Elly in Love (The Elly Series)

by Oakes, Colleen

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The wedding day started with an overcast sky. Elly pushed back the curtains and frowned, hoping that Lola’s big day wouldn’t be ruined by rain. She showered and put on her outfit for delivery (a super combination of sexiness that no man could refuse: tan Crocs, gray yoga pants, and a long black T-shirt embroidered with her store logo) and pulled her plastic-wrapped dress for the evening from the closet. Her wedding invitation had arrived in the mail last week, a gorgeous navy striped envelope made of linen that unfolded to become a pop-up invitation exploding with orchids and raised piping inviting her to the wedding of Lola Plumb and Joseph Keats. Elly was thrilled and nervous. She had attended weddings in the past that she had also designed, and it never went well. Even though she was supposed to be a guest and enjoying herself, Elly was always checking centerpieces and keeping a wary eye on the bridal bouquet as it was flung every which direction during the reception. Eventually, she would always excuse herself to the bathroom and then make a hasty retreat after sneaking a piece of cake. In short, it was not very fun. But this was different. Elly had forged a bond with Lola, and it was an honor to be invited to the wedding of the year. Sadly, the only man she wanted to be her date would be breaking it off from her tomorrow night, so that wasn’t going to work.

  Tightening her ponytail, she headed down the hallway to Dennis’s room. He was still asleep. She nudged his arm once, twice, and then finally, using a trick she learned from her mom, pinched his arm softly.

  “Wha’?” He lurched up in bed.

  “Oh, hey. I was wondering if you wanted to be my date for Lola’s wedding tonight. She invited me.”

  Dennis rubbed the sleep out of his blue eyes. He looked better than Elly had seen him look in a long time. “Uhhh … really? You don’t want to ask Anthony?”

  Anthony. Elly cursed herself for forgetting Anthony. He would have been a fabulous date, whereas Dennis looked less than thrilled. It was too late to ask him now. “Well, you don’t have to go.”

  “Yeah, I might not. It’s just, you know, not my thing. Sorry.”

  Elly patted his leg. “That’s okay. Go back to bed.”

  With a grumble, Dennis buried himself under the sheets and began snoring almost immediately. Elly smiled. Somehow, she had never been happier to have him in her house. After yesterday, when she feared she might lose him forever, stinky laundry piles didn’t seem so bad. She grabbed a piece of homemade quiche from the fridge—thank you Kim!—and headed down for what might be the longest day ever.

  As always, the cameras were waiting for them. Elly assembled her team around her—Kim, Snarky Teenager, Anthony, and about seven extra workers that Kim had found—and explained their tasks for the morning, which had been broken into five parts: transportation, communication, set-up, clean-up, and finalization. Elly bounced nervously on her toes, praying that the different flowers wouldn’t cause Gemma to have a nervous breakdown, or even worse, Lola to be thrown off her fragile tightrope.

  Snarky Teenager looked down at the sheet with her directions. “I’m on finalization? Without you? What about you?”

  “I’m going to the wedding.”

  Their mouths dropped open. “You get to go to Lola’s wedding! You aren’t cool enough to go to Lola’s wedding!”

  “Maybe not, but I got an invite. And yeah, it was awesome.”

  Snarky Teenager stomped off, grumbling to herself as she began pulling things out of the cooler. Elly only heard snippets. “Ridiculous … not even … ideal bone structure … love handles … made out with a French model … twice.”

  Elly walked over to her. “I’ll make sure everything is perfect before I go. But I’m trusting you with the final check. That’s the most important job there is.

  “Yeah, yeah.” She hoisted a box of fifteen twisty glass vases spilling over with varying shades of pink and white sweet pea onto her slim shoulders.

  “Are you good with that?”

  She eyed Elly. “If you ask me again, I will murder you in your sleep with your own muumuu.”

  “Okay, then.” They began loading up the flowers, one huge box at a time into air-conditioned vans that idled outside. There was so much work that two of the cameramen finally put down their cameras to help them, feeling guilty as they all labored in front of them.

  Elly did a final check on the store, carrying Lola’s bouquet in her hand, not trusting anyone to move it except for her. It was strange to be in her clean store, when she knew that outside, eight vans were bursting with more flowers than she had ever transported in her life. The fan circled overhead and she closed her eyes. Oh please Lord, let this all be okay. Let Lola have the day she deserves. With that, she blew her little studio a kiss and headed to the wedding of the year.

  The ceremony was at Homestead, a pre-Civil War farmhouse and venue that had just opened in St. Louis. And by “just opened,” it meant that Lola’s wedding would be the first one there.

  When Elly walked inside the farmhouse at eight a.m., chaos was already expanding outwards from its wooden walls. The owners of the venue were there, along with probably thirty hired hands, each doing something different to transform the home into a lush floral garden with a nautical theme. Elly began to walk up the aisle.

  “No!” barked a producer with a microphone attached to his ear.

  Elly stopped. “What?”

  “You cannot walk up the aisle. Only Lola can walk up this aisle. It will be the first time anyone walks up the aisle, ever! Get back!”

  Elly stepped back, annoyed. “How are we supposed to decorate the aisle without walking up the aisle? It’s not like we just have a few pew clips. I need to lay a carpet of intricate petals here.”

  The producer waved her off like she was some sort of annoying insect. “Figure it out.” He leaned into his microphone. “Gemma. We have a crisis on our hands. The bottled water just arrived and it’s not Voss. Yeah, I know. Call in the big dogs.” He walked away, snapping orders.

  Elly looked up at the ceiling, which was being draped with a fabric chevron with navy-and-white stripes, interspersed with dangling crystal chandeliers. It would not be her choice to cover a gorgeous farmhouse with fabric to make it look like a chic hotel, but it was Lola’s wedding, not hers. She turned to her workers, who were standing behind her, waiting patiently for directions. “Okay. Go.”

  They took off in different directions, Anthony to deck out the entrance to the barn with ivy, ferns, and seven huge urns filled with bright-blue delphinium, seeded eucalyptus, and white dahlias hedged with lavender. Kim went to set down the bouquets in the bathrooms, the dressing rooms, the pre-wedding bar area, and to scatter them in the offices that rested above the barn.

  With a bright smile, Elly turned to Snarky Teenager. “We can’t walk down the aisle.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s new.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yup. But, it’s the way it is.”

  “Fine.” Snarky Teenager began hauling the buckets over the side of the pews and winding her way sideways to the place where the aisle met the wooden pew. Elly followed her and they began assembling the complex aisle pieces. First they hung delicate wreaths made of Queen Anne’s lace and mint. Each wreath connected to a hanging white lantern that just dangled above the wreath. Candles would be inserted into the lanterns just before the ceremony, something that was thankfully the job of the caterer. Elly hated working with fire for obvious reasons: she had a distaste for being burned alive.

  After the lanterns and wreaths were connected to every other aisle, totaling forty in all, they began working on the complex petal aisle—the exact concept that had won Elly the bid in the first place. Each taking buckets full of rose petals in a single color, Elly began with white at the start of the aisle, pouring out petals over the pew, then using a rake to spread them in a thin layer, and then repeating. At the same time, Snarky Teenager was pouring out fuchsia rose petals at the end of the aisle near the makeshift altar. As t
hey edged closer and closer to each other, they both began using different hues, assembled in numbered buckets ahead of time. Elly’s petals grew progressively darker, while Snarky Teenager’s grew lighter. Eventually, they met in the middle with two buckets of the same color petal, a medium pink with beautifully crinkled petals. Finally, hauling their buckets away with them, they climbed up the spiral staircase at the back of the farmhouse to look down on the aisle.

  “Wow,” breathed Snarky Teenager as she took pictures with her phone. So that’s what an unlimited budget could buy. The ombré pattern leapt out from the floor, a gradual transition from white to dark pink, one petal at a time. They had worked swirls into the design, inspired by the Hokusai paintings of the great wave. Huge crests of pinks tinging with white swirled over the floor. It was incredible and strange at the same time. “That,” breathed Snarky Teenager, “looks awesome.”

  Elly looked at her watch. It was almost noon—how had that happened? She turned to mention something to her blond coworker, but she was already making her way down the stairs to start on the next project: setting up the huge candelabras draped with white dendrobium orchids, something stark and simple to set off the elaborate floor design. She watched as Snarky Teenager made her way to the front, directed some of their hired workers on how to help her, and began mounting the elaborate orchid display. She watched the way that she navigated the workers, and how she quickly adapted to the fact that the candelabra was about four feet larger than they had been told. She directed those around her, and incorporated herself physically into the set-up, something that Elly always struggled with. A tiny piece of jaded shell broke off her heart and Elly found herself surprised in the best sort of way. Somehow, without her even noticing, Snarky Teenager had become manager material. She no longer needed Elly’s directions or guidance. She had handled the flower crisis—undoubtedly the biggest crisis in Posies’ history—with grace under pressure. Elly found her eyes swelling with tears. The girl was ready. She wasn’t wearing a bra, but she was still ready. Her fears about the new store evaporated into the wide loft, and Elly felt everything falling into place. Something was subtly telling her to let go of the reins and trust. Elly tried to listen carefully.

  “Hey! Hey!” Elly looked down to where Snarky Teenager was staring at her with her arms raised in confusion, her loud voice echoing through the farmhouse. “Are you going to just, like, stand there and dream about bundt cakes or are you going to help us?”

  Elly grinned in spite of herself.

  She left the farmhouse a total mess, leaving Snarky Teenager, Anthony, and two workers behind to finish the decor, taking Kim and the rest of the hired hands over to the reception. Kim was grinning the entire ride over.

  “What are you smiling at? Aren’t you exhausted?” Elly was. Her back was throbbing from bending over the pews like some sort of panda scaling a bamboo, and the pain was starting to make its way around to her ribs and jaw.

  Kim wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel and tilted her high ponytail to the side. “Nothing. I’m smiling about nothing. I’m smiling about the wedding.”

  Elly tilted her head as she massaged her soft belly. “You are lying. I can tell. Do you think I don’t know when you are lying by now?”

  Kim bit her lip. “I’m just happy to be delivering with you, that’s all. I miss this! I miss crazy deliveries and designing and movie stars….”

  “We’ve never had movie stars before. We did have that one really mean lady who was a soap star in the eighties.”

  Kim laughed. “Lucille B.? Oh, I love her! She only wants red carnations. It’s so adorable. But seriously, Elly, I’ve noticed something about you today.”

  Elly squinted. “What is that? That my boob sweat levels have reached a catastrophic level?”

  “No. It’s that for the first time in a long time, you aren’t complaining about Dennis. For the past few months, every time we get together, you’ve complained about Dennis, and that was fine with me, because you had plenty of reasons to complain, and you know, your drama is like, mah stories, but….” Her azure eyes twinkled in the warm white light coming through the windshield. “You seem much happier. About Dennis.”

  Elly pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes and shrugged. “We’ll get there. If I had grown up with my father instead of my mother, I would be Dennis, only with a weakness for wine. Can you imagine how terrible I would be?”

  “True story.” Kim pulled the van up to the curb with a jerk. The flowers inside the van bounced and swayed. “Are you ready for this?”

  Elly stared up at the Fabulous Fox Theater, the same place that she had met Lola for lunch that day. It seemed like a million years ago. This place, a St. Louis staple of art and theater, would be the place where St. Louis would host its most famous wedding to date. The outside, which was sort of unremarkable, was already being transformed by a film crew. Black umbrellas were being hoisted around a building that had hosted the likes of Nat King Cole and Mae West. The crowd of cameras and unidentifiable people all dressed in black—was that like the uniform for Hollywood?—parted and Elly saw Gemma Reynolds stomping toward the car, a clipboard in her hand, dressed head to toe in a sharp white suit.

  “Oh, crap,” muttered Kim, and bolted out of the door. “I’ll begin unloading!”

  “Wait, don’t leave me here!” Elly tried to grab Kim’s arm.

  “No way! You are my best friend, but she’s terrifying. Sorry, love you, you are a wonderful person!” Kim scampered off with two oblong boxes of navy vases filled with a single pink ranunculus.

  “Uh….” Elly pressed herself against the side of the van, hoping that Gemma was maybe looking for someone else to scream at.

  She wasn’t. “Where the hell have you been?” Gemma’s normally pristine helmet of brown hair was curling at the tips. “I didn’t even know if you would show. And what is this I heard about the flowers? I thought you would replace the original order, but your assistant told me that you are going a completely different direction then the one we discussed.” She was practically spitting now as she stalked toward the van doors. “I knew we should have hired a larger shop. You might want to think about getting yourself a lawyer. Lola would rather have no flowers than crappy—” She opened the van and her voice faded away.

  Elly quietly suppressed a snarky smile. When you looked at all the flowers smushed together (carefully!) in a car, the effect was almost overwhelming, like trying to understand a Monet painting from very close up. The colors simply burst into your vision, an almost sexual explosion of delight and texture.

  “I … uh … wow. Okay.” Gemma didn’t know what to say. Finally, she swallowed and her clipped British speech returned. “Well, this is certainly different from what Lola was expecting. I’m not sure how she’s going to feel about this.”

  Elly tied her apron tight around her waist and pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. “Honestly, Gemma, Lola doesn’t care. This wasn’t ever truly her wedding, anyway. You came up with everything for her. Do you know I was really the only vendor she told what her true vision for her wedding was?” Elly gestured to the huge, grand theater as workers carrying a giant ice statue of a fleur-de-lis straggled past. “If Lola had her way, she would be in a backyard somewhere, wearing a linen dress, and carrying a bouquet of carnations.”

  Gemma tucked back her tiny lips. “I’m aware of Ms. Plumb’s tastes. But we can’t have something like that on our show. This is a major production, Ms. Jordan.”

  Elly began separating out the centerpieces, which were cluttered into small bundles. “Lola’s entire life has been a production, Ms. Reynolds, and her wedding should be whatever she wants it to be. I never thought I would say this, but I’m glad that her original shipment of flowers didn’t make it. Those flowers weren’t Lola, those flowers were you. Lola isn’t a rare breed of lily of the valley or an expensive orchid from Thailand. You are. You are elegant and straightforward, down to your bones. I get it, I love those flowers. But Lola is wilder, and more
down to Earth. These flowers,” she gestured to the van, which burst forth with local blooms, “are Lola. And she will love them. And so will your viewers, if they are the right kind of people.” She pushed past Gemma, who was crossing her arms and pouting. “Now, if you will please excuse me, I have to hurry and get everything set up inside, so that I can get myself ready for the wedding.”

  Gemma slipped her tortoiseshell glasses down her nose and was looking at her clipboard while tapping her foot. “What do you mean, get ready?”

  “Oh, I’m attending the wedding, didn’t you know?”

  She looked up at Elly. “You must be joking. A vendor has never gone to the wedding, especially one of this size, and you won’t exactly, you know, fit in. Her guests are Hollywood’s elite. George Clooney is coming.”

  Elly turned on Gemma. “I will be going, because Lola invited me.”

  Gemma’s wide eyes looked confused. “But,” she sputtered, “who will watch the flowers?”

  At this, Elly gave a sharp laugh. “They are flowers, not children. They won’t run off if we don’t watch them. I will have a member of my team here tonight to keep an eye on things, but I plan on enjoying myself. I’m sure I’ll see you later. Now, if you will please move out of my way, I have a wedding to set up.” She sidestepped Gemma and left her standing by the van, looking bewildered. Elly grinned to herself as she walked in the door, past the lenses of a dozen cameras that had surely just caught her discussion with Gemma. She was somehow sure that their conversation wouldn’t make it past the cutting-room floor.

  The floral set-up for the reception took four hours and nine people working until their hands, riddled with small cuts, cramped up and stopped working. After setting the last flower on the cake, Elly looked down at her pink rubber watch with a grimace. Not only would she not have time to go home, shower, and change for the ceremony like she had planned, but if she wanted to have a prayer of making the ceremony, she would have to leave right now. Her dress was in the car, but the rest of everything she needed was at home. It wouldn’t work. There was no way.