by Donna Ball
Lindsay, holding the strapless gown up at the bodice—it wouldn’t quite zip over her jeans—peered down at Bridget’s feet, which were as close as they could reasonably get to the hem of the dress. “I don’t know,” she said, craning her neck to see over the top of Bridget’s head. “Which one do you think, Cici? The lace with the rose pattern or the satin with the buckle?”
“Neither one,” Cici said. “The minute you step outside in those heels you’re going to sink two inches into the mud. This is a vineyard wedding, remember?”
A flash of panic crossed Lindsay’s eyes. “Oh, my goodness, you’re right. How can I wear fabric shoes to an outdoor wedding?”
“By using an aisle runner,” declared Paul, returning empty-handed from the kitchen. “And it’s satin with the buckle, clearly.”
Bridget held out the satin-clad foot skeptically. “A little young?”
“You can dress in the barn,” supplied Cici with a nod, “I mean, winery. And if we set up right where the hill starts to crest, facing the vines, we’ll only need about twenty feet of runner. That should keep your shoes clean.”
Lindsay grinned. “I like that. It’s a vineyard wedding, so I dress in the winery.”
“Not too young at all,” Paul told Bridget, holding out his hand for the shoe. “We’re going to take off the buckle and replace it with a pearl cluster rosette.”
Lindsay clapped her hands together. “Perfect!”
Bridget returned the shoes to Paul and Cici helped Lindsay shuffle out of the dress, folding it carefully at the waist to keep the hem off the floor. “The weather could be cold in October,” she said. “You’re going to need a jacket.”
“And cover up this cleavage?” Lindsay looked horrified. “I don’t think so.”
Paul strode over to the garment bag he had spread out on the buffet and unzipped it, removing a long-sleeved lace jacket with a flourish. “It’s a size four,” he said, holding it up to Lindsay’s chest, “but we can put in a few lace panels—no offense darling, you know you are the perfect size,” he added quickly when Lindsay glared at him. “It’s just that these vicious models with their disgusting binge-and-purge habits make life impossible for the rest of us. And look, it fastens here, just under the bust, so we have even more natural enhancement of the cleavage.”
“Well …”
He swept the jacket away and whipped out two hats from an oversized round box. “What do you think, ladies? Portrait hat or cloche?”
He set each hat on Lindsay’s head and when Bridget and Cici agreed unanimously, “Portrait!” he rolled his eyes and put the big hat back into the box. “Cloche, obviously,” he told them, and set the rolled satin hat slightly askew on Lindsay’s head, twisting her hair into a rope over the opposite shoulder. He turned Lindsay toward the big gilt-framed mirror on the wall. “Fabulous, yes? And picture the half-collar of the jacket framing your face from the back … you will be a walking poem!”
“Yes,” agreed Lindsay, eyes sparkling as she made a miniscule adjustment to the hat. “I will!”
Paul plucked the hat from her head and, ignoring Lindsay’s protest, began to rewrap it in the blue tissue from which it had come. “No more time to play, girls. Moving on, moving on. We have decisions to make if we’re going to keep this event on schedule.”
Lindsay turned down a corner of her mouth and murmured, “And I thought I was going to get to be the Bridezilla.”
“I heard that,” replied Paul.
Ignoring them both, Bridget said, “Enough about her. What about our dresses?” She went to the table and began turning pages in the oversized five-ring binder that was the style sample book. “Good heavens, Paul, you should go into the business. Look at all of this, Cici.”
“Darling, if I were in the business, you couldn’t begin to afford me.” He spun the binder around, flipped to a new section, and turned it back toward Bridget. “Waltz length, bell skirt, three-quarter length sleeve cuffed at the elbow, braided gold belt four inches above the waist.”
“Does it come in garnet?” Cici wanted to know, peering over Bridget’s shoulder.
Paul reached into a plastic pocket on the design page and pulled out a swatch. “Also known as claret,” he said, presenting it to her with a flourish. “The only color for autumn. And for you, my gorgeous blonde …” He took out another swatch for Bridget. “French rose, your signature color.”
“I always wear pink,” complained Bridget.
“That’s because it’s your signature color,” Paul explained patiently. “And it does magical things for your skin.”
“Well …” Bridget held up the swatch near her face and turned to the mirror.
“Nice,” said Cici, rubbing the swatch of fabric between her fingers. “Shot silk.” She looked at him hesitantly. “How much?”
“Designer label, off the rack prices,” he assured her. “And I can get them both in two weeks. Now for the bouquets …”
“No roses,” Lindsay warned, limping to the table.
He gave her a disdainful look. “Of course, roses. They’re your signature flower. Garnet for Bridget, French rose for Cici, and a mixture of both, accented with ivory, for you.”
“But the funeral …” Lindsay protested.
“Will be long forgotten by then. Roses, definitely.”
“I don’t know.” Lindsay looked worried as she sank into the chair in front of the style book. “It might be bad luck. I don’t want to take any chances.”
Bridget leaned over her shoulder, turning pages of the book. “What do garnet roses look like anyway?”
“There is no such thing as bad luck when I’m in charge,” Paul assured Lindsay airily. “Only expertise, precision, and execution. Speaking of which, we will of course be hosting your engagement party at the Hummingbird House, and it will be perfection personified. I’m thinking a champagne garden party, and we’ll invite all our old friends from the city …”
“Oh, Paul! You’d do that for me?” Lindsay’s face lit up and she clapped her hands in delight. “You’re the best!”
She sprang up from the chair to hug him just as Bridget reached across her and lifted the heavy book off the table, saying, “Here they are! Cici, look.”
She swung around with the book as Lindsay lunged forward. Lindsay slammed into the book—or the book slammed into her—so hard that it knocked her back down into her chair. She just sat there for a moment, clutching her cheek and looking like a bird that had just flown into a window, while her equally stunned friends watched in horror as the flesh beneath her right eye began to turn a purplish-red color.
“Well,” Lindsay said after a moment, weakly, “as long as there’s no such thing as bad luck.”
~*~
“Seriously, ladies.” Paul gave Bridget a look of mild reprimand as he replaced the dripping wet washcloth that Cici had hastily procured from the nearby washroom with a proper ice bag for Lindsay’s eye. “We are on a very short deadline here and we have no hope whatsoever of meeting it unless the bridesmaids stop beating up the bride.”
“It’s not their fault.” Lindsay scrunched down in her chair so that her head was resting on the back and applied the ice bag gingerly to her eye. Cici and Bridget hovered helplessly. “It’s mine. What was I thinking? We should elope.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Paul replied, “you can’t go anywhere looking like this.”
“She thinks weddings at Ladybug Farm are cursed,” Cici told him.
“Well,” Paul admitted, beginning to gather up his samples, “she may have a point. Not …” he raised a finger to ward off Cici’s indignant protest, “that that has anything to do with the wedding at hand. After all,” he pointed out to Lindsay, “you live here. This is your home. Everyone else was just visiting.”
Lindsay slowly removed the icepack from her eye and straightened up, looking slightly less miserable. “That’s right,” she agreed cautiously. “I suppose that could make a difference.”
“Without a doubt,” he ass
ured her.
“Besides,” Bridget added helpfully, “with only twenty people, how much could go wrong?”
Paul froze in place, staring at her. “Twenty people? You can’t be serious. We can’t possibly have a wedding for only twenty people. That’s not a wedding, it’s a dinner party! How does one even do that?”
“That’s what I thought,” Lindsay said, looking miserable again. “But …”
“But if we start trimming the guest list, someone’s feelings are going to be hurt, and we can’t afford a sit-down wedding and reception for a hundred fifty people,” Cici explained. “So we’re just inviting family and that’s just the way it is.”
“Besides,” added Bridget, remembering that she was in charge of invitations, “we don’t have time to send out that many invitations. Literally.”
“Well, it’s totally unacceptable.” Paul gave a quick flick of his wrist, dismissing the possibility, and turned back to packing his samples. “Let’s make it happen, people, think outside the box. We are not having a mini-wedding in Vera Wang, we simply are not, and that …” he tossed a challenging look at Cici as he snapped a sample case closed, “… is the way it is.”
Cici opened her mouth for self-defense, glanced at Lindsay, who had shrunk back into her chair with the ice bag covering half her face, and changed her mind. She muttered, “We’ll figure something out.”
Paul air-kissed Lindsay’s cheek and Bridget and Cici helped him carry the samples to the car. “I mean it, ladies,” he told them sternly just before he left. “We are not going to let our bride down. After all, what are the chances of her ever finding another man at her age?” Then, glancing at his watch, “Must fly. We have two guests checking in this afternoon and I have to set up the sherry tray. They’re architects! Come for brunch Sunday, we’ll iron out a plan. Kisses!” And, waving to them from the window, he drove off.
Cici followed his departure with a sour look, but Bridget just sighed and sat down on the front steps. “He’s right, you know,” she said. “A wedding where no one comes is almost as bad as a funeral where no one comes. And to go from a hundred fifty people to twenty … it is kind of sad.”
Cici sat beside her. “The church was full at my wedding,” she admitted. “My parents spent a fortune, for all the good it did. If we’d had to pay for it ourselves we would have been in debt for years after we were divorced.”
“But you got to be queen for a day,” Bridget reminded her. “And you got to have your picture taken looking as beautiful as you’ve ever looked in your life …”
Cici smiled reminiscently. “Yeah, I did. Of course …” she slid a sideways glance at her friend. “I was up all night cutting Richard out of those pictures three years later.”
“I know none of us are kids anymore, and no one wants to spend her life savings on a party,” Bridget said. “But Lindsay’s first wedding wasn’t very memorable and I know she was hoping this one could be really special.”
“Well then,” said Cici, with resolve, “we’re just going to have to make it special.”
“All we need is a plan,” Bridget said.
“Right,” said Cici, leaning back on her elbows to contemplate the options. But her tone was a little flat as she added, “Because that’s worked out so well so far.”
Bridget glanced at her, searched for an argument, and found none. In the end she just folded her hands under her chin, leaned her elbows on her knees, and agreed glumly, “Right.”
They sat there, searching for inspiration, for another ten minutes, but they never found it.
~*~
At the Hummingbird House
~*~
“The ring is precious,” reported Paul, shaking out the wrinkles of a peacock blue silk throw and arranging it in a precise triangle at the foot of the bed. “Garnet, of course, but it’s very on-trend to use semiprecious stones these days. And there are diamonds in the setting.”
Derrick said, “Well he certainly took his time putting it on her finger, if you ask me.”
“Custom designed,” Paul pointed out.
“Well, in that case …” Derrick, looking slightly mollified, gave the silver candy dish on the nightstand a half turn, then frowned. “Purline!” he called.
Their ponytailed housekeeper entered the room with a stack of fluffy towels, cobalt blue to match the color of the door that opened onto the low-roofed porch that encircled the lodge. Each room had its own entrance from the porch, and each door was painted a different, vibrant color. At first Paul and Derrick had found that bizarre, but soon came to embrace the eccentricity. Color-coding the accessories to match each door also helped Purline, who was always complaining about their fussiness, keep up with what went where.
“What?” she demanded now, snapping her gum. “You find a smudge on the windowpane or something?”
“Fives and sevens, my dear,” Derrick explained with an exaggerated air of forbearance. “Remember? We always display in odd numbers.” He indicated the small silver tray which, as anyone could plainly see, contained only six wrapped Godiva chocolates.
Paul said quickly, “I’m afraid that’s my fault. I ate one.”
Purline rolled her eyes and took the towels to the bathroom, and Derrick gave Paul a disappointed look.
“At any rate,” Paul went on, “the poor girl is a wreck.” He fluffed the arrangement of autumn wildflowers that were displayed in a hammered copper bowl on the table in front of the window. “I honestly don’t know what she’d do without me.”
“All brides are nervous,” Derrick said. “It’s part of their charm.” He examined the arrangement of blue and cream candles in the fireplace with a critical eye. “I don’t know. Time to change the display to firewood?”
“Heavens no,” said Paul. “That would only encourage the guests to light a fire.”
“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” said Purline, returning from the bathroom. “I’m the one that has to clean the ashes.”
Derrick said, “Purline, please …”
“Candy, right.” She paused to fold the throw at the foot of the bed into a neat rectangle, blew a bubble with her gum, and snapped it on the way out.
Paul immediately rearranged the throw into the perfect triangle in which he’d originally placed it. “Lindsay has bigger problems than pre-wedding jitters,” he confided. “She’s nothing but one accident after another, bumping into things, tripping over things, getting hit by things …”
“I knew a woman like that once,” said Purline, returning with the box of candy. “Turned out she was blind in one eye and didn’t even know it.” She held up a gold wrapped chocolate between her thumb and forefinger, showing it to Derrick, and then placed it deliberately in the center of the candy tray.
Paul and Derrick shared a brief concerned look, then Paul said, “I’m sure that’s not it. At any rate, Lindsay is completely convinced there’s a curse on weddings held at Ladybug Farm.”
“She may have a point,” conceded Derrick. He nudged the chocolate that Purline had just placed a fraction to the left, then gave the dish another quarter turn. He stepped back to admire the effect. “If you think about it, every time they’ve tried to host a wedding, there have been problems.”
“If you call a tornado a problem,” agreed Paul.
“Or a runaway bride.”
“I knew a fella that was hexed once,” said Purline, punching up one of the down-filled cushions that lined the Queen Anne love seat in front of the fireplace. “Every one of his teeth fell out, then he lost his job down at the water plant—’course, that might’ve been because he was so ugly, without any teeth—then he cut off his pinky with a band saw, then his wife left him and his dog ran away. Got to where people’d cross the street when they saw him coming, for fear it was catching.”
Paul and Derrick looked at each other with a mixture of skepticism and dismay. Purline began fluffing the pillows on the bed.
“If you ask me,” Derrick said, discreetly returning the center cre
ase to the cushion Purline had just fluffed, “it’s too soon after Lori’s broken engagement. Maybe there is a little lingering bad juju. It’s practically the same date, for heaven’s sake, and she’s even wearing Lori’s gown.”
“Lori, the little heathen, hated the Vera Wang,” Paul reminded him. “She wanted to cut it off at the knees and add a denim jacket!” His eyes darkened with recalled pain. “She said it was fussy! Right in front of me!”
Derrick winced sympathetically. “There, there.”
“I couldn’t snatch it off her fast enough,” Paul said, his tone still disgruntled. He went behind Purline and rearranged the pillows on the bed. “And don’t let me forget—we’ve got to find someone who can get the alterations done in a month.”
“And that’s another thing,” Derrick said. “Who plans a wedding in a month?”
“Worse,” Paul said, “we’ve got to plan an engagement party in twenty days.”
Purline said, “My mama does sewing. She could get it done for you in half the time.”
Paul gave her a smile that he hoped wasn’t too condescending. “Thank you, Purline. But … well. It’s Vera Wang.”
Derrick said, aghast, “Twenty days?”
Purline shrugged. “Suit yourself. But she made twenty choir robes in two weeks last year. Everybody still says that’s the best-dressed choir in the county.” Then she frowned sharply, “You’re not expecting me to cook for this party of yours, are you? I told you, I don’t do parties.”
“Of course not, dear.” Paul gave her arm a reassuring pat. “We’re having it catered.”
“On twenty days’ notice?” Derrick’s eyebrows lifted. “Good luck with that. The only person we know who could do a turnaround like that is Bridget, and I suspect she’ll be a tad busy with the wedding.”
“What about that young fellow who did our grand opening? He turned out to be quite remarkable, despite the debacle with the hummingbirds which, to be perfectly fair, wasn’t entirely his fault. And I’m sure he’d do us a favor. After all, we practically made his career.”