Twice Told Tail

by Ali Brandon

  Connie, meanwhile, had recovered from her momentary shock. Gripping Darla’s arm, she nodded in the direction Daniel’s partner had gone and declared, “Did you hear what that jerk said? He called me a cow! A c-cow!”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” was Darla’s tactful response to Connie’s despairing cry, suspecting that the man had intended a much cruder pejorative and had only just caught himself. Still, the bovine reference must have sounded just as insulting to Connie, given her current “Queen of the Cows” mindset.

  Detaching herself from Connie’s grasp, Darla went on. “He was probably upset over having another bride pass out on him and wasn’t thinking.”

  “Well, I’m thinking,” she huffed as she snatched the veil from her head and started back toward the main shop, Darla and Jake trailing after her. “I’m thinking maybe I don’t want to buy a dress here after all.”

  “Oh no, dearie,” Daniel interjected, breaking free of the others to follow after them. “Let’s discuss this, shall we?”

  They regrouped in the same spot where Darla and Jake had been waiting at the mirrors. With a sidelong wry glance at her that Darla took to mean I’m bowing out of this one, kid, Jake strode over to the small table to retrieve her abandoned champagne. Sighing and longing for her own glass, Darla instead tried to reason with the fuming future bride.

  “Here’s the thing, Connie. I know you’re mad, and you have every right to be, after being insulted like that,” she assured the other woman while turning a pointed look to Daniel. “That’s just what Reese, er, Fi, would expect you to do, raise an alarm like that if something looks wrong. You just went a little overboard and scared the heck out of the rest of us.”

  “Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know the dumb broad hadn’t croaked?” Connie hotly countered, flinging the veil onto the wicker sofa where Darla had been sitting. Flailing behind her to find the gown’s hooks and zipper, she added, “She looked dead to me.”

  “I’m sure it was a terrible shock, and no one is blaming you for anything,” Daniel agreed, though Darla wasn’t so sure. By now, the would-be corpse bride’s family was filing back out into the showroom, and the nasty looks they were shooting in Connie’s direction were potent enough to take out a lesser woman.

  Daniel, meanwhile, was nimbly refastening the hooks she’d managed to undo. Then, hands on her shoulders, he spun her back around so that she was facing the mirror. Catching up the veil again, he deftly placed it back atop her head before giving an approving nod.

  “Do let me apologize for my half brother,” he said, sounding repentant now. “Poor Vinnie, he’s had a recent nasty brush with death himself, and he’s not been quite the same since. I do understand your outrage at his over-the-top attitude—and, believe me, I will have a word with him about it—but I simply can’t let you walk out the door without buying this gown. It is too, too perfect for you.”

  Then, like any good salesman, he zipped his lip and stepped back to let the dress do the talking for him.

  “Well.” Connie hedged and preened a little at her reflection.

  Darla exchanged a knowing glance with Jake, who was comfortably settled back in her seat and obviously content simply to watch the action. She had seen the covetous look in Connie’s eyes when she’d first stood before the mirror wearing that dress. No way was she not going to buy the gown. The question was, how much was Connie going to make Daniel suffer before they agreed on a price?

  “Well,” the woman repeated with a shrug, expression cagey, “it’s nice for off-the-rack, I guess, but all that yelling just spoiled it for me. I don’t think I could ever wear it again without remembering that terrible experience.”

  “Maybe another discount would help erase the memory?”

  His expression equally cagey, Daniel named a new price for the gown, which Connie promptly answered with a dollar amount well below. Daniel countered with another price, as did Connie. This continued for another few rounds, until Darla felt like she was watching some strange backward auction. And then, finally, Connie nodded.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s fair. I’ll take the dress.”

  While she and Daniel headed off to seal the deal and get Connie back into her street clothes, Darla sagged into the empty seat beside Jake.

  “What an ordeal. Reese owes me big-time for this. I’d forgotten how bad it is to go wedding dress shopping, especially when you’re not the bride.”

  “Eh, it could have been worse,” the older woman pointed out. “There could have really been a dead girl in the dressing room.”

  “True.” Darla lifted her champagne glass, which held a final inch of bubbly, and went on. “I hereby offer retroactive apologies to all my friends and family who went dress shopping with me. I promise, I’ll never do that again.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Jake agreed as she lifted her own glass. “That’s why I went the easy way and wore my trusty old prom dress when I got married.”

  Darla choked on her champagne. “Wait! What?”

  Setting down the glass with a clatter, she stared at her friend. This was the first she’d heard of that situation. “Married! You were married? When? To whom?”

  Jake gave her now-empty glass a rueful look. “Oops. I forgot I tend to get gabby when I drink this stuff. I don’t suppose you can pretend you didn’t hear what I just said?”

  Not a chance, was Darla’s first thought. Jake had always been notoriously closemouthed about her personal life. Darla only knew snippets of her friend’s past, with said past limited to the time after the ex-NYPD cop had suffered her career-ending injury a few years earlier. Darla had no desire to pass up the opportunity to learn more about Jake’s mysterious former life, up to and including the fact that she’d once been married.

  Aloud, however, she virtuously said, “No worries. If you don’t want to talk about it, then I won’t say another word.”

  “Thanks, kid. And do me a favor . . . don’t mention it to anyone else, either. Maybe someday I’ll share the gory details, but right now with all this wedding dress hoohaw I’m about girl-talked out.”

  And so, while waiting on Connie, they instead spent the next several minutes chatting about the upcoming holidays. Though it was getting close to two years since Darla had taken over the bookstore from her late great-aunt, she still had to remind herself that Thanksgiving and Christmas no longer meant getting a week or two of vacation time from the job. Rather, running a retail establishment meant that she’d be there for the duration, closing only for the actual holidays. Her next real break wouldn’t come until after the new year.

  “All right, girls. All I gotta do is pay, and I’m all done here,” Connie called as, once again wearing street clothes, she headed toward the register tucked discreetly near the bridal shop’s main door.

  Jake got to her feet, and Darla did the same, gathering up her knee-length, navy blue down coat and handing Jake her fleece-lined black leather duster. Not that either of them would feel the cold on the short walk to Connie’s favorite watering hole, Darla told herself with a smile. Though since she did have to go back to work afterward, she planned to limit herself to a single drink.

  By the time they joined Connie at the register, she had already signed her charge card receipt and was holding a pink business card die-cut into the shape of a wedding bouquet.

  “I’ll put the alteration appointment into my cell right now,” she assured the man, glancing back and forth to the card as she deftly punched the keys of her oversized phone. Then, with a satisfied nod, she said, “All set. And, listen, here’s my reminder tone, since we’re going with traditional music at the wedding.”

  She pressed a key, and the first few notes of “Here Comes the Bride” pealed from realistic-sounding wedding bells.

  Jake raised a brow. “I’d have gone with Billy Idol, myself.”

  She hummed a few notes of the 1980s hit “White Wedding
” for Darla’s benefit while Daniel helped Connie into her leopard-print coat and began escorting them toward the front door. Darla, meanwhile, smiled at her friend’s enthusiastic rendition.

  “I definitely could see you doing the old step-and-pause up the aisle to that. Me, I like tradition.” And she was a bit surprised that Connie fell into the same camp. Darla pictured her marching to the altar to something trendier—a Katy Perry song, or maybe Alanis Morissette’s spoof of Fergie’s “My Humps.”

  Darla’s smile broadened as she pictured that. But before she could make that quick aside to Jake, the man she’d dubbed Mr. Customer Service—apparently, the “Vin” in Davina—abruptly reappeared.

  “Ms. Capello,” Vinnie began with a self-deprecating smile as he smoothly inserted himself between them and the door. “Please let me apologize for my earlier behavior. I must explain that it was a shock for me, as well, seeing that poor woman lying there. You see, I recently found my own father deceased in his bed, and the scene in the dressing room brought back rather unpleasant memories. I’m afraid I took out my emotional distress on you.”

  At the man’s approach, Connie had assumed a peeved expression that Darla had been certain would explode into a session of “going all Jersey” on him. Instead, Connie’s anger dissolved into a look of concern.

  “Oh, you poor man,” she replied, giving him a consoling pat on the arm. “Believe me, I know just how you feel. A few months ago, someone died during Darla’s block party, and I saw them take away the body. It was awful.”

  Probably not as awful as seeing your parent lying there dead, Darla thought, mentally wincing at the other woman’s insensitivity. To his credit, however, Vinnie did not point out the obvious. Instead, he gave a sober nod.

  “How terrible for you. And I completely understand why the sight of our poor bride lying there unconscious upset you so much. I hope this will convey how sorry I am for my boorishness.”

  With the slick moves of a street magician, he whipped one arm from behind his back. Now, Darla could see that he held a small bouquet consisting of a single white lily and a pale blush rose. The two perfect blooms were backed by a wisp of fern and tied with a mint green ribbon to make an admittedly charming arrangement.

  Well played. She silently congratulated the man. Though, given his seemingly volatile manner, he likely kept a few of those bouquets available to placate customers whom he’d ticked off. A glance over at Jake, who was rolling her eyes, confirmed that Darla wasn’t the only one who suspected as much.

  Connie, however, seemed touched by the gesture.

  “How lovely!” she exclaimed as he presented the flowers to her with a flourish. “How can I not forgive you after this?” She turned and winked in Daniel’s direction, adding, “Especially since your partner gave me such a great deal on the gown.”

  “I had no choice,” Daniel replied with a small smile that, all at once, made him look uncannily like his half brother. “I couldn’t bear to let anyone else buy that dress except you.”

  With that, the two shop owners opened the plum-colored front doors and ushered them out into the literal cold.

  “Ugh, I hate this time of year,” Darla lamented, pulling on her leather gloves as a biting blast of chilly wind promptly whipped around them. “It’s not even Thanksgiving, and already it’s almost as cold here as Dallas gets in January. I’m telling you, my blood’s too thin for New York winters.”

  Jake, who’d pulled on an oversized pair of fuzzy black earmuffs that matched her gloves, merely chuckled. “You say that every time it gets below sixty degrees. C’mon, kid, time to toughen up.”

  “Yeah, I’ll remind you of that next summer when you’re complaining about no air-conditioning,” Darla grumbled back, though she smiled as she said it.

  Whipping a plaid knit scarf from her coat pocket, she looped it over her head so that it covered her hair and ears, then tied it beneath her chin. Not the most fashionable look, she thought with a grimace as she glimpsed her undeniably frumpy reflection in Davina’s elegant display window. But when it came to cold weather, comfort trumped style.

  Then she frowned. Beyond the window display of bridal mannequins draped in a flurry of winter white tulle, she glimpsed a portion of the shop beyond. She could see that Vinnie and Daniel had returned to the same spot near the register. She could also tell that their earlier unctuous smiles were gone. Instead, both men appeared furious as they silently gesticulated in obvious argument.

  Which is why they say family shouldn’t go into business together, Darla wryly reminded herself. Aloud, she said through chattering teeth as she sidestepped a pile of yesterday’s slush, “Connie, I hope wherever we’re going for happy hour is close by. I’m going to turn into an icicle in about three more minutes!”

  Connie, looking stylish in a leopard-print cloche that matched her jacket, was busy protecting her flowers from the cold wind by hunching over them. With an awkward glance over her shoulder, she replied, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? While I was changing, I called Fi to tell him about the dress. He’s going to take an early dinner break and meet us at your bookstore, instead, so I can show him all the pictures of the gown I took. So, rain check on the drinks, okay?”

  Darla exchanged disbelieving looks with Jake, not sure what surprised her more: Connie blithely going back on her promise, or the fact she’d convinced Reese to break with tradition and view the dress ahead of the ceremony. Though, likely, Connie didn’t consider that a bridal shop selfie or two constituted actually “seeing” the gown.

  With a shiver, she replied, “I don’t mind the rain check, but I could have done without walking a dozen blocks through the modern ice age. Why didn’t you just have Reese pick us up at Davina’s?”

  Connie shot another look over her shoulder, heavily tweezed black brows rising. “He wouldn’t get there for a while, and I didn’t want to sit around looking at all those other wedding gowns.”

  They trudged on, and Darla reminded herself that if Connie could make the trek without complaint while wearing three-inch heels, then so could she in her flats. But by the time they reached the stoop of the bookstore, where Reese’s car was illegally parked, she could barely feel her toes and fingers. She held the shop door open just long enough for Connie and Jake to slip in after her before shutting it with a jangle of bells behind her.

  Brrr was Darla’s first thought. With all the energy-saving initiatives that she and James had put into place—specifically, lowering the thermostat!—the shop didn’t feel that much warmer than outdoors.

  Her second and quite arbitrary thought was that Reese looked surprisingly good in businessman’s tweed. Still wearing his long hound’s-tooth-checked overcoat, the detective was leaning up against the counter chatting with James. As the three women rushed in from the cold, the latter gave them all a friendly nod while Reese straightened to greet them.

  “Hi, Darla . . . Jake,” he said with a smile. Connie got a “Hi, babe,” accompanied by a loud smack on her lips as she snuggled up to him. “You girls have fun looking at dresses?”

  Then, noticing the flower spray Connie still clutched, he released her and took a step back, hands raised.

  “Whoa, what’s this? I thought you were going to show me pictures of a dress. You didn’t call me here so we can run off to A.C. to get married right now, did you?”

  The glare his fiancée shot him was the same look that Hamlet used on Darla when she was late filling his kibble bowl.

  “I’ll have you know, the flowers are from a very nice man at the bridal shop,” Connie exclaimed. “And no way am I going to elope to Atlantic City when I just bought the world’s most gorgeous dress that looks like a million bucks on me. Everybody’s gonna see me in it, or else. So there.”

  “Hey, it was just a joke,” he replied, though Darla heard a genuine note of relief in his voice. Then, when Connie’s glare burned still brighter—no need to crank up t
he temperature after all, Darla decided—he hurriedly backtracked. “I mean, not that I wouldn’t do it—you know, elope—if you really wanted to, but I agree with you. I think everyone ought to see you in that dress, too.”

  Then, while a placated Connie linked a possessive arm through his, he turned to the others. “So, you two look half frozen. What, did you broads walk all the way from the dress shop? I woulda picked you up if you’d said something.”

  “Yeah, we kind of thought of that after the fact,” was Jake’s wry reply as she pulled off her fuzzy earmuffs and started in on her gloves. “And, FYI, Connie still owes us a happy hour on your dime.”

  “How about we do coffee for now?” Darla suggested, still feeling a little fuzzy from the earlier champagne. She’d already shrugged off the down coat and was untying the unbecoming scarf while trying to finger-comb her auburn hair into some semblance of order. “Reese, you want me to fix you a cup?”

  “No time,” he replied with a shake of his head. “I told Connie before it was bad luck, but she’s insisting I take a quick look-see at her dress pictures. Then I gotta drive her home so I can get back on shift. But I’ll take you up on the java next time I’m around.”

  “You and your silly superstitions,” Connie countered, giving a dismissive little laugh as she released his arm. She pulled her phone from her coat and started scrolling through it, then held up the cell so he could see.

  “Here’s the front view. Don’t my boobs look great? Come on, take a look. Besides, it’s not like you’re seeing the actual dress. It’s just a picture and—A-a-CHOO!”

  Connie’s unexpected sneeze made all of them jump. She blinked and promptly sneezed again. Then, dabbing at her nose with the back of her free hand, she waved the cell phone about as if to disperse something.

  “Id’s dat stupid cad,” she exclaimed, her usual nasal tones abruptly sounding downright stuffy. “I’b allergid to—A—CHOO!”