A Wedding on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Paul looked up from the computer and blinked, as he often did when seeing Harmony, and Derrick, on the opposite side of the antique partners desk, gazed over the top of his reading glasses in bemusement. “Belly dancers?” he repeated, trying to look open-minded. “Walking on fire?”

  Purline, in skintight jeans and a cropped tank top with beaded fringe, squeezed past Harmony. The two women gave each other a single head-to-toe look that left no doubt about what each one thought of the other’s outfit, then Purline turned to Paul. “The folks in the red room want to know could we fix them a picnic lunch to take out to the falls.”

  Paul managed to tear his gaze away from Harmony to Purline, but his dismay only grew as he took in her attire. It wasn’t her mostly bare torso that offended him so much as the sheer tastelessness of the fringe, but he resisted the urge to cover her with his jacket. He and Derrick had already discussed the fact that they could hardly criticize Purline’s taste when they tolerated Harmony’s and they furthermore, quite frankly, couldn’t afford to lose either one of them this close to the party. He replied instead, distractedly, “Ruby room, Purline. It’s the ruby room. And I’ve told you before, whatever our guests want, it’s theirs without question. I’m sure you can find some cold chicken and potato salad.”

  “They want,” replied Purline pointedly, “a bottle of that fancy wine you charge eight dollars a glass for.”

  Derrick lifted an eyebrow. “Well, of course that would be extra.”

  “And do you want me to send out your nice glasses with it, or plastic cups?”

  Paul said, “Real glasses, of course!”

  Derrick’s lip curled slightly in distaste. “Do we even have plastic cups?”

  Harmony spread her hands wide, her eyes shining with passion. “We’ll dig the pit behind the butterfly garden, and fill it with green laurel. We’ll light the fire at sunrise and let it burn all day.”

  Purline looked at her skeptically. “You planning a barbeque?”

  “No,” Paul said quickly. “No barbeque. No pit, no belly dancers.”

  Purline said, “Well, that’s good, because laurel wood is about worthless for smoking meat. Unless you’re planning on roasting a goat, maybe.”

  “But it’s the laurel smoke that calls down the favor of the spirits,” Harmony explained patiently. “That’s the whole point.”

  Paul turned back to Purline. “Be sure to fold up a stadium blanket in the picnic basket. You can use that to cushion the glasses.”

  “I was going to use the one you keep on the back of the rocking chair.”

  “That’s cashmere!” Paul and Derrick objected at once.

  “And belly dancers,” Harmony went on, smiling benignly, “have been a symbol of fertility and feminine power since ancient times. Of course you want to celebrate your friends’ marital union with the gift of belly dancers!”

  Purline rolled her eyes and muttered, “I told you that woman was going to turn your party into a circus.”

  And before either Paul or Derrick could admonish her, Purline threw up her hands and turned to the door. “Got it. No cashmere, no plastic, charge ’em for the wine.”

  “But for heaven’s sake, don’t put a bill in the picnic basket!” Derrick called after her, and she waved him away over her shoulder.

  Paul turned to Harmony with a breath. “Harmony, we appreciate your help, but all we really need is a caterer who doesn’t mind driving out here and who can do the event on short notice. We’ve already taken care of the entertainment.”

  “Not a problem,” Harmony assured them with a flick of her wrist. “I just booked Ahmed Bianca out of Richmond. He specializes in Moroccan.”

  “Moroccan.” Paul and Derrick looked at each other thoughtfully.

  “That’s an interesting idea,” Paul allowed.

  “I had a lamb tajine in London that I still dream about,” Derrick recalled.

  “And what about the spareribs mechoui that we had in that little place in Georgetown?”

  “To die for,” admitted Derrick.

  “No one else would think of doing a Moroccan garden party.” Paul’s excitement was growing. “But it’s perfect for this time of year. We’ll get wrought iron braziers and light them all around the patio and the garden paths, and cover the tables with paisley …”

  “Blue clay pots with herbs for centerpieces,” put in Derrick.

  “Surrounding a single sunflower,” added Paul with an approving nod.

  “And Moroccan tiles as chargers.”

  “Perfect!”

  “And,” declared Harmony, beaming, “the belly dancers will go on just as the sun reaches the crest of the mountain—”

  “No belly dancers!” declared Paul and Derrick as one, and Harmony turned a very stern look on them. They held steady.

  “Fellows,” she said after a moment, “I really can’t help but feel you’re not properly exploiting my talents. I have so much to offer, and your vision is so limited.”

  Derrick looked as though he wanted to take offense, but Paul spoke up quickly. “Limited vision,” he agreed. “Completely limited.”

  She regarded him for a moment as though debating whether or not to pursue the issue, then seemed to concede. “I’ll speak with Ahmed about the menu,” she said.

  “Mention the tajine,” suggested Derrick.

  “We could serve it in white ceramic bowls with a wedge of pita,” suggested Paul.

  “With a single edible flower on top,” added Derrick.

  “Divine,” declared Paul.

  Harmony folded her hands at her waist and smiled at them beatifically. “Now,” she inquired, “where shall we dig the fire pit?”

  ~*~

  Kevin and Lori took their gelato across the street and sat at the base of a fountain to people-watch. If there was one thing Siena had plenty of, it was fountains. This particular one featured three giant horses with their hooves raised in battle while sheets of water cascaded over their greenish-bronze forms. Lori used to be impressed by things like that. Now she barely noticed.

  “So,” Kevin said, digging the wooden spoon into his cup, “Sergio seemed nice.”

  Lori groaned out loud. “You met him.”

  “Also his lovely wife.”

  She muttered, “Crap.”

  “And his mother, and his father …”

  “All right, already. Jeez.” Lori scowled as she applied herself to the gelato.

  Kevin gazed mildly ahead, his expression all but obscured by the sunglasses. “So I’m guessing this Sergio dude is the one you’re supposed to be madly in love with, and his dad is who you’re supposed to be working for.”

  “I never said madly in love,” Lori protested quickly. “I never said that.” And then she sighed, licking the back of her spoon. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  “Couldn’t possibly be.”

  She gave him a dark look. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

  “It didn’t require a private detective, if that’s what you mean. You told your folks you were working at the Villa Laurentis. The Marcellos were nice enough to tell me where you were really working. You’re just lucky it was me, and not your dad, who decided to fly over and surprise you. Seriously, how long were you planning to keep this up?”

  Lori stretched her legs out in front of her and crumpled up her empty paper cup, her expression glum. “I don’t know. As long as I could, I guess.”

  “I don’t see the point.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Seriously? Kevin the Wonder Boy, who never made a mistake in his life. What do you know about anything except the view from your ivory tower?”

  He seemed to tense a little beside her, and Lori thought she might have hurt his feelings. She was so wrapped up in her own misery that she didn’t much care.

  She said after a time, “Are you going to tell my mother?”

  He finished his gelato. “That depends.”

&n
bsp; “On what?”

  “What the story is.”

  He held out his hand for her empty cup, and crossed the street to dispose of it. He returned after a moment with two bottles of water, and handed one to her. He opened his bottle and took a sip, but didn’t say anything else. He just waited while the fountain splashed behind them and the tourists paused to aim their cell-phone cameras, and a group of men in white shirts strolled by, talking loudly in Italian.

  Lori said, “I got to know Sergio—kind of—in college, when I was researching internships. He helped me line up a summer job at the winery, but he never told me it was his family’s business. Of course I figured it out later, but by then it didn’t matter because I broke my leg and couldn’t go, and then I met Mark …” She glanced at him. “You know about Mark? I was engaged to him. And when that blew up … I mean, when I screwed that up …” She shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea to try to pick up where I’d left off. I always had this fantasy that something great was waiting for me in Italy, like my destiny, you know? And okay, so for a while maybe I thought it was Sergio. But, you know, while I was engaged to Mark of course I knew Sergio was seeing someone else. Why shouldn’t he? I just didn’t know he had married her. Not until I was here, anyway.”

  She lifted the water bottle and took a long drink, eyes straight ahead. “Still, his dad wanted to honor his commitment and offered me an apprenticeship and a place to stay, which was nice. But after a few days I could tell that wasn’t going over so well with certain other members of the household.”

  Kevin murmured, “I can imagine.”

  She looked at him sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re kidding, right? No woman wants her husband’s old flame moving into the house, especially when she looks like you.”

  Lori wrestled for a moment between insult and flattery, then let it go with an unhappy shrug. “Anyway, it wasn’t his wife. It was his mother.” She took another drink of water. “Italian women are strange.”

  Kevin laughed softly, but stopped when he saw the look on her face. “So you moved into town and told them to forward your mail so your folks wouldn’t know what had happened,” he guessed.

  “More or less.”

  “I still don’t know why you didn’t just go home.”

  “Like I said, you wouldn’t.” And when he drew a breath for a sharp retort, she held up a staying hand. “People like you don’t have any idea what it’s like to be me. I changed my major three times in college. I had an affair with a married professor. I flunked two courses. I left UCLA because I couldn’t keep up and I barely made it into UVA. I got engaged to the most wonderful guy in the world and walked out on him three months before the wedding. All I’ve ever done my whole pathetic life is screw up and waste chances and I just couldn’t face that look in my mother’s eyes one more time. You’re good at everything, Kevin, you always were. You were team captain, you were class president, you made law review, you didn’t just pass the bar, you practically sailed over it, and the next thing we know you’re pulling down a half mil a year and dating the boss’s daughter. You’re in the top freakin’ one percent, what can you know about what it’s like for the rest of us who are barely squeaking by?”

  “Not the top one percent,” Kevin said. He took a drink of his water and replaced the cap. He glanced at her, trying to coax a smile. “Maybe the top ten.”

  But Lori just stared miserably at her feet. “Don’t you get it, Kev? I’ve never been good at anything. Not one single thing. I had one chance to do one thing right, and—surprise! I blew it again. I can’t go home. Not ever.”

  Kevin said, “Well then, you’d better start learning Italian, baby, because the only job lower than the one you just walked out on starts on a street corner about three blocks from my hotel.”

  She lunged angrily to her feet but he caught her arm. “Forgive me, princess, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for anybody who could solve all her problems with one phone call to her rich daddy back in the States. You’re not the only person in the world with troubles, you know, and most of them are a lot worse than yours.”

  She jerked her arm away and for a moment they glared at each other, her nostrils flared, his lips set tight. The silence grew a little awkward, both of them realizing that they did not want to spend whatever time they had together fighting, but neither one of them knowing quite how to end it.

  Lori muttered, “You always were a prick.”

  He replied, “And you always were a brat. Now it seems to me you’ve got two choices. You can stalk away in righteous indignation, or you can let me buy you that dinner. What’s it going to be?”

  In another moment she sank back down beside him, her hands clasped loosely between her knees, still scowling. “It had better be expensive.”

  He grinned a little, and nudged her gently with his elbow, and this time, after only a slight hesitation, she smiled back.

  ~*~

  “Yes’m, it was a blow, a real blow,” said Farley solemnly. “She was a fine woman. I appreciate all them cakes and casseroles you left, though.”

  Lindsay patted his arm sympathetically, and Cici added her own murmurs of sympathy. This was the first time they had seen Farley since his sister-in-law’s funeral.

  Bridget’s eyes were brimming with compassion. “It’s never easy to lose a family member. You just let us know if there’s anything we can do, you hear? And I wrapped up a cherry pie for you this morning. Don’t leave without it.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Miss Bridget.” He touched the brim of his camo cap respectfully, his ginger-bearded face softening as he looked at her. “That’s right kind of you.”

  He was a gruff mountain man with a limited vocabulary and a rather unpleasant chewing tobacco habit, but in all the years the ladies had lived in the old house he had never failed to show up when they needed him, whether it was with tiles to repair the roof or a sheep dog to gather escaped livestock or a tractor to clear their snowed-in driveway, and he never charged them more than ten dollars. Not ten dollars an hour; just ten dollars. It was no secret that he had a tiny crush on Bridget, which was hardly discouraged by the fact that she was always sending him home with pies and cakes and plates of cold chicken—which was only fair, she insisted, considering all the cheap labor he gave them.

  He turned to Lindsay. “I hear you’re getting married, Miss Lindsay.”

  Lindsay beamed at him. “That’s right. Next month. We’re going to have a big party here afterwards. You’re invited, of course.”

  He replied by spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the soda can he carried for that purpose. “You need anybody to say the words over you, you let me know.”

  Lindsay looked briefly horrified, but disguised it quickly with a smile. Farley, as it turned out, was a mail-order cleric who had saved their spring blessing of the vines ceremony when he stepped up to the occasion. Weddings were, of course, another matter entirely.

  “Thank you, Farley,” Lindsay said, “but I’ve already spoken to Reverend Holland.”

  “Well,” he agreed, shifting the tobacco wad to the other cheek, “wouldn’t want to cut into his business none.”

  Cici came to Lindsay’s rescue, even though she was barely able to keep a straight face herself. “Farley, we’d better get started before it gets too hot.”

  For the next two hours the house rocked with the clatter and crunch of demolition and disposal. Nails screeched and posts fell. Farley lowered four-by-sixes through the window and into the waiting bed of his pickup truck with a thunderous clatter while Cici filled barrels with smaller pieces of debris. Lindsay decided this would be a perfect time to drive over to the Hummingbird House to consult with Paul on some wedding details, and Bridget locked herself in the workroom with six dozen gift bags to fill. Ida Mae turned up the radio, opened the kitchen windows, and started a batch of apple-cheese bread that could be frozen until it was time to turn it into finger sandwiches for the wedding.

  Farley left w
ith a truck full of scrap lumber, ten dollars in his pocket, and a cherry pie on his front seat. Bridget tied back her hair, grabbed a broom and dustpan, and went upstairs to help Cici. The space was still covered with plaster dust and plastic drop cloths, the furniture from both rooms had been piled in the hall, and the wallpaper still clung to the grayish, bedraggled walls in a few stubborn patchy spots. But for the first time, with the dividing wall gone, the room was revealed for what it must have been in its prime and soon would be again: a light open space with high whitewashed ceilings, dark wide plank floors and soft sunshine filtering through the two big, wavy-paned windows. When they first moved in, Cici had built a closet for each room and had spaced them against the far walls, so that a nook was now opened up on either side of the big room. The fireplace with its painted mantel was now perfectly centered, rather than crowded against the door as it once had been, and already Bridget could envision two wing chairs drawn up before it, maybe with a comfortable ottoman between them holding a tray and two wine glasses, and a pretty shawl casually tossed across the arm of one chair. She had already purchased five gallons of Wedgewood blue paint, because Lindsay said that was one of Dominic’s favorite colors, and bright white for the trim and the paneled wainscoting that defined two walls and was now a rather nondescript eggshell color. There was an Oriental carpet in the attic done in shades of blue and gold, and Lindsay had some gorgeous cobalt pieces that would look stunning on the bookshelves Bridget intended to persuade Cici to build. She couldn’t wait to get started.

  “Wow, Cici, this room is going to be gorgeous. What a difference! You know what we should do? We should put up a curtain and keep this place off-limits to Lindsay until it’s finished, then do a big reveal just like they do on those television shows. Oh! We could put a bow across the door, and bring Dominic and Lindsay up to see it at the same time!”