Save the Date

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Sure,” Wendy said. “You know him?”

  “Just of him,” she said. “I guess he has some pretty fancy clients.”

  “I’d say so,” Wendy said.

  Cara was still looking at all those flowers by the loading dock. “Wait a minute, Wendy. He’s got tons of pink tulips. But I didn’t get any. And I specifically ordered three dozen.”

  Wendy shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it, Cara.”

  “Since when?” Cara asked. “You’re the owner. Come on, Wendy. You know this isn’t right. I might not order as many flowers as this new guy, but I’ve been a good customer. You can’t just short me like this. At least split the order with me.”

  “Oh, Cara,” Wendy sighed.

  Cara could sense she was softening.

  “Wendy? Don’t do me like this. Please? I need those tulips.”

  She shook her head, then gestured toward the buckets of flowers, looking furtively around the warehouse. “I can spare a dozen of these pink tulips.”

  “Two dozen,” Cara said, not too proud to beg. “I’ve got all these tabletops at the golf club.”

  “Eighteen,” Wendy said. “Take ’em, but be quick about it. I don’t want Allen to catch me raiding his customer’s order. I’ll adjust your bill. Now shoo, before I change my mind.”

  * * *

  Cara spent all Tuesday morning scrounging up enough greenery to fill in for the missing flowers for her centerpieces—snipping asparagus ferns from one friend’s garden in Ardsley Park, Meyer lemon leaves from a client’s courtyard, and silvery-gray lamb’s ears from the hip-pocket-sized container garden she tended behind the shop. She made a trip over to Whole Foods and bought four fat pots of pink hydrangeas, wincing at the cash register while she paid retail prices for the flowers.

  She’d even made a quick trip out to Wilmington Island, where she knew of a thick patch of blue plumbago growing in the Publix shopping center parking lot. She’d parked her car right by the patch, snipped a big batch, then fled like a thief in the night. It wasn’t really stealing, she’d told herself. The plumbago needed trimming.

  All that foraging put her behind schedule—she’d intended to get to the golf club by ten. She had her arms full—a huge cardboard box containing eight square glass centerpieces, plus the corsages in their clear plastic clamshell boxes. She looked around the nearly empty lobby, wondering where the party was being held.

  Lillian Fanning hurried toward her. She wore a sleeveless coral sheath, matching sling-back heels, and a necklace of twined turquoise, coral, and seed pearls. “Cara!” she called. “We’re back here, in the grill.” Lillian looked pointedly down at the thin gold watch on her wrist.

  “Hi, Lillian,” Cara said. “Sorry to be a little late.“

  Lillian glanced over at the box. “Those look nice,” she said. “I’m so glad you could do this. I know it was short notice, but after seeing all the beautiful centerpieces you did for Torie, I just couldn’t settle for those dreary little half-dead flower sprigs the club puts out for luncheons.”

  “Happy to do it,” Cara said, struggling to keep up in Lillian’s wake.

  The tables in the grill had already been set for luncheon. Pale pink cloths covered the rounds, and somebody, Lillian, she assumed, had placed tiny wrapped boxes at each place setting. Cara hurried around the room, depositing the centerpieces where Lillian directed.

  They heard voices coming from the doorway. “Oh good,” Lillian said, turning to see the first arrivals. “That’s Lindsay.”

  “Then I’ll just get out of your hair,” Cara said. She unloaded the corsages onto a chair and made a beeline for the door.

  * * *

  She was streaking across the lobby when she heard a familiar voice call her name.

  “Cara! Yoo-hoo!”

  Vicki Cooper and a woman Cara didn’t recognize were walking toward her.

  Cara pasted a smile on her face and wiped her palms on the seat of her capris. She was sweaty and her clothes were smudged with specks of mud from her morning of greenery wrangling, and she should have stopped back at the shop to change her clothes before delivering the flowers to the club, but time had been her enemy all morning.

  Vicki Cooper, on the other hand, looked fresh as a daisy in a sleeveless black silk dress, silver wedge sandals, and chunky silver bracelets and hoop earrings. Vicki’s shimmery white hair hung to her shoulders. Her deep blue eyes were lightly made up and she wore a peach-colored lipstick. At sixty, Vicki looked like what Cara wanted to be when she grew up.

  “Pretend you don’t see me,” Cara told Vicki, giving her a quick hug. “I’ve been playing in the dirt all morning, and I’m a big mess.”

  “You look fine! Cara, I want you to meet Faith McCurdy. Faith, this is our favorite florist in town, Cara Kryzik. She did all the flowers for our son’s wedding, and she’s an absolute genius.”

  The other woman was in her early sixties, dressed in a tidy shirtwaist dress, heels, and hose. “So nice to meet you,” she murmured.

  “Faith’s nephew Tyler Carver is married to Lindsay Fanning,” Vicki said. “Is that what you’re doing here? Flowers for the baby shower?”

  “Just delivered them,” Cara said. She looked around the lobby and saw several groups of women walking toward the entrance to the grill. “And I better move along.”

  “Oh, don’t run off just yet,” Vicki protested, catching Cara by the arm. “Faith, you go ahead on. I’ll be along in a minute. I just want to chat with Cara for a moment.”

  Vicki drew Cara to an alcove on the far side of the lobby, gesturing for her to sit on a settee looking out on the golf course.

  “I won’t take a minute of your time,” Vicki started. “Just wanted to check. Did you hear from Marie Trapnell?”

  “I met with her yesterday. Thanks so much for the referral.”

  “Well?” Vicki raised an eyebrow expectantly.

  “It’s … complicated,” Cara said. “Marie is very nice, and we hit it off immediately. But it sounds as though her ex-husband is the one who is really running the show. She says he’s got another florist in town he’s very interested in working with. I told her I understand…”

  “What?” Vicki’s voice echoed through the high-ceilinged room. “Are you telling me Gordon Trapnell now fancies himself as an event planner?”

  Cara looked around the room, uneasy at discussing a client’s private life, even if the client might not even turn out to be her client.

  “According to Marie, Mr. Trapnell wants to be involved in every aspect of his daughter’s wedding.”

  “Oh, puh-leez,” Vicki drawled. “Gordon doesn’t care a thing in the world about this wedding. He just wants to make a big show of being the adoring daddy to his darling Brookie, because he’s eaten up with guilt over his shabby treatment of poor Marie. Which he should be. But Brooke’s a smart girl. She has no illusions about Daddy Rat.”

  “This doesn’t sound like something I need to get in the middle of,” Cara demurred.

  “What exactly did Marie tell you—about the circumstances of her divorce?” Vicki asked, leaning forward. “Come on, you can tell me. It’s not like it’s a secret.”

  Cara shrugged. “She didn’t get into the details. She just said she thinks Brooke feels torn—between loyalty to her mother, and anger at her father. Something about the second wife?”

  “Patricia,” Vicki said. “Or Patti, as she used to be called before she decided to reinvent herself. Patricia Showalter Linencamp Trapnell. Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t missed much,” Vicki said. “What a remorseless little tramp she is. And when I think about how she had all of us fooled…”

  Cara twisted around in her chair. She really needed to get back to the shop. And she didn’t want to be seen slinging mud with Vicki Cooper right in the middle of the golf-club lobby. It just didn’t look right.

  “I know, I know, you think this is all just petty gossip,” Vicki said. “But you know me, Cara.
I never gossip.”

  Cara struggled to keep a straight face.

  “How did you leave it with Marie?” Vicki asked.

  “I just asked if she could let me know by Friday whether or not her ex had decided to hire this other florist his new wife, Patricia, knows.”

  “Oh yes, Cullen Kane, boy wonder. Patricia’s new best friend. I hear they’re practically joined at the hip these days. And that’s who Gordon wants to hire to do the flowers for Brooke’s wedding?”

  “I think so,” Cara said. “Although Marie did say her ex might want to interview me.”

  “Absurd!” Vicki said. “Gordon doesn’t know the first thing about flowers. This is all Patricia’s doing.”

  “I might just go ahead and bow out,” Cara said. “After all, if they really want Cullen Kane…”

  “Don’t you dare!” Vicki said sharply. “This is all just a control issue. Gordon wants to prove that he still has Marie under his big fat thumb, that’s all.”

  “Still, if he’s paying for his daughter’s wedding, you can’t blame him for wanting to be consulted.”

  “Marie doesn’t need Gordon’s money to pay for Brooke’s wedding. She inherited more money than he’ll ever think about having, from her grandfather when he passed away last year,” Vicki confided.

  “I’ve known Gordon for years and years,” Vicki said now. “Patricia too, for that matter. And I hate what the two of them have done to Marie. She’s a shell of her former self, Cara. Would you believe, she used to be a senior vice president at one of the biggest ad agencies in New York? She’s twice as smart as Gordon ever hoped to be, but gave up her career after she married that goober. Even after she had Brooke, Marie was a powerhouse. Headed up the development committee for Brooke’s school that raised a five-million-dollar endowment fund, was on the board of the library, she helped get the book festival started here, chaired the United Way campaign…”

  “Really?” It was hard for Cara to reconcile the image of a powerful business executive with the nervous, uncertain woman she’d met the previous day.

  “The divorce shook her to the core,” Vicki confided. She made a face. “When I think of that weasel Patricia, pretending to be Marie’s dear friend all those years—it literally makes me sick. You think you know somebody, right? And then they turn out to be a devious, backstabbing bitch.”

  “You were friends with this Patricia?”

  “Honey, we all ran around in the same crowd. Brooke and my Cason started preschool together. Patricia’s twins from her first marriage were a year older, and anyway, after Patricia split with Billy, her second husband, she shipped the boys off to military school and that was the last we saw of them. I never liked Patricia, her pretensions were always a little much as far as I was concerned—but our husbands were business associates and golf buddies. You know how that works in this town.”

  Cara did know.

  “When Patricia snaked Gordon away from Marie, she did more than just wreck a marriage. She broke up our supper club—couples were taking sides, of course, and it wasn’t fun anymore. Our book club dissolved—Marie was the glue, and after she quit coming, because of Patricia, we never got back on track. I know it’s selfish of me, considering what Marie has been through, but really, even though it’s been four or five years, I’m still so mad about book club I could spit!”

  As she talked, Vicki was idly watching the flow of traffic in the country-club lobby. Men in golf and tennis togs filtered in, heading for the men’s card room; young mothers with small children in swimsuits came in from the pool. Vicki’s eyes widened.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” she said, her voice low. “Speak of the devil.”

  Cara casually glanced to her left. Two women were walking in, their heads bent together in conversation. They headed toward the main dining room.

  “The blonde? With the face transplant? That’s Patricia,” Vicki murmured. “I don’t know the gal she’s with. Probably one of her new friends from Charleston. She pretty much burned all her bridges here, so she had to go trawling up there for some new besties.”

  Patricia Trapnell was scanning the room as she walked. She spotted Vicki Cooper, gave her a bright smile and a finger wave, then turned back toward her friend.

  “She knows better than to try to speak to me,” Vicki said bitterly.

  Cara saw an opening and went for it. “Thanks for the backgrounder on the Trapnells, Vicki. It’s probably a good thing to get the whole story before I meet with the husband. But I have a feeling this is all going to be moot, if Patricia is that close to Cullen Kane.”

  She stood up to leave, but Vicki seized her by the arm.

  “Look, Cara. I know you don’t want to get involved in some messy intramarital showdown. All I’m saying is, don’t back down just yet. I’m thinking Marie is about to get fed up with Gordon’s dictatorial bullshit. And when she does, she’s going to want Brooke’s wedding to be everything that girl has dreamed of since she was in pigtails. You’re the one who can give her that. Right?”

  “Maybe,” Cara conceded. “Guess I’ll just have to wait and see how the interview goes.”

  12

  The courtyard garden behind the little shop on Jones Street was what convinced her not to leave when Cara was considering moving the shop after she inherited it from Norma.

  Cara told herself that she stayed out of convenience. Plus, there was the space itself—high-ceilinged and airy, with a wide front window looking out on the street, a serviceable office nook, and a nice-sized workroom that could be curtained off from her showroom. There was space in the showroom for her flower cooler, and shelves that held the various unusual and vintage containers and knickknacks she sold in addition to her flower arrangements. There was a dedicated parking space out back for the delivery van. And the block itself was a good one, on tree-shaded West Jones Street, surrounded by private residences as well as a handful of discreet businesses: a trendy women’s boutique, a gift and card shop, and a pair of antique shops.

  On the downside, she’d had to put hours and hours of sweat equity into transforming the place from Norma’s to Bloom: sanding and refinishing the floors, painting the exposed brick walls, and having display shelves and tables built. It was only when her costs began to mount up that she’d had to go to her father, hat in hand, to beg for a loan.

  She might have been okay after that, if life hadn’t happened. If the van hadn’t needed a whole new suspension. If the computer hadn’t died, if she hadn’t had to pay for expensive photography to showcase her portfolio on her website. If. If. If.

  Still, most days, she was at peace with the decision to stay on Jones Street and live above the shop. And the thing that that made her heart really sing about her new home was that pocket-sized courtyard garden. It was surrounded by a high wall of aged Savannah gray bricks, and the design was simple, two narrow rectangular planting beds outlined with more brick and a border of dwarf boxwoods.

  A brick walkway bisected the space, and there was a small brick-paved patio.

  When she’d inherited the lease from Norma, the beds were overgrown with chickweed, privet, wild onions, and morning glories that spilled over the borders and onto the basketweave brick walkway. A ginormous wisteria vine with a trunk the size of her waist had taken up occupancy in the right rear corner of the courtyard, and its tendrils had wound their way clear around the brick walls and up a neighbor’s two-story-high camellia.

  Busy with remodeling the downstairs, she’d had no time to spend on that garden, until her marriage crumbled and she’d retreated to the apartment on the top floor of the building.

  Cara had barely unpacked her clothes before starting her assault on the garden. Every morning at daylight she had donned jeans and work gloves and headed out to the courtyard to do battle for a couple of hours before going to work in the shop. She hacked down most of the wisteria and weeded the borders for what seemed like weeks. Her hands were left blistered, and callused, and every night when she soaked in the claw-f
oot bathtub in her upstairs apartment, she got a kind of grim satisfaction from viewing what she saw as the battle scars from a failed marriage.

  Leo called. He texted. But when he dropped by the shop, Bert gave him the cold shoulder and glared at him with undisguised loathing. Leo suggested counseling. That’s when Cara suggested he get their house listed and sold, because she needed her share of the equity to grow her business.

  Leo gazed at her with his round blue eyes—the ones she’d gazed into on her wedding day, when he’d promise to love her forever. “It was a mistake. All right? How many ways can I tell you I’m sorry? Didn’t you ever make a mistake you came to deeply regret?”

  “Yes,” Cara said gravely. “Marrying you. Believing you would be faithful was a mistake. That’s my big regret.”

  * * *

  When she’d cleared out the invaders in her courtyard, she’d been thrilled to find the bones of a lovely old garden. Hiding in the shadow of the wisteria she found a beautifully mottled marble birdbath with a bowl shaped like a sunflower. With Bert’s help, she’d dragged it into the center of the courtyard and dug out a circular bed and planted lavender, rosemary, creeping thyme, and three different varieties of scented geraniums at its base.

  As the weather warmed up and spring arrived in Savannah, she was thrilled when an unnamed heirloom rose she’d pruned back sprouted new canes and brought forth a froth of delicate white blossoms with orange-tipped centers.

  When one of her elderly spinster Jones Street neighbors died, Cara went to the estate sale and bought two huge old terra-cotta pots, which she dragged home in a rusty little red wagon she’d found in a trash pile down the lane. She dumped out the hideous cast-iron plants that had filled those pots for decades, and in their place she planted a pair of lemon trees.

  She planted banana trees in the far corner of the beds and underplanted them with hostas, ferns, and ruffly bicolored caladiums.

  Leo called one day to tell her the house was under contract. The next day, when she knew he’d be at work, she drove the van over to the house, and let herself into the back gate. With Bert’s help, she loaded up the only furniture she really wanted from her previous life, a pair of teak Luytens benches that had been a wedding gift from her father.