Cara’s stomach was already in knots. She wondered if Patricia was aware of the way her “dear friend” Cullen Kane had managed to so thoroughly torpedo her personal and professional life.
She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel just slightly after her car was finally speeding along the flat, featureless low country on the South Carolina side of the bridge. Glimpses of marsh flashed by, of elderly men with cane poles fishing on muddy creek banks, of elegant white egrets soaring over the green-gold grass, of rusted, aging mobile homes separated from the highway by little more than a weedy patch of dirt.
Thirty minutes later she slowed the car for the turn down the crushed-gravel drive to Cabin Creek. It was five till two, and she felt relief at the sight of Brooke’s white Volvo sedan parked behind her mother’s sedate gray Mercedes. There was always a fifty-fifty chance their harried bride might not show up.
Libba Strayhorn met her at the back door, dressed in a short, mint green cotton dress, pearls, and low-heeled sandals. Her blond hair curled just below her chin. Cara realized she’d never seen her client’s hair, because Libba was never without her baseball cap.
“You’re staring,” Libba said, as she ushered her inside.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen you so dressed up before,” Cara admitted.
“Doesn’t happen very often,” Libba said cheerfully. “I had an altar guild meeting at church this morning, and I haven’t had a minute to change. But I’m going to, right this minute.”
She gestured toward the kitchen wing. “Everybody’s out in the kitchen getting something cold to drink. Go on in, and I’ll be right with you as soon as I get out of this rig and into something comfortable.”
* * *
As soon as she walked into the kitchen, Cara sensed something was amiss. Marie sat at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap, glancing anxiously in the direction of the French doors that led to the patio. Patricia sat at the far end of the table, her head bent, furiously typing something into her Blackberry. But where were the bride and groom?
Ahh. Finally, she saw Brooke and Harris, outside on the patio. They stood close together, talking quietly, but Cara could tell from the angry set of Harris’s usually placid face and the animated flashing of Brooke’s hands that they were arguing.
Marie winced. “They’ve been out there for about ten minutes. Brooke is really wound up about something. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
Patricia looked up from her typing. “I heard them when I walked up to the house, they were so involved, they didn’t even notice me. It’s all over this silly bachelor party tomorrow night. Brooke is being ridiculous.”
“Why do you say that?” Marie said, her voice uncharacteristically sharp.
“She’s making this big fuss about nothing. It’s a bachelor’s party, for God’s sake. A bunch of guys hooting and hollering at a strip club. So what? It’s harmless. A rite of passage. My son’s friends all do it before their weddings.”
Marie stared down at her iced-tea glass. “Brooke won’t see it like that.”
“Then she needs to get over herself,” Patricia shot back. “Harris is a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
Marie’s eyes narrowed. But before she could respond, Libba bounced into the room. She wore faded blue jeans, a loose-fitting T-shirt, tennis shoes, and her ever-present Cabin Creek baseball cap again, and her dog was right on her heels.
“Thanks for your patience, ladies,” Libba said. “I feel soooo much better. You know, every year I swear I’m not going to dress up for these darned altar-guild meetings, and every year, I bow to peer pressure, and put on the dress and heels and pantyhose. And every year, I want to kill myself. It’s torture! And I’ll tell you right now, I am not wearing hose at this wedding. My mother-of-the groom dress is floor length, so nobody but me and Jesus will be any the wiser.”
“Ooh, good idea,” Marie chimed in. “Mine is long too. And I despise pantyhose. Let’s make a pact. We’ll call it a hose-free zone.” She looked over at Patricia. “What do you say? Are you in?”
Patricia stopped typing on her Blackberry and slipped it back into her Louis Vuitton tote. “Sorry, girls. My dress is cocktail length. And Gordon thinks sheer black hose are terrifically sexy.”
“You’re wearing black to the wedding?” Libba blurted. “Isn’t that considered bad luck, or taboo or something?”
“Not for stepmothers,” Patricia purred.
Two pink spots bloomed high on Marie’s cheeks. The awkward silence was broken when the French doors opened and the bride and groom stepped inside.
Brooke’s eyes were red-rimmed, and Harris was stony-faced. He looked from his mother to Cara to Marie. “Can we just get through this, please? Brooke says she has a meeting back in town.”
“Sure thing,” Libba said. “Let’s start in the ballroom.”
* * *
The ballroom had been freshly painted and wallpapered, and Libba Strayhorn was tickled to be showing it off. She linked her arm through Marie’s as they walked around the room.
“I don’t know why we waited so long to freshen this room up,” she said, pointing out the new window treatments, and the polished floors. She looked over her shoulder at Brooke, who hadn’t uttered a single word since the tour had started.
“Thank you so much, Brooke, for agreeing to have the wedding over here. Even that old skinflint Mitchell is pleased with how things have turned out.”
Brooke forced a smile. “You’re welcome, Lib. It looks great.”
Cara paced off the room and showed the women the floor plan she’d drawn up for the bandstand, dance floor, ten-top tables and chairs.
“Do we have the fabric samples for the tablecloths yet?” Patricia asked, studying the sketches.
Cara blinked. “I thought you’d seen them, Patricia. I sent them to Brooke two weeks ago. The seamstress called yesterday, she thinks she’ll have them done early next week.”
Patricia glared at Brooke, who blandly looked away. “Sorry, I guess I forgot. I think I still have the sample in my car, if you really care.”
“Not at this late date, I don’t.”
“Okay, good,” Brooke said, smirking.
“I just love paying for something I haven’t even seen,” Patricia said under her breath.
Marie glanced helplessly from Cara to her daughter to Libba. The tension in the room was nearly as thick and unpleasant as the June humidity.
“Let’s go out and see the barn,” Libba suggested brightly. “You’re simply not going to believe how it looks.”
* * *
Cara let out an inward sigh of relief when they approached the barn and Jack’s pickup wasn’t there.
But there were signs everywhere that he and Ryan had worked their magic. A wide new walkway of worn flagstones wound through the newly mown field toward the barn. Nearby, an old farm wagon had been planted with white geraniums, trailing Swedish ivy and swirls of blue plumbago.
“After the guys cleaned the barn they dragged that out, and I told them to just take it to the dump,” Libba said. “The next time I walked over here, it looked like that.”
“The flagstones were Jack’s idea,” she said. “He pointed out that walking through the field would ruin everybody’s shoes, and particularly Brooke’s wedding gown, if they had to trail in the grass. And God forbid there might be rain that night.”
“It looks like it’s always been here,” Marie said approvingly. She glanced at Brooke, who trailed a few yards behind. “Isn’t it lovely, Brooke?”
“Nice,” Brooke said.
Cara stopped dead in her tracks as they got closer to the barn. It had been a month since she’d last been out to Cabin Creek, and the transformation in that time was dramatic.
The cracked and faded exterior barn boards had been pressure-washed and patched, with the new boards carefully stained to blend with the old. The standing-seam tin roof gleamed brightly in the glaring afternoon sun. Wide new windows had been cut into the walls
, but the glass was old and wavy, with true divided lights picked out in a deep gray that contrasted with the original silvery exterior color.
Libba walked up to the newly painted glossy black barn doors. “This is one of my favorite things,” she crowed. She touched a black iron latch, and both doors slid open on the wrought-iron sliders.
“Isn’t that amazing? Those old doors, I could hardly yank them open anymore. Jack and Ryan found these doors and rigged some system of weights and counterweights, and I can open them with no problem.”
Libba spread her arms wide, her face wreathed in smiles as she stepped inside the barn. “Ta-da!”
* * *
Brooke stood in the middle of the barn and burst into tears.
“Honey?” Harris gingerly wrapped his arms around his fiancée. “Don’t you like it?” He rested his chin on Brooke’s shining hair and looked to his mother for help.
Libba shook her head, speechless.
It was Patricia who finally broke the silence. “It’s spectacular.”
“It’s … it’s just so beautiful,” Brooke said, her voice breaking. She turned and hugged Libba. “I can’t believe you did all of this just for us.”
“Well, to be honest, it was for me too,” Libba said, rubbing Brooke’s back. “Just call it a labor of love.”
* * *
Their footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged room. Cara craned her neck to see the exposed trusses and beams overhead. Sturdy industrial-looking galvanized light fixtures hung from thick ropes, illuminating the space below.
“Should we take off our shoes?” Patricia asked, already slipping out of her own Prada pumps.
“Not at all,” Libba said. She leaned down and ran a hand lovingly over the burnished wood floors. “These boards came out of a closed-down textile mill in Spartanburg. They’re old-growth pine. If you look carefully, you can see old grease stains and holes where machinery was bolted to the floor, and gouges and dents. I love them just the way they are, and Jack and Ryan agreed. The more beat up they get, the better they’ll look.”
“If you say so,” Patricia said, her tone implying that she thought otherwise.
“It’s a barn,” Libba said, chuckling. “A really expensive barn, but I didn’t want it too tarted up.”
“Look up there, Brooke,” Harris said, pointing to the gabled east end of the barn. “The old hayloft.”
“Harris and his high-school band used to practice up there,” Libba said. “Mitchell used to say the racket they made would make the neighbor’s cows go dry. Brooke, I bet you didn’t know you were marrying a musician.”
“I didn’t,” Brooke said.
“That’s because we sucked,” Harris said. “Called ourselves the Chiggers. We were trying to be badass, but mostly we were just bad. And asses.”
“I’ll bet you weren’t that awful.”
“Actually, they were,” Libba volunteered. She drew Marie aside and pointed again at the hayloft. “I had the guys reinforce the floors with steel beams, and that rail is reinforced too. Someday, my grandbabies will play up in that loft, just like Harris and Holly did, and their daddy before them.”
For a split second, Cara saw a tiny pucker form on Brooke’s smooth brow.
“Jack had a great idea,” Harris said. “He said we should put the DJ booth up there for the after-party.”
Brooke pointed at the sturdy ladder leading up to the loft. “But how would he get his equipment up that ladder?”
“If you open that door back there behind that partition, you’ll see how,” Libba said. “The guys put in a nice wide staircase. And underneath it, there’s a new bathroom too.”
Marie shook her head. “Libba, I’m just stunned at everything you’ve accomplished in such a short time.”
Cara was already pacing off the room, admiring the honest grace and simplicity of the old structure’s lines. She reached out and touched a silvery board and felt a deep twinge of regret. Jack Finnerty had rebuilt this barn, poured his sweat and passion into every detail and rediscovered its beauty. She wished she could tell him how moved she was by the artistry of his work.
But that ship had sailed.
Libba was still beaming as she led the group out of the barn. “I asked Jack for a fireplace back in the barn, but he talked me out of it. There just wasn’t going to be time to build a suitable rock chimney before the wedding.”
She pointed to a cleared area on the south side of the barn. “Instead, he’s giving me a fire pit over there. He and Ryan will build some benches from wood left over from the barn.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Cara said. “If you don’t mind, maybe we could move that old cart over near the fire pit. We can use it to set up the bar and the dessert buffet.”
Cara turned to Marie. “Layne is baking homemade chocolate-dipped graham crackers and her own marshmallows for s’mores at midnight. And we’re going to do a signature Cabin Creek cocktail. It’s basically an old-fashioned, but we’ll use this new bourbon from a distillery in Americus. And we’ll serve them in pint Mason jars.”
“Americus as in Georgia?” Patricia laughed. “No thanks. Give me a dry martini any day.”
Cara couldn’t resist the challenge. “You might be pleasantly surprised, Patricia. I’ve had this bourbon, and it’s really quite good.”
“I think this all sounds great,” Marie said. She looked around to seek her daughter’s agreement, but Brooke and Harris had drifted away from the others. They were standing under the shade of a pin-oak tree several yards away, deep in discussion, and from the looks of their expressions, things had gotten heated again.
“Brooke, Harris,” Marie called, determined to draw them out of their argument. “Did you hear what Cara said about the Cabin Creek cocktail?”
Brooke shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks, and stomped off.
“That sounds fine, Marie,” Harris called. Then he hurried off in his fiancée’s wake.
A few minutes later, they heard car doors slamming, then Brooke’s Volvo, roaring up the road in a cloud of dust.
“Oh my,” Libba said, shading her eyes with her hand as she watched Harris’s car follow a moment later.
Marie sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Libba. Brooke’s just a bundle of nerves these days. It’s this trial she’s working on. I’ll be so glad when it’s over. This is classic Brooke. She’s so intense and driven when it comes to her job. She was the same way when she was in school. She’d make herself sick worrying and studying before a big test. She’d convince herself she couldn’t possibly pass, and of course, she always did. I don’t remember her ever making anything lower than a B-plus.”
“Brooke is so unlike Gordon in that way,” Patricia piped up. “He’s always so calm and confident. I think he actually thrives under pressure.”
Marie gazed wordlessly at her ex-husband’s new wife. She started to say something, but stopped herself.
“Never mind,” Libba said soothingly. “Whatever is going on between the kids, they’ll work it out.”
“I hope so,” Marie said.
52
Cara felt like a wrung-out dishrag by the time she finally parked her car on the street outside Bloom. It was nearly 5:30, but she was surprised to see that the garden cart was still on the sidewalk, and through the window she spotted Ginny Best, still seated at the worktable, poking daisies and zinnias into a round glass bowl.
“Oh hi,” Ginny said. She held up the arrangement. “What do you think?”
“Mmm. Needs something else. Maybe some of those little miniature blue irises.” Cara looked around the shop. “Where’s Poppy?”
“Out back,” Ginny said, going to the cooler for more flowers. “Some guy came by to see you earlier. I told him you’d be back late in the day.”
“What guy?” Cara asked, grabbing a bottle of cold water from the fridge in the kitchenette. She left the fridge door open, uncapped the bottle, and swigged deeply as the cool air chilled her damp skin. She felt a tiny prickle
of hope. Could it have been Jack? Was it possible that he hadn’t totally written her of?
“He didn’t tell me his name,” Ginny said. “He was kind of a hottie, though. Blond hair, Ray-Bans. Your boyfriend?”
Cara choked, spewing water over her chest and chin. She grabbed a paper towel and mopped her face. “Not even,” she said.
“Oh.” Ginny nodded. “I think I get the picture.”
“Thanks, Ginny. You can go on home now. I don’t want you working a ten-hour day. I can finish that in the morning,” Cara said.
“Okay,” Ginny said, hopping down from her stool.
Cara fished a puppy treat from the jar on the counter and unlocked the back door, bracing herself for Poppy’s typical rocket launch of unbridled puppy love.
At first glance, she thought the dog was sleeping. Poppy lay motionless on the sun-baked bricks.
“Here girl!” Cara called gaily. “Treat time!”
Poppy raised her muzzle and whined. That’s when Cara saw the taut rope leading from the trunk of the crepe myrtle to the dog’s neck. That’s when she noticed the reddish trickle staining Poppy’s platinum curls.
“Oh my God!” Cara cried. She dropped to the ground, her fingers shaking uncontrollably as she worked at the knot attached to her pet’s collar. Poppy whined again, but she didn’t squirm. All the fight had already gone out of her.
The bricks beneath Cara’s knees scorched her skin as she fumbled helplessly with the tangled cord. “Oh my sweet girl. My poor sweet girl,” Cara crooned. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, but was probably less than a minute, she tossed the rope aside. Cara unbuckled the dog’s collar, flinching at the sight of the bloodstained fur.
She felt Poppy’s nose. It was dry. She looked around for her water bowl and saw it, just out of reach, turned on its side.
Save the Date Page 33