Halfway to Half Way

by Suzann Ledbetter

  Marlin looked at David. "Amazing coincidence about that prowler complaint to the Sanity PD and the two geezers who pointed Constantine and Sheib at Royal's grave. Want to bet one of 'em was decked out like a referee and the other was fat and bald?"

  "Nope."

  "Want to bet the call to 911 came from the same pay phone as the one to Toots?"

  "Nope."

  "Want to bet a certain wacko wannabe Sherlock's fingerprints are on that shovel handle, along with Chlorine Moody's?"

  "Yep. Twenty bucks?"

  Marlin deliberated, then muttered a curse. "All right, all right. If the old bastard finished what Chlorine started, he'd have been smart enough to wear gloves."

  "Black ones is my guess." David grinned. "You know. To match the paint job on his golf shoes."

  18

  From the outside, Claudina Burkholtz's house was a bleak, asphalt-shingled rental, but the home's drabness ended at the front door. Gallons of brightly hued paint had transformed the ugly birch paneling into pastel galleries for the kids' framed artwork.

  Dressed in panties, nylons, ecru stiletto heels and a longline bra, Hannah stood on a sheet laid over the floor's crazy-quilt carpet squares, while the Great Slip Debate raged on behind her.

  "Quit being so bossy, IdaClare. The slip goes on first, then the dress over it."

  "I am not being bossy, Margaret. If you think Dixie Jo slaved for an hour on that mop of hair just to wreck it, you've gotta another think comin'."

  Mop of hair? This from a woman who dyed hers pink? On purpose? Hannah gritted her teeth, determined not to morph into Bridezilla, regardless of provocation. The Constitution only guaranteed a fair trial, not the jury of twelve newlywedded women who'd acquit her in a nanosecond.

  "Margaret?" Rosemary laughed. "Whenever I called one of my kids by his Christian name, it meant somebody was about to get a whipping."

  IdaClare harrumphed. "The somebody that ought to be whipped is whoever thought one o'clock in the afternoon in August was the perfect time for an outdoor wedding."

  Jeremy Burkholtz, sitting in the recliner in his underpants and black dress socks, aimed a sympathetic look at Hannah. He and his sisters had been privy to a couple of Claudina, Luke and Hannah's prenuptial meetings. Jeremy raised a small bowl of M&M's where she could reach them, as if it were a last treat before the flogging commenced.

  "Thanks, sweetie, but I can't breathe as it is." Hannah smiled. "Okay, exhaling is doable. It's the inhaling that makes me see spots."

  "How come?"

  "Because wedding dresses are torture devices in disguise, and women are insane enough to buy them."

  Jeremy's freckles shifted as he pondered, then asked the inevitable "Why?"

  An attempted chuckle sounded like the Heimlich maneuver performed on a duck. "For the same reason we buy blouses that button up the back and shoes that hurt to walk in. To look pretty for you guys."

  "Sheriff David says you're pretty because you don't put too much gunk on your face, and you laugh a lot and you don't get mad when you get dirty."

  Hannah's belly did a little flip-flop. Eat your heart out, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "That's why I'm marrying him. Sheriff David likes me just the way I am."

  Jeremy popped a few candies in his mouth and crunched them. "Then how come you've got a lotta gunk on your face and you haven't laughed once all day?" A rhetorical question, apparently, since he wriggled around in the recliner and returned his attention to the cartoon on TV.

  Months ago, Polly had taken Hannah's breath away with a similar dead-on remark. Breathing being severely compromised at the moment didn't lessen the impact of Jeremy's observation. Whatever the older Burkholtz kids might have inherited from their father, their directness came from Claudina.

  Rosemary gasped and said, "Hey, I know. We'll put a bag over her head while we pull the dress over it. Surely Claudina has a paper grocery sack, somewhere."

  "If she doesn't," Marge said, "a plastic one will do. We'll just have to hurry so she won't suffocate."

  IdaClare insisted, "Dress first. Slip pulled up from underneath. And that's final."

  Hannah pictured herself in the strapless bra, hose and heels, with her head stuck in a Price-Slasher supermarket bag like a frozen Thanksgiving turkey. The giggles amped to whoops of laughter. It hurt like hell, but she couldn't stop.

  At a teary-eyed glimpse of the three horrified godmothers clutching her dress, the crinoline slip and, in Marge's case, a plastic shopping bag with the empty shoe box inside, Hannah lost it again. She clogged in place, as Dixie Jo's artful, sausage-curled creation yielded to hysterics and gravity.

  Claudina rushed in from the back bedroom, where she'd been helping Polly and Lana into their flower girl ensembles. "What's going on? Hannah? Are you okay? Lord-a-mercy, girlfriend, are you laughing or crying?"

  Both, actually. Hannah waved a hand, not trusting herself to answer without going loony tunes again.

  IdaClare, who was seldom at a loss for words, diagnosed prewedding jitters. She sniffed, huffed, then sniped, "I suppose we needn't worry about mussing her hair anymore. Dixie Jo is going to faint dead away when she sees what you've done."

  "Let her," Hannah said, not unkindly. "Look, I love you all and I appreciate everything you've done, but I'm just getting married, not ascending the freakin' throne."

  She took the slip from IdaClare. Teetering on one leg, she inserted the other through the waistband. "I mean, c'mon. It's ninety-seven in the shade outside. Instead of birdseed bags, we're doling out tiny bottles of sunblock. The county coroner's officiating, so nobody'll get mad that we picked minister A over minister B through Z. A bluegrass band named for their overalls is playing the wedding march, and the ring bearer's still in his Batman Underoos."

  Pulling the slip into position, Hannah fumbled for the zipper. "We—me, especially—caught a bad case of perfect wedding-itis." Chin down, more or less addressing her crotch, she added. "Heck with perfect. Legal, binding and fun, we can shoot for. If we're lucky, nobody'll pass out from heatstroke and need the ambulance standing by behind the gazebo."

  She grinned and planted her hands on her hips. "So here's the drill. Claudina, pop a Travis Tritt CD into the stereo."

  "Yeehaw." Claudina sashayed across the room, twirling her index fingers in the air. "Exactly what this party needs. A little boot-skootin' bootie shakin'."

  Hannah regarded Lana, a frail blond angel in a ruffled blue, dotted swiss dress. "Do you like your hair up in that french twist?"

  The little girl touched a curly tendril with reverence. "Oh, yeth, Mith Hannah. It'th beeyootiful."

  "It certainly is, honey. Now, would you please go find your brother's suit and his shoes?"

  To Polly, the eldest, whose skinned knees matched her elbows, Hannah said, "I know you're mad about the dress, but I promise Sheriff David won't think you've gone over to the dark, girlie side."

  "It's okay, I guess, on account of blue's his favorite color." The girl cut a scathing look at IdaClare, clad in pink from hairdo to pumps. "It's this doughnut thing stuck to my head that sucks."

  Dixie Jo had wrapped and pinned Polly's waist-length braids into a coronet.

  "You want your pigtails back?" Hannah asked. "Fine with me, but you've gotta make it quick."

  IdaClare blanched and clapped a hand to her bosom. "No, please," she said, a tremor in her voice. "You can't I won't let you spoil everything, I've " Lips pressed tight, she struggled to fight back the tears rimming her eyes.

  "Excuse us." Hannah led IdaClare into the kitchen for a private talk they should have had days ago. After seating her in a chair, Hannah looked for a tissue and settled for a paper napkin from a keeper on the counter.

  IdaClare thanked her, and said, "I'm sorry, dear, for behaving like an old fool. And a cranky one at that. I swear, I don't know why weddings always do this to me."

  Hannah knelt down, the voluminous slip billowing around her like a frothy cloud. "You were upset at Rosemary and Leo's wedding because it rem
inded you of yours and Patrick's and you miss him so much."

  Nodding, IdaClare dabbed the inner corners of her eyes with the napkin. "I've missed him every minute he's been gone, but yes it's hard to be happy for someone else—even when you truly are—and eaten up with envy at the same time."

  "Except that's not why you're upset today, is it?" Hannah caressed a blue-veined, spotted hand. For decades, IdaClare worked as her rancher husband's number-one foreman, cattle-wrangler and calf-roper. "What's bothering you is that you wish I was marrying Jack instead of David."

  Fresh tears rambled down IdaClare's face. "You'd be so perfect together. No insult to David, but I knew that from how Jack talked about you, before we ever met. If only that boy had come to his senses in time."

  Hannah shook her head. "He did, IdaClare. Jack tried for so long to be something he's not. And just because the love of his life is named Stephen, not Stephanie, or Hannah, doesn't mean you or Patrick did anything wrong."

  Pain lanced those bright, Clancy-blue eyes. Hannah softened her tone but didn't blunt what needed to be said. "Jack is who he is, IdaClare. You'd love him with all your heart, even if he turned into an ax-murderer. I know you sometimes think that'd be easier to accept, but only when you put your happiness before his."

  "I have never—"

  "You can either stop crying about not being the mother of the groom and act like the mother of the bride—which you are, as far as I'm concerned—or keep making yourself miserable about a son who's done the Clancy name proud in every single respect that matters a damn."

  IdaClare snatched away her hand. Pale, then flushed, she tensed as though ready to storm out of the house. "You have no right to speak to me like that."

  Staring into the distance, she wicked the moisture from her face and her wattled neck. "But it's high time somebody did."

  That somebody should have been her son, Hannah thought. But Jack feared his Irish temper as much as IdaClare's and likely didn't want to risk saying something he didn't mean, and couldn't ever take back.

  IdaClare picked apart the soggy napkin. "People are going to ask who Stephen is. What do I say? How do I introduce him to people?"

  "Well," Hannah said, "I think, 'This is Dr. Stephen Riverton, the best OB/GYN in St. Louis' will do just fine."

  "But what if someone asks if he and Jack are a couple?"

  "'A couple of what?' is the best comeback I know of."

  "A couple of what?" IdaClare repeated. Straightening in the chair, a defiant smirk crimped her lips. "Hah. That'll nip it in the bud, won't it."

  "Works for me." Hannah grinned. IdaClare was a long way from accepting Jack's lifestyle, but at the moment, she looked almost eager to try out her new zinger.

  The honorary mother of the bride pushed upright so fast, Hannah nearly tumbled backward on her butt. "Heavens to Betsy, young lady. That's a slip, not a dust mop. Just 'cause that dress is beige doesn't mean the dirt won't show underneath."

  Hannah took the hand she offered, saying, "It isn't beige, it's cream-white."

  "I don't care if it's fire-engine-red with tassels on the bust." IdaClare pointed at the clock on the opposite wall. "We've got eighteen minutes to get to the park, lest that poor boy thinks you've left him at the altar."

  Fifteen minutes elapsed before IdaClare, Marge and Rosemary stepped back, their eyes brimming with tears at the creation they'd buttoned, poked, prodded and bickered into shape.

  The resourceful, practical Claudina had taken a closet door with a built-in mirror off its hinges and leaned it against the living room wall. The glass was cloudy and the silvering worn away in places, but all Hannah saw was a reflection she hardly recognized.

  She'd never thought of herself as an ugly duckling—well, not since her knees were constantly scabbed and her eyes too big for her face. A swan she'd never been, either. Not even close until now.

  The strapless satin gown was banded at the top and hem in a pale, bronzy taupe. The gentle belled skirt nipped her waist and narrowed her hips, the fabric folding into soft pleats at the back below a crisscross-laced panel.

  Its simple, elegant design effected a grace and sophistication no child raised in a trailer park known as Tin Can Alley bothered dreaming of, because silk purses can't be made of sow's ears no matter how many stars you wish on, or prayers you whisper.

  Vaguely aware of the Battle of the Veil erupting around her, Hannah twirled this way and that, entranced by the skirt's fluid dips and sways. She couldn't wait to see the look on David's face when he saw her. A childish second self wished everyone in Effindale, Illinois, who'd ever taunted her for being a no-account Garvey could, too. It wouldn't change any minds, though, and plenty of family members had lived down to that reputation.

  I'm not a silk purse, she thought, smiling at the lovely lady in the mirror, and I'm not a sow's ear. I'm just Hannah Marie Garvey, soon to be Hannah Marie Garvey Hendrickson, who doesn't wear too much gunk on my face and laughs a lot and doesn't get mad if I get dirty.

  "Hannah wants the veil down," Marge said.

  "She certainly does," Rosemary concurred. "Like brides used to wear them."

  IdaClare said, "Well, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard. What's the sense in nobody being able to see her face?"

  "David will," Rosemary said, with a dreamy sigh. "When he lifts it to kiss his bride."

  "Oh, pshaw." IdaClare fussed with the headpiece, gouging craters in Hannah's skull. Fluffing the veil forward, she retreated a few steps, then crossed her arms, her head angled like a curator examining a Rembrandt.

  "Beautiful," Marge said.

  "It's so sheer, you can hardly tell it's there," Rosemary agreed. "And I love those tiny little spangly thingies. They'll sparkle like diamond dust when the sun hits them."

  IdaClare clucked her tongue in disgust. "Well, I still don't like it—"

  "You wouldn't admit it, if you did," Marge snapped.

  "—but if that's what she wants, at least it'll keep the skeeters off of her."

  "The limo's here," Claudina yelled from the front bedroom. "Ready or not, it's time to rock 'n' roll."

  * * *

  David stood in a copse of walnut trees where Luke had dropped him off. The wedding planners had won more arguments than they'd lost in the past couple of weeks, but David refused to wade into the crowd gathering in the park. The groom wasn't expected to mingle before a church wedding, and he damn well wouldn't here.

  Besides, a little peace, quiet and solitude gave him a chance to admire the miracle Luke and Claudina had pulled off. They'd drafted a small army of helpers, but the results were nothing short of amazing.

  A white canvas runner divided row upon row of chairs obtained from every rental outfit in a hundred-mile radius. At the far end was a flower-twined arbor backdropped with a hurricane candelabra where David and Hannah would repeat their vows.

  Off to one side, a gazebo was hung with gauzy curtains, where Hannah would wait, unseen, until her walk down the aisle. Between it and the bandstand, tables clothed in starched white linens were shaded by green canopies, courtesy of Duckworth's Funeral Home.

  From a refrigerated delivery truck, Willard Johnson and his mother, Benita, the special-event baker at Petits Fours & More, were unloading boxes of individually decorated squares of cake for the reception. Ruby Amyx, a vision in sequined, scarlet lace, was arranging and rearranging silver paper cake plates, forks and imprinted napkins.

  The squad of official greeters were all surnamed Hendrickson. David's mother and sisters-in-law were each armed with a guest book, and his father and brothers ushered the multitudes to their seats. His nieces and nephews scurried from one row to another doling out sunblock and old-fashioned paddle fans. Plain ones, not the imprinted "Hendrickson for Sheriff" kind Luke had wanted him to get.

  David ran a finger under his shirt collar, telling himself he'd be roasting from the inside out if he'd worn a black tuxedo instead of his dress uniform. Any discomfort he felt now from feeling less like a groom, and more like
a politician masquerading as one.

  Hannah had insisted on the uniform. Like she'd said, the last time he'd worn it was to Bev Beauford's funeral. From now on, when he took it from the closet, wouldn't he rather be reminded of their wedding?

  The fact that Hannah considered his profession a point of pride, not something he should apologize for, made David smile. The most amazing woman in the world was marrying him because she loved the man he was, not the one she hoped he'd change into.

  "If I was you, I'd be hiding back here, too, old buddy."