The Pretty Delicious Cafe

by Danielle Hawkins

  Deidre was decorating a standard maple near the entrance to the marquee with fat blue satin bows.

  ‘Interesting,’ I said.

  ‘It’s ghastly!’

  ‘But look how happy it’s making her. Should we start hanging tea lights?’

  Mum dropped her head onto my shoulder. ‘Why did I think this was a good idea?’ she said.

  ‘The tea lights?’ I asked, rubbing her back.

  ‘No. Having a wedding in my garden.’

  ‘It does all look amazing,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, giving the beribboned maple a dirty look.

  It did look amazing, though, and when Rob brought Anna back, looking considerably more cheerful than she had when she left, she stopped in the marquee doorway and said shakily, ‘Oh, wow.’

  * * *

  I left at four to start barbecue preparations, taking Dad with me for the sake of my mother’s mental health.

  ‘Lia!’ Anna called, leaning out Mum’s kitchen window as we crossed the lawn towards the car. ‘Call in to the garage and just make sure Monty knows it’s two thirty, and that he’s to come to the café!’

  ‘Okay!’ I called back. ‘Only a small detour, Dad, it won’t take long.’

  I directed him across town to the garage, and he parked behind the workshop. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ I said, opening my door and getting out to cross the dusty gravel.

  Monty was peering into the innards of a grey sedan, but he straightened as I approached, wiping his hands on a bit of rag. ‘Afternoon, Miss Lia,’ he said. ‘All organised for the big day?’

  ‘Getting there, I think.’

  ‘Good on you. Jed’s back there in the office somewhere.’

  ‘Actually, I’m here to see you,’ I said. ‘Anna was wondering if you could be at the café at half past two tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘I thought the wedding was at three,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How long’s it going to take to drive down that hill? And isn’t the bride supposed to be fashionably late?’

  ‘Well, she said two thirty, and I’m not brave enough to argue with her. I just do as I’m told.’

  ‘Do you just?’ said Monty. ‘That’s not what I hear.’ Turning, he bellowed, ‘Jed!’ in the direction of the office.

  Jed put his head around the office door with a clipboard in one hand and a portable phone in the other, saw me and smiled. ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he said, coming across the workshop.

  ‘It all seems to be falling into place,’ I said. ‘Hopefully. Maybe.’ I hugged him, breathing in the sharp, metallic smell of his overalls.

  ‘Steady on there, you’ll embarrass Monty,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t actually planning to stick my tongue down your throat,’ I protested.

  ‘Go right ahead,’ said Monty. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  Jed grinned, put his phone and clipboard down on the roof of a handy car, took my face between two slightly oily hands and kissed me comprehensively.

  ‘Ah, young love,’ Monty said soulfully as we broke apart.

  I squeezed Jed’s hand – choosing, unfortunately, the broken one. He breathed in with a faint hiss.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said, letting go. ‘Damn. Sorry. See you tomorrow, guys.’

  ‘Two thirty,’ called Monty, waving his rag as I ran back across the gravel to the car.

  * * *

  Back at home, I was measuring yeast for a batch of focaccia into the bowl of the big mixer when Dad, who had withdrawn down the hall, came back into the kitchen carrying his chequebook.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ I offered.

  ‘Good idea. Got a pen? Better do something for the happy couple, I suppose.’

  ‘There should be one floating around by the phone,’ I said, filling the kettle. My cell phone buzzed, and I took it out of my shorts pocket. The message was from Anna.

  Flower girl and family arrived. May shoot myself. Actually no, will shoot Mum. And them.

  After a moment’s thought I sent back, Breathe. Good air in, bad air out. Will all be funny in 10 years. Then I made a mental note to live in sin for the rest of my life rather than contemplating anything as wearing as a wedding, switched the kettle on and started to make potato salad dressing.

  Finding that his pen wouldn’t write, Dad discarded it and rummaged through my handbag in search of another one. At which point, inevitably, he found that bloody vibrator. He turned it over, read the packet, recoiled and dropped it back into my bag.

  I couldn’t think of any comment that would make things better, so I just said, ‘Here,’ fished another pen out of the fruit bowl and handed it over.

  * * *

  That evening’s Leslie family pre-wedding barbecue was not a particularly scintillating occasion, owing both to a scarcity of relatives and a general feeling of exhaustion. It consisted of Mum, Rob, Mike, Dad, Dad’s elderly Uncle Neville and Aunty Freda from Morrinsville, and me. Gina’s lot, as well as Mum’s parents and brother, were arriving the next day.

  ‘Have you got room for some prawn kebabs, or should I grill them in the oven?’ I asked, taking a bowl of meat patties out to Rob on the kitchen porch, where he was barbecuing sausages under Dad’s expert supervision.

  ‘Bring them out,’ he said, slapping patties onto the hotplate. ‘We’ll find them a spot.’

  ‘How was the flower girl?’

  ‘Fairly special. Not as special as the rest of her family, but.’

  ‘Speaking of special,’ I said, ‘are Deidre and Ian staying at your place tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Sarcasm, Lia, is the lowest form of wit,’ said Dad, turning and going back inside.

  Rob grinned at my expression. ‘That put you in your place,’ he said. ‘Hey. Cheer up. Who cares?’

  ‘Me, a bit.’

  ‘Well, stop. Miserable old coot.’

  * * *

  Dinner, which we ate at the biggest outside table, was memorable mostly for Uncle Neville’s hearing aid. He took it out to change the battery and lost it through a crack between two boards of decking. Rob had to pry several boards off the side of the porch to make a hole to climb through and retrieve it, armed with the flashlight on his mobile phone. He found it eventually, although he found a patch of stinging nettles and a mummified hedgehog first.

  This excitement over, a lethargy fell over the party. Dad took Uncle Neville and Aunty Freda back to their motel, and Rob went home to put Anna to bed, by force if necessary. The rest of us retired to the kitchen to clean up.

  Mum filled the kettle and switched it on, yawning. ‘What a day,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve been run over by a steamroller.’ She looked at herself in the polished metal side of the kettle and made a face. ‘Damn. I look like it, too.’

  ‘You do not,’ I said. ‘Does she, Mike?’

  Mike was scraping plates into the compost bucket. Not looking up, he said evenly, ‘No. She looks very beautiful. As always.’

  Mum whipped around and stared at him, her face turning first pink and then white.

  Oh my god, I thought blankly, opening the fridge and rummaging through it at random to hide my face. Holy shit. Mum and Mike. She – he – Oh my god!

  * * *

  Long after everyone else in the house was asleep I lay awake and astonished on my sofa. Mum and Mike. Crikey. How long had he been in love with her? Years, probably. Thirty years, as likely as not.

  My right hip met something small and hard, and I fished a plastic Minion out of the crack between two squabs and dropped it on the floor. What about Mum? Was she in love with him? Yes, I thought, remembering her face. Yes, she was. No wonder she wouldn’t go out with poor Hugh. No wonder she’d been so unhappy. She’d been labouring under a hopeless passion, poor petal.

  I sat up, turned my hot pillow over and lay down again, gnawing the side of a fingernail. Well, for goodness’ sake, what a miserable waste of time. Why didn’t they stop fannying about and get on w
ith it? It wasn’t, after all, as if they were actually related. I didn’t care, and Rob wouldn’t either – would he? No, I decided, he wouldn’t. And the general public wouldn’t be all horrified and disapproving, would it? Not in the circumstances. It wasn’t as if we were talking raddled-old-cougar-leaves-husband-for-teenage-stepson, here. Giving up on sleep, I threw back the cotton blanket, got up and padded across the shadowy dining room to sit down cross-legged on the kitchen window seat in the pale grey moonlight and open the laptop.

  Can you marry your stepmother? I typed into Google.

  My first hit was a discussion forum, whose participants had supplied various discouraging comments along the line of, I guess, you sad freak, and U need therapy.

  Hmm. What sensitive and charming people.

  Eventually, however, I tracked down an official-looking document on the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs website, headed Prohibited Degrees of Marriage and Civil Union.

  Legislation specifies, it informed me, that a person may not marry or enter into a civil union with a person with whom they have a certain relationship. A person may not marry or enter into a civil union with their . . .

  A long list followed. It started with parents, grandparents and children, which you’d hope wouldn’t come as too much of a nasty shock to anyone, and moved on to more convoluted and obscure relationships. Near the bottom we reached: parent’s spouse or civil union partner, and spouse’s or civil union partner’s child. A note at the end added: This list applies whether the relationships described are by the whole blood or by the half blood. In this list, a spouse and civil union partner include a former spouse or former civil union partner, whether alive or deceased, and whether the marriage or civil union was terminated by death, dissolution, or otherwise.

  What? I thought indignantly once I’d translated this into everyday English. Well, it didn’t matter anyway; they could live together, if they felt like it. It wasn’t as if someone from the Department of Internal Affairs was going to come around and cast aspersions on their morals. On this thought I closed the laptop with a defiant sniff, retreated to my sofa and went straight to sleep.

  Chapter 30

  The wedding morning was warm, cloudy and moderately chaotic. Even Rob was affected by the general panic, and rang at quarter to seven sounding most uncharacteristically flustered, wanting a pair of black dress socks.

  ‘I’ll ask if Dad or Mike has a pair,’ I said, noticing for the first time a long red scratch along my left arm that was unlikely to please the bride. ‘And if they don’t, you could wear navy ones or something, couldn’t you? Nobody’ll see your socks.’

  ‘I haven’t got navy ones,’ Rob snapped.

  ‘I’ll find out and ring you back,’ I said soothingly. ‘And I’m sure the Four Square will have some if –’ At that point I realised I was talking to the dial tone, sighed and put the phone down.

  After breakfast I transported the cake down to Mum’s, a nerve-racking manoeuvre during which I smudged a ribbon with chocolate ganache.

  ‘It won’t matter,’ Mum said, examining the damage. ‘We’ll just put a rose over it.’

  ‘But it’s on the wrong side! The roses are only supposed to hide the joins in the ribbons!’

  ‘It will look charmingly informal.’

  ‘It’ll look like someone’s emptied a bucket of flowers randomly over the cake.’

  Mum looked at me over the tops of her glasses, which had slipped to the very tip of her nose. ‘Lia, there are over six million homeless people in Syria. That is a disaster. This is not.’

  I smiled at her sheepishly, but said, ‘It was a disaster yesterday when Rob stood on your apple-blossom penstemon.’

  ‘That,’ said Mum, pushing her glasses back up, ‘was completely different.’

  I went from her house to the Four Square, which was a sockless wasteland. Rob was in my bedroom when I got home, rummaging through my underwear drawer and swearing under his breath. He pulled out a pair of purple Merino bed socks, looked at them for a moment and then threw them at the wall.

  Managing – just – not to laugh, I tossed him a packet of black opaque knee-high woman’s stockings. ‘Here.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  ‘Just try them. It was all they had at the Four Square.’

  Rob sighed, sat down on the edge of my bed and ripped the cellophane off the packet.

  The stockings looked distinctly odd with rugby shorts, but they covered his ankles perfectly well. ‘Near enough?’ he asked, holding up one foot.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ I said. ‘I never realised you had such shapely calves.’

  ‘Lia, where’s your iron?’ Dad called, coming down the hall and putting his head around my bedroom door. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Robin, you can’t wear those.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Rob, peeling off the stockings and stuffing them in his shorts pocket. ‘Right, let’s go. You can iron your shirt at our place. Mike!’ He stood up and smiled at me. ‘Thanks.’

  I hugged him swiftly. ‘You’re welcome. See you in a few hours.’

  * * *

  It was ten minutes to ten when Gabriella and her mother arrived, despite all assurances that midday would be plenty early enough. Gabriella was no bother – she retreated to a corner and whipped out her cell phone – but her mother, Jan, was one of those disconcerting people who tell you, in graphic and unnecessary detail and after about seven minutes’ acquaintance, all about their marital problems, urinary tract infections and ongoing battles with the wankers at Child, Youth and Family.

  ‘And then I told her that she could just take her parenting course and shove it up her bum,’ she said, embarking on her third Chelsea bun. ‘What’s the red stuff?’

  ‘Freeze-dried raspberry powder.’ I was dusting friands with it, using a little cardboard stencil in the shape of a daisy. ‘It looks quite cute, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Mm. And then she had the nerve to say I might learn something! Gabby, put that down and come here, please.’

  Gabriella neither moved nor spoke.

  ‘Gabby!’

  Nothing.

  ‘Gabriella Lawson, you listen to me when I speak to you! Oh, God, I don’t know why I bother.’

  Neither did I. ‘Look, here are Anna and Deidre,’ I said brightly.

  Anna looked much less tired than she had the day before. She ran up the kitchen steps, smiled at her unwanted flower girl and turned on the kettle. ‘Morning,’ she said.

  ‘Here comes the bride,’ said Jan fatuously.

  ‘You’re very early, Jan,’ said Deidre, coming in with a dress bag over her arm.

  ‘Well, we didn’t want to miss anything. Bun?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Deidre coldly.

  Anna and I looked at each other and smiled.

  ‘What do you think?’ I said, and she came across the kitchen to inspect the friands.

  ‘Serves her right,’ she said under her breath. Then, ‘They look amazing.’

  ‘And that’s it. They’re my last job. Now we just have to get pretty. How was last night?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Anna, breathing out on a long sigh. ‘I can’t believe we’re almost there. Champagne?’

  ‘Why not?’ We both looked at Jan, considered the probable effect of a couple of glasses of champagne on someone who was already as silly as a chook, decided it would be poor but that Deidre could deal with it, and opened a bottle.

  The morning sped past in a whirl of hair and makeup and clothes. Mum arrived just before twelve looking pale and tired, with her dress in a plastic supermarket bag and dirt under her fingernails. Deidre, already gowned in hot pink shot silk and with a hot pink fascinator stuck to the side of her head, looked at her with tolerant scorn.

  My mother, however, is not just your average long-haired, ageing hippy. By twelve fifteen she was wearing a long, tight, sleeveless black dress with a Chinese collar and heavy gold embroidery, dainty gold sandals (fourteen dollars from St Vincent de Paul) and chandelier earrings. Her h
air was swept up into a carelessly elegant knot and pinned with a pair of black lacquer chopsticks, her eyes were expertly tinted in shades of purple and grey and her nails were fire engine red. She looked stunning.

  Trapped in my seat by the hairdresser, I met her eyes in the mirror and grinned. She winked at me and poured herself a glass of champagne.

  ‘You look like a movie star,’ said Jan in awe. ‘Doesn’t she, Deidre?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Deidre in a small, flat voice. It was lovely.

  If Mum looked like a movie star, Anna was a dream princess in her wedding dress. She was tall, slim and flawless, her dark hair pinned loosely at the nape of her neck and her cream silk skirts falling in soft, graceful folds to her feet.

  Deidre fastened her last button and stepped back, and Anna turned to face us. Nobody said anything, but Deidre, Mum, the photographer and I all started to cry.

  ‘What?’ cried Anna. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ said Gabriella wonderingly.

  ‘Shit,’ said Deidre through her tears. ‘My mascara . . .’

  * * *

  Anna’s father and Monty both arrived promptly at two thirty. While Deidre adjusted her husband’s hair, tie, cuffs and expression – ‘Smile, Ian! It’s a wedding, not a funeral!’ – I went out to talk to Monty, who was polishing the roof of his vintage Rolls with his handkerchief.

  Looking up, he smiled and gave a long, low whistle.

  ‘Wait till you see Anna and Mum,’ I said, reaching up to kiss his cheek. ‘Nice suit.’

  He tugged at his tie. ‘Damn thing. What time are you wanting to leave?’

  ‘Five to three.’ Which should, factoring in driving time and final dress adjustments, bring the bride’s arrival on the scene to ten past. Fashionably, but not annoyingly, late. ‘Come on in.’

  ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘I’d only get underfoot.’

  ‘Lia, you’re wanted for more photos!’ Mum called, appearing at the kitchen door. ‘Hi, Monty, come in and have a cold drink.’

  There was a last-minute flurry of pictures before the photographer, taking Mum to direct him (and, bless him, Jan to get her out of the way) and warning us to give him a good head start, drove off down the hill into town. The rest of us tucked Anna into the back of the Rolls, flanked by her parents and with me and Gabriella in the front, and followed. Then we were hurrying across the lawn to regroup around the corner of Mum’s house, out of sight of the wedding guests. Deidre brushed frantically at Anna’s skirt – Mum rushed out of the kitchen with our bouquets – Gabriella announced that she was going to throw up – the processional music, selected by Rob and swathed until now in deepest secrecy, started, and Anna dissolved into laughter as she realised he’d chosen ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 miles)’ by The Proclaimers.