruce wasn’t ten feet outside his room when he turned to see Kelly slumped in a hallway chair just down the way from Darren’s and Tina’s rooms. Her hands covered her eyes. Bruce started to ask, “Are you okay?” but swallowed the question. A sniff and a shuddering breath told him she’d finally given in to the tears she’d fought back earlier this morning. He could see without asking that she wasn’t anything close to okay—the whole event was falling down around her. She heard his approach and looked up, clearly upset at his discovery of her at such a loss.

  “Tina’s sobbing,” she said, waving a soggy tissue in the direction of the rooms he’d been approaching. “Our bride’s in there crying.”

  Bruce knew he ought to say something like “It’ll be okay,” but that seemed trite given the circumstances. Instead, he sat down next to her and put his hand on her shoulder the way he had done this morning. “Sometimes, the weather wins. Not the war, just the battle. Darren and Tina know you can’t control that. They know you’re trying.”

  “I am,” Kelly groaned as she wiped her eyes. “It was going to be perfect.”

  Bruce leaned back. “Now it’ll just have to be a different kind of perfect. Come on, we know how to do that, you and I. We’ve been having to create a different kind of perfect for our families since...you know.” He groped for some good news, any shred to cheer her up. “Carly’s still excited for tonight. She told me it’s been her best vacation ever.”

  “I don’t see how,” Kelly muttered.

  “No, really. Somehow you and Lulu have made this all a grand adventure for her instead of the fiasco I know it feels like to you. I should thank you for that.”

  She gave a low laugh. “You can’t honestly tell me this turned out to be the vacation you planned.”

  He laughed, as well. “No, you’re right there. But somehow, it’s fitting the bill of what we really needed. We’ve had fun.” When she looked at him, he amended, “Odd fun, unexpected fun, but fun. If the goal was memories, we’re definitely making ’em.” After a moment, he hit upon the news he knew would bolster her spirits. “Carly told me she saw a unicorn this morning. An ice unicorn. New species, evidently. She gave a very detailed description, and you should have seen her smile while she did.”

  Kelly tucked her hair behind her ear. He liked the way it curved around her cheek when it wasn’t behind her ear. It framed her face in a simple way that suited her. Shiny and straight, but bouncy and full of movement. “Does that whole business baffle you? Her imaginary unicorns?”

  “Sure it does. But I also figure it’s her way of telling me she’ll be okay. She seems to see it as Sandy telling her she’ll be okay, and since it’s her own imagination, I see it as her telling me.” He shifted his weight on the small, fussy chair—most of the inn’s furnishings felt too small and fussy for him at his size. “It makes me feel better to know she’s seen one, because they seem to stop coming when she’s sad or bothered.”

  “Well, then, bring them on. In fact, can we send a herd of those ‘feel better’ unicorns Tina’s way?”

  Bruce laughed. “Wasn’t that the original plan? Well, elk anyway.” They had, in fact, planned to take some of the wedding photos out by the elk herd the day after the ceremony. That wouldn’t be happening now. Lots of things weren’t going to happen the way they’d been planned. “I really do think you’ll pull this off.”

  “There’s no power. There are nearly no guests.” She held up her ever-present clipboard. “I like it much better when things go according to plan,” she admitted.

  “But you’re coping like a pro. Adapting, improvising. Seriously, if you manage to make this wedding happen, I guarantee even Samantha will be impressed.”

  Kelly shook her head. “Rob brought her sandwiches and a flashlight, and the man looked positively smitten with her. Talk about opposites attracting.”

  “Must be something in the air in Matrimony Valley.” He was coming to think of the valley as a special place despite his earlier irritation. Parts of him that felt tied in knots for so long seemed to loosen here, to unfurl out of the grip of grief. As if he were thawing out at the same time the valley was icing over. Was it the town, his time away from the pressures of work, the consuming nature of the wedding-in-crisis...or the friendship of the woman sitting next to him? He couldn’t trust that the wedding, the stress and simple lack of sleep weren’t messing with his perspective.

  “There you are!” An older woman came trotting down the hallway. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “What now, Rose?” Kelly clearly expected the woman to heap yet another problem onto her shoulders.

  “We’ve solved the problem of the rehearsal dinner—chili in slow cookers. Bill’s got a generator and a strip of outlets. Half the town’s cooking up a batch, and Yvonne’s got ingredients for a s’mores bar. We can make this work.”

  “A chili and s’mores rehearsal dinner?” Kelly looked skeptical.

  Talk about making it up as you go along. “Actually,” Bruce found himself saying, “I think it works. Kind of fits in with the rest of the wedding. You don’t get any more backwoods than chili and s’mores.” Bruce offered Kelly a supportive smile. “I think Darren will approve. And the rehearsal dinner is the responsibility of the groom, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” Kelly said, brightening.

  “As best man, I endorse it. So let’s go get the groom’s approval,” Bruce said, rising off the chair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At six o’clock that evening, four more guests—including one bridesmaid and one groomsman—had managed to make it into town despite the power still being out. While everyone tried to hold out hopes for improvements tomorrow, optimism was wearing thin. Bruce hoped for everyo
ne’s sake that tonight’s party would brighten the mood.

  He walked downstairs with Carly to an inn lobby that had been totally transformed. “Wow, Daddy!” she gasped.

  Bruce had to say he was impressed. How many people could pull off the party atmosphere in a power outage like this? A fire was roaring in the lobby’s enormous fireplace, and someone had cleared the local outfitters of every camping lantern it had in stock so that they shone in a rainbow of colors around the room. The whole space had a happy glow about it. The greens he remembered from Kelly’s shop were hung around the room with ribbons and strips of plaid flannel.

  He didn’t know much about how to throw parties, but this place felt more like a party than he’d ever thought possible in a snowstorm. Far smaller than how the event had initially been planned, true, but remarkably cheerful. Happy in spite of it all, which seemed like a particularly potent kind of happiness.

  Just outside the inn’s front steps, Bruce could see a small army of valley residents manning a collection of grills. Whatever it was they were cooking up, it smelled delicious. On the far side of the room, a battalion of slow cookers simmered hooked up to a power strip whose cord ran out through a window to a running generator outside. He and Carly were among the first downstairs, and Bruce’s stomach growled enough from the hard work of the day to make him consider ducking outside to see if he could sneak something right now.

  “Daddy, look!” Carly pulled his hand toward where a table had been set up next to the fireplace. “S’mores, just like you said!”

  Sure enough, a dessert table of sorts had been laid out with a cobbled-together collection of s’mores ingredients. Not just the usual chocolate, marshmallows and graham crackers, but surprising things like cherries, nuts, gingersnaps, caramel sauce—and even a few things he couldn’t quite identify.

  Carly, of course, was ready to try them all. “Can I have one?”

  “How about we try dinner first tonight?”

  “Aw, why?” She pouted, but only until she spied Lulu coming in from the inn kitchen and the girls raced off to giggle about something together. He didn’t have to think twice about letting her run off with her new friend. He knew she’d be safe—that everyone would keep an eye out for her. In his short time here, the town had become a comfortably closed circle, a connected place. As if he’d been living the last two years under glass, and someone was starting to lift the lid. Did every guest snowbound here in the valley feel like that, or was it just him?

  He caught sight of Kelly smiling to someone over a wooden bucket filled with greens and red flowers as she placed it on the buffet table. He knew piling everyone into a smaller space helped to keep the temperature comfortable, but it also created an atmosphere he could describe only as “defiant warmth.”

  It really did feel like the whole valley had pulled together to make this event happen. The inn managed to feel filled with people, even though he knew it was with more “workers” than “guests.” The storm had blurred the lines between the two in a surprising and enjoyable way.

  Well, mostly enjoyable. Darren was taking the alternative wedding plans a lot better than Tina was. The bride-to-be was still upstairs getting dressed, but Darren had escaped to Bruce’s room multiple times in order to decompress and blow off steam from the huge job of keeping Tina happy. “Haven’t seen this side of her before,” Darren had said nervously as he joined Bruce in the lobby. “Do all wives get like this?”

  Sandy had, but not at the wedding. Of course, theirs had gone off without a hitch. Tina and Darren were launching their marriage with a monumental challenge, that was for sure. Bruce clamped a supportive hand on his friend’s shoulder. “The way I see it, a lot of marriage is seeing the other person at their worst and loving them anyway. Sandy made for a calm bride, but she was a handful when she was pregnant. You didn’t think we went on all those daylong hikes that winter because I liked your company, did you?”

  “Ha,” Darren said, not laughing.

  “Hang in there. You’ll be fine and this will be a funny story. Next year, that is.”

  Darren looked around the room. “I don’t know what Tina will do if the power’s not back on by tomorrow. Or more guests don’t show up.”

  “Maybe you don’t know what to do, but I’m thinking they’ll come up with something.” Bruce nodded to the setup of chili and corn bread that would join grilled chicken and burgers—and, of course, s’mores—as the rehearsal dinner. As a guy, Bruce found this highly appealing. He could understand, however, that Tina might not share his opinion.

  “And then there’s her,” Darren went on as Rob helped Samantha Douglas into a chair at one corner of the room. “The only thing worse than not getting your perfect wedding is having someone writing about how it all went wrong.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Bruce replied. “Would she?”

  “Tina whined that her Matrimony Valley wedding will never be anything more to Southeastern Nuptials Magazine than the place that trapped their reporter and made her limp.”

  “That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “I thought it might be fun for Tina to go ahead with the interview. So we did, and I tried to be nice,” Darren offered. “Tina was a little short in the nice department.” The groom-to-be sighed. “She’s really disappointed, you know? About all the people who called us to say they can’t get here. I offered to put it off, but she’s always wanted a Valentine’s weekend wedding. I was worried for a while that she’d get it in her head to put it off a whole year and try again next February.”

  Bruce laughed. “I’m with you. That’s too long an engagement for any couple.” Once he’d decided to marry Sandy, they’d arranged things as fast as possible. He was usually a quick and decisive thinker, which is what made this long slow climb out of grief so excruciating. “You’re ready, man. And so is she. Think of it this way—if you can make it through this, you can make it through anything. Just throw a huge Valentine’s first anniversary party next year.” He handed Darren his flashlight. “As for now, why don’t you go get your bride and bring her downstairs so we can get this party started.”

  As Darren ascended the stairs, Kelly walked up to Bruce with a stunned look on her face.

  “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

  “Funny enough, it’s something right.” She pushed a stray hair off her forehead.

  “That’s welcome news. What went right?”

  “I just got a compliment from Samantha Douglas.”

  Bruce looked over at the woman with her bandaged foot carefully placed on an ottoman pillow. “A compliment? From Samantha?”

  Kelly grinned. “I know. She said she thought we were handling the situation well. Really well, to be exact.”

  Samantha had never struck Bruce as the kind of person to be handing out compliments in a good situation, much less this. “Are we sure she didn’t hit her head when she fell?”

  Kelly laughed. Bruce felt a glow of satisfaction at making the beleaguered florist smile and laugh. It had been a long day for everyone. “I don’t know if it’s the pain medication or what, but she’s been so much nicer since she got hurt. Is that a terrible thing to think?” She stared again at the woman, who was actually smiling as Rob plumped a pillow under her foot. Kelly turned to look at Bruce at the same moment he put the facts together himself. “Could it be...?”

  Bruce scratched his chin. “I’m not much of a judge of that sort of thing, but I’d say your hardware store owner is...what’d they call it in Bambi? ‘Twitterpated’?”

  Kelly burst out laughing at that, hand flying to cover her mouth when a few people turned to look. Bruce quickly found something to fiddle with on the table while Kelly pivoted to face the wall. She shot Bruce a sideways glance filled with amusement. “He is, isn’t he?”

  “You didn’t see it yesterday?” he teased. It was fun to one-up her on something so clearly in her terr
itory and not his.

  “Well, yes, but...” She sneaked another look at the pair under the guise of adjusting one of the wall sconces. Then she smirked at Bruce. “‘Twitterpated’? I haven’t heard that word in years.”

  Bruce stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Anyone with a five-year-old daughter going to an elk wedding watches a fair amount of Bambi—minus the scary fire scene, of course. Remind me to thank whoever invented the fast-forward button.”

  Kelly shook her head as she managed another discreet peek at the pair across the room. “Will you look at that?”

  At that moment Samantha reached out and touched Rob’s hand tenderly. Despite both of their advanced years, they looked as smitten as teenagers. “Who knew your secret weapon was the hardware guy?” he teased.

  “Just because Rob strikes her fancy doesn’t mean she’ll give us a good write-up.”

  Kelly excelled in finding new things to worry about. “I’d say it certainly can’t hurt.”

  Hailey rang a large brass bell from the bottom of the inn staircase. “Ladies and gentlemen, your bride- and groom-to-be!” With the announcement, the small crowd burst into applause as Darren and Tina came down the stairs and Matrimony Valley’s first-ever electricity-free rehearsal dinner kicked into gear.

  Just after his second bowl of very good chili, Bruce felt someone tugging on his sleeve. “Mr. Marvin makes chili as good as he makes ice cream, don’t you think?” Lulu remarked.

  “Is this his recipe?” Bruce asked. “Then I’d have to say I agree.”

  “I like you.” Lulu leaned up against him. “You’re fun. And you help Mom have fun. She’d kind of forgot how, if you ask me.”

  Bruce almost did a double take at the girl’s blatant pronouncement. He’d certainly never use the word fun to describe himself. “You’re pretty fun yourself,” he replied, not quite sure what else to say. His nerves sprang to alert as he considered where this odd conversation might be heading—again.