Wedding Belles: A Novel in Four Parts

by Melanie Jacobson

  He grabbed his dead phone and his keys and headed out to the car, which he did not remember parking that close to the cabin. Close enough to leave a wrinkle in the BMW’s front bumper.

  “One more thing I’ve messed up.” His muttering startled a bird, who left him a streaky white present on the back window. “I deserve that,” he said.

  The engine started with a comforting hum. Patting the steering wheel, he said to the car, “I love you. I really do. Don’t leave me.” He checked his mirror before backing out and caught sight of himself again. This time, he had to laugh. It was a pitiful laugh, but it beat the alternative. “All right, D. Pull it together.” He plugged his dead phone in to charge and drove to find food.

  When his phone had enough charge to turn back on, the first thing he saw was a text from Lily: You need to eat.

  She had that right. After a few more minutes of driving, he pulled into the parking lot at Barry’s, a dingy diner that had made the world’s best pancakes for about a thousand years. It was possible the same woman had been serving the pancakes for that whole time. A bell announced his entrance, and he was hit with the comforting scents of toast, bacon, and coffee.

  “Seat yourself, honey,” an ancient voice called out, and Deacon slid into a booth. The tiny woman with white cotton-candy hair bounced over within a minute and pulled out one of those ancient paper order pads.

  “Need a menu?” she asked.

  “No thanks.” He held his hands out, one a couple of inches above the other. “I need a stack of pancakes. Can you make that happen?”

  She leaned in and lifted his upper hand a few inches higher. “Big stack?”

  He nodded and raised it a bit more. His hands indicated nearly a foot of hot, buttered carbs.

  “You’re easy to please. Coming right up, honey.” She patted his shoulder, and he used all his strength to resist pulling her into a hug. Clearly Deacon didn’t do alone well.

  While he waited for his pancakes, he scrolled through his missed calls and texts.

  So many missed calls and texts.

  Although he could pretend he wasn’t looking for anything in particular, it didn’t take long to realize that none of them were from Dahlia. Many of them were from his mother, all on the theme of, Are you finished pouting?

  And quite a few from Lily. He looked through them quickly, reading the newest first: You need to eat.

  Did you take food with you?

  Just give me a hint.

  Did you leave the city or possibly the country?

  Apartment?

  Not the house, right?

  Where are you?

  Emmett says he knows but he’s not telling.

  Where are you, I mean it.

  Your mom said you’re not with her.

  I’m trying not to get worried.

  Did you wake up?

  Let me know when you wake up.

  Please note that I waited 24hrs to send another message.

  Please?

  Tell me you’re okay.

  Are you okay?

  Not our best day, am I right?

  Where are you staying?

  Did you make it home?

  Sorry.

  I know you’re tired of ‘sorry’ but . . .

  Tell me when you’re home safe.

  Three days’ worth of concern from Lily, who was only a friend. And from Dahlia? Not a thing.

  He sent three texts: to Emmett, his mom, and Lily. All three said the same thing. I’m fine. Having breakfast. Coming home soon.

  His mom responded immediately. Home here? I’ll have a room ready.

  Emmett’s reply came a minute later. In typical Emmett fashion, his was a mixture of comedy and concern. Don’t go home. Mom will eat you whole.

  The waitress brought Deacon his breakfast, set it down in front of him, and started walking away. “Wait,” he said.

  “Need something else, honey?”

  He glanced around the otherwise deserted diner. “Can you sit for a minute?”

  She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “If I sat down with every handsome man who invited me, I’d never get a single bit of work done.”

  He nodded and laughed, wondering what had made him ask her that in the first place. “Sure. Thanks. This smells perfect.”

  He’d shoveled a great deal of food into his mouth but barely made a dent in the pile of pancakes when she returned. She slid a bowl of sliced strawberries and a can of aerosol whipped cream onto the table. “A little something extra for you. Looks like you could use it.”

  “That bad, huh?” His hand reflexively smoothed out his hair and ran along his jaw.

  She shrugged. “Doesn’t have to be all that bad to leave a mark.”

  He helped himself to berries and cream, relishing the slurpy sound the can made as he sprayed. It was one of the happy sounds of childhood. Good to be reminded that there were at least a few good things (okay, at least one) unconnected to Dahlia Ravenel. He looked around again, saw nobody, and tipped the bottle so the nozzle was pointing into his mouth. He shot a tentative spray which came out mostly air.

  “Tip your chin up, honey. Gotta be straight up and down.”

  Where was she? How could she see him if he couldn’t see her?

  Oh, well. Too late to play it cool. Chin up, he squirted cream into his mouth and smiled.

  Chapter Five

  Balancing a cafeteria salad and her water bottle in one hand, Lily turned on her phone with the other. Helping to change bandages on a burn patient had taken up fifteen minutes of her lunch break.

  Texts from her mom, Aunt Camellia, and a guy she had dinner with a month ago. And at the bottom, finally, a reply from Deacon. It wasn’t much, but he was okay. Responsive. Upright, apparently.

  She shot him a message telling him she was on a shift until seven. She started typing more: how she was glad he was okay. Delete, delete, delete. How she hoped he wasn’t annoyed by her barrage of messages over the past few days. Delete, delete, delete. How she’d been so angry and now she wasn’t. Delete, delete, delete.

  An alarm buzzed on her hand, startling her, and she checked the time. She only had five minutes left to eat her wilty, mostly-white-lettuce salad. Shoveling a few bites into her mouth, she hoped it would fuel her for another six hours. It would have to do.

  Walking to her car after work, she noticed how pleasant the evening felt. She pulled the ponytail out of her hair and ran her fingers over her scalp, scratching out the stress of the day and letting the breeze blow through.

  A voice called out from the hospital parking lot. “Is there a doctor in the house? Or at least a nurse?”

  Deacon stepped out from behind an old red minivan.

  “You need medical attention?” she asked, smiling at the grin on his face.

  “I need all kinds of attention,” he said. Almost immediately she saw his face flush and he looked at his shoes, clearly embarrassed by any number of wrong ways she could have taken that.

  “Come here, you. Bring it in.” She opened her arms and he hugged her long and tight. Oh. His arms fit around her so perfectly. And she had no desire to let go any time soon. She noticed the scent of his skin, his clothes . . . and then she remembered who she was. “Sorry I smell like work,” she said.

  He breathed in while she was still in his arms. “You smell like . . . is that baby shampoo?”

  She pulled back and ducked away. “There was possibly a little bit more human biology happening today than I’d expected.”

  “Mmm.” He pretended to be intrigued. “Got a little on you, did you?”

  “Gross. But yes. Baby shampoo was all they had in the locker room showers.”

  He came close and put his arm around her. “I like it. It suits you.”

  Why was she so aware of both Deacon’s arm and her shoulder? He’d walked with his arm around her shoulders for years. This should feel normal, she told herself.

  Lily kept walking toward her car. “What brings you here?” She found that
she was holding her breath, both hoping and fearing that she knew what he’d say.

  “I was lonely.” That was the fear, right there. That he’d come because there was nothing else to do. That he was here only because she was his secondary default. “It’s weird for me, being alone.” He tried to laugh it off, but she knew he wasn’t kidding. “I don’t like it.”

  Lily understood what he was trying hard not to say. She was still riding the wave of her realization about being the main character in her own life story, but Deacon hadn’t had any such revelation. He wasn’t ready for it yet.

  “Remember that time Christmas of junior year, I think it was, when you and I spent every day together?” He didn’t say her name. He didn’t say “because Dahlia and her family had gone to Vail to ski,” but the specter of her hung there in the parking lot anyway.

  “I do remember,” Lily said. “We watched a lot of really terrible movies that week.”

  “No, you must be thinking of something else. No, we watched all those Steve McQueen car chase films that winter.”

  “Oh, was I unclear? Those are the movies I was talking about. They were terrible.”

  Shaking his head, Deacon sighed. “Poor Lily. You don’t know an amazing piece of art when you see one.”

  “I maintain that the movies were awful. Company was great, though,” she said, bumping him with her elbow.

  Deacon nodded. “I will allow you your incorrect opinion of Steve McQueen.” He went around to the passenger side of her car. “Can I ride home with you?”

  She worried her surprise would come across as disinterest, so she answered carefully. “Of course. Are you leaving your car here?” Why was it so hard to be normal?

  Oh. Right. Because normal contained another person. One who drove every decision, steered every conversation, and dominated every aspect of every day. That.

  “I dropped her at the shop for a little shine-up and walked over.”

  This, Lily knew, was code. A “shine-up” was what Dahlia got every time she crashed her car into something: fire hydrants, parked cars, trees, light poles.

  “What’d you hit?” she asked as she clicked her seatbelt.

  “I didn’t hit anything. I nudged.”

  “Right. Got it.” If he didn’t want to tell, she wasn’t going to pester him about it.

  They’d been together for fewer than five minutes, and already she was tense from being so careful about what she did and did not say. Not to mention from the memory of how she’d reacted to that hug. The hug that she’d shared with her cousin’s ex-fiancé. Her old friend. This grieving man.

  “Can you lead this conversation, please?” she said. “I don’t want to say any of the wrong things, and I’m drawing a blank on what the right things might be.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw him shift in the passenger seat.

  “What were you planning to do about dinner?” he asked.

  Good. Food was easy.

  “I’m making grilled cheese sandwiches, and no comments about four-year-old taste. It’s a very good sandwich.”

  He nodded. “I almost believe you, but I’m willing to let you prove it to me.”

  “Did you just invite yourself over for dinner?”

  He scratched his jawline. “Do normal people not do that?”

  She laughed. “Is that what you’re aiming for? Normal?”

  He did not laugh. His hands covered his face and he spoke from behind them. “Lil, I don’t even remember my life without her in it. I don’t know how to be a person who isn’t her person.”

  I do! She wanted to shout it out her open window. I know how to be me without her. But his wound was different than hers, and he needed to figure it out on his own. And if Lily were being honest with herself, she still had some figuring out to do when it came to how she behaved around Deacon. This was obvious. She wasn’t finished with the process yet, she knew.

  “I need to do a few things,” Deacon said.

  Lily nodded, assuming he meant errands he wanted to take care of tonight. Possibly in her car.

  “I need a new apartment.”

  “Oh.” This, she knew, was not an intelligent response. But it was what she had available to her in the moment.

  “I’ve lived with my parents for seven hours now, and I’m about at my limit.”

  She laughed. “How many of those hours were you actually in the house?”

  “Four. Don’t laugh.” But he was laughing too.

  She forced her face into a stoic expression. “I hear the Holiday Inn by the airport has rooms, if you’re feeling desperate.”

  “Nah. Mom’s excited to cook for me, and Emmett’s here, so I can probably survive a little longer.” He reached up and tweaked the angle of her rearview mirror. “But not forever. So. You know the Charleston apartment scene. Where do I want to look?”

  “I’m not sure. There are lots of options, but . . . why don’t you buy a house?” She didn’t say what she was thinking, which was something along the line of you have all the money in the world and didn’t the Ravenels just buy you a house and nobody’s going to live in it while Dahlia’s on the other side of the planet, mainly because he still had not said her name.

  “I’m looking for a short-term thing, I think.”

  What did that mean? This tiptoeing around was making her crazy. There had never been a time since they were kids that Lily had felt like she couldn’t just say what she meant or ask what he was thinking.

  “Okay,” she said, glad that exasperation was absent from her tone. “Close to work? Close to the water?” Was she supposed to be a real estate agent?

  He shrugged. “I like your place.”

  What?

  “I already have a roommate, and no.”

  “Not your apartment. But maybe your building. Or your neighborhood.”

  She nodded. “Let’s Google it and see if there’s anything around here.”

  Did that sound like she was giving him permission? Like she thought he needed her permission? This was making her skin itch.

  She pulled into her parking garage while he was still looking at his phone, and when she got out, he followed her up to her place.

  “Sandwich?”

  “Sure.”

  Those two words? That was the most comfortable exchange they’d had since the . . . party. It was hard to think of it as a reception without all the correlated baggage.

  He sat on a stool in the kitchen looking at apartments on her laptop while she chopped onions, spinach, and mushrooms, and sliced gruyere. In a few minutes she had two steaming grilled cheese sandwiches and put them on plates.

  “Drink?” she asked, sliding him a sandwich.

  He shook his head, then said, “Water?”

  She wanted to ask all the questions but knew she couldn’t without tipping the balance. This new territory riddled with emotional pitfalls contained too many mysterious dark places, and above it all hung the fear that she’d say or do the one thing that would turn Deacon away from her. And without him, she feared, there was so little left.

  Wow. The drama.

  She shook it off and sat down to eat. Deacon made all the appropriate noises of appreciation for the sandwich.

  “When you call this ‘grilled cheese’ you might be underselling it.”

  She shrugged. “It’s got cheese. It’s grilled.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not true,” he said. “I just think you could make it more appealing.”

  Her heart thumped with anxiety. It sounded like he was channeling her mother, who occasionally said things like, “You’ve got so much potential. I wish you’d try a little harder to show it to men.” Unfortunately, her mom had a different visual attached to “showing her potential,” and it almost always required expensive clothes and absolutely never included scrubs. But she didn’t need to think about that right now.

  “How about you give this sandwich a name,” Lily said, “and I promise I’ll always call it whatever you say it’s supposed to
be.”

  “And whenever I come over and ask for the Baltic, you’ll make this one?”

  “Really? The Baltic? As in eastern Europe?” She picked off a corner of her sandwich and nibbled it, looking at the ceiling and trying to find anything Baltic about it.

  He shook his head. “Or not. Maybe it will be called the Geisha.”

  “Why?” Lily couldn’t even begin to imagine how spinach and onions conjured up Geisha feelings.

  “The Yucatan?”

  “You’re really reaching now.”

  He smiled and took another bite. “Madagascar.”

  “You keep saying words that reflect cultures and places that are not in any way contained in this sandwich. Also, you might need to call a travel agent and take a trip.” She put the last piece of her sandwich in her mouth.

  “It’s on the list,” he said through a large bite. He gestured to his phone. “Get an apartment. Take a vacation. Fall out of love.”

  Lily was unsurprised but a little embarrassed when tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh, Deacon,” she said, but didn’t know how to finish.

  “Have you noticed,” he asked, “that I have not once said her name this evening?”

  The tears came a little faster. “Of course I’ve noticed. This is the most awkward we’ve ever been.”

  He held his hand out, fingers pinched almost together to show a tiny space. “The time you threw up in front of me might have been as awkward.”

  She nodded and wiped her eyes with her napkin. “Close second.”

  “I’m running on the theory that if I don’t mention her, don’t actually ever say her name, my heart will zip itself back together and everything will be natural again.”

  She folded the napkin in half, then in half again. “That’s so repressive and adorable.”

  “So in your medical opinion, I’m on the right track?”

  He couldn’t keep his face straight for long.

  She gathered the two plates and carried them to the sink.

  Deacon leaned back from the counter, stretching his arms over his head. “I’ve been thinking.” He was quiet for a minute.

  She asked the question she’d been avoiding. “When you were gone the last few days?”