The Wedding Pearls

by Carolyn Brown

  “Let it, like, rest,” Melody smarted off.

  “I will not. You did a stupid-ass thing and you can put up with what I want to say until you learn your lesson,” Ivy said.

  Melody was a cute little red-haired teenager. Probably about fifteen or sixteen, dressed completely in black with a ton of black makeup on her face. Not that it did much good, because freckles were still shining across her nose. She was small built and looked like a little kid in a Halloween costume.

  “I’ve got a question,” Tessa said.

  “Shoot,” Frankie said. “We’ll answer anything you want to know.”

  “What if I’m a fake? What if I’m not your daughter and I’m here to rob you blind?” Tessa asked.

  “Then we’ll shoot you,” Lola said bluntly.

  It started off as a giggle that Tessa smothered with her hand, but it wouldn’t be denied and turned into laughter that bounced off the walls, with Lola joining in.

  “What’s so damn funny?” Melody asked.

  “You’d have to have their sense of humor to understand them,” Ivy explained. “No one understands Lola’s humor, but evidently her daughter does.”

  Lola wiped her eyes on her dinner napkin. “I knew Sophie and Derek. I trusted them with you, and I’m sure they brought you up right. Sophie fell in love with you the day you were born. You sure don’t look like you could be twenty-nine years old. I bet they ID you when you order a beer.”

  Tessa’s laughter stopped as suddenly as it had started, and she steeled herself for the question on her mind. The room went so silent that the flapping of butterfly wings would have sounded like an approaching tornado. She had to ask, had to know before she exploded. It was the question that hung over her like smoke in an old honky-tonk.

  “Why did you give me to Sophie?” Tessa looked Lola right in the eyes and asked softly.

  Lola hesitated several seconds before she answered. “I was young and stupid and scared. And at the time I didn’t know if Mama would let me come back home after the stunt I pulled. I was afraid if I told her I had a baby, too, that she’d definitely say no, and that commune wasn’t any place to raise a child.”

  “Regrets?” Tessa took a big scoop of mashed potatoes and sent the serving bowl to Melody, who filled a fourth of her plate with them.

  Lola shook her head. “They were better parents than I could have ever been.”

  Ivy raised her hand like a little girl in the schoolroom. “I’ve got a question. What is it that you do?”

  “As in a job?” Tessa tasted the potatoes as she waited on the green bean casserole. “My cousin Clint and I own a travel agency.”

  “If you can get away for any or all of my retirement trip, I would be mighty happy,” Frankie said. “We could fly you back to Louisiana whenever you say the word if you can’t make the whole trip.”

  Tessa had agreed to meet these people only to please her mama, and yet there was something about them pulling at her heartstrings. Something about this moment that felt right. No, it was more than just right; it was deeper than that. Something she couldn’t put her finger on, something she’d have to analyze and sort out over a glass of good old Jack Daniel’s. Not a double shot or three fingers, but a glass half-full that she’d sip on all evening as she tried to figure out why these people could find their way into her heart over the course of one lunch. Did blood and shared DNA really mean something after all?

  “Well, crap!” Lola pushed back her chair and dabbed at her legs with her napkin after she’d knocked a glass of water into her lap.

  Frankie waved it off with a flick of the hand. “It’s an everyday occurrence. Funny thing is that she can handle a thousand-dollar tea set in the store and never break a thing but she can’t walk across a room without stumbling or falling over her own feet. And mealtimes are always a disaster.”

  Ivy picked up a bowl of candied sweet potatoes and started them around the table. “Her daddy was like that, too. Frankie here, why, she could tiptoe across hot coals and never lose her balance, but her daddy, Lester, that man was so clumsy it was downright pitiful.”

  “Was?” Tessa asked.

  “Been dead now about thirty years,” Frankie answered. “Did it bother you that you were adopted? Did you ever wonder about your other family?”

  “Being adopted never bothered me as much as being clumsy. My mama and I both cried every day of dance lessons for a whole year before we figured out I had two left feet,” Tessa confessed. “It broke Mama’s heart and mine because I felt like I’d let her down. I was only four, but I remember trying so hard to be graceful.”

  Lola picked up the corn that had spilled on the floor and carried it to the trash, returning with a fresh napkin for her lap and one to spare.

  Well, dammit! Why did I have to say “mama” twice in one explanation? Tessa thought.

  Frankie smiled. “I can read your mind, child. Sophie is your mama, darlin’. She deserves that, and don’t you ever feel bad about it. I’m happy to be Frankie, and Lola, here, well, she’s happy to just be Lola. We’d like to be your other family if you’ll let us, and we’d sure like to get to know you. Right now, we’ve probably come on too strong but we don’t know any other way to do things, so bear with us.”

  “Thank you.” Tessa felt heartstrings pulling at her. Could she really leave her home on Tuesday morning and go on a trip with complete strangers? Even though they were blood relatives, she didn’t know these people. Did she want to?

  “Good chicken. Reckon you could send that platter back this way, Tessa?” Branch changed the subject. “I’m glad Ivy left a breast for me.”

  “Oh, honey, I’ve always got a breast for a good-looking cowboy.”

  “Dear Lord!” Melody rolled her eyes at the ceiling.

  “He is at that,” Ivy chuckled.

  “This is like cruel and unusual punishment. I’m never, like, getting in trouble at school again,” Melody whined.

  Ivy’s old eyes twinkled as she looked across the table at her great-niece. “Well, that’s a step in the right direction. Now, if you’ll give up smoking that dope, maybe your brain cells won’t be fried. You are lucky the judge let you keep that tablet thing for your lessons and your phone, but remember, he said the phone could go if I thought you were spending too much time on it.”

  The sun was a big orange ball setting in her rearview mirror and casting a glow over her entire car as Tessa drove back into New Iberia that evening. She’d tried for more than two hours to sort out her feelings about this new wrinkle in her life and the trip that the whole bunch of them were so happy about. She’d barely gotten into her apartment and kicked off her shoes when the jingle of keys and her doorknob turning announced that her mother couldn’t wait to talk.

  “I know you probably need some time to get things sorted out, but I couldn’t wait to talk to you. I drove by and saw your car. How did it go?” Sophie looked worried.

  Tessa patted the sofa beside her. “Just got here. Sit with me?”

  Sophie handed her a small gift bag. “I’ll open up a couple of cokes and then we’ll talk.”

  “What’s this?” Tessa asked.

  “Open it and see.”

  “A journal?” Tessa frowned. “Mama, it’s not Christmas.”

  “I know that. This is a special journal for a special trip.”

  Tessa ran her hand down the outside of the soft brown leather with the word Memories engraved in gold on the spine. It was by far the fanciest journal that she’d ever had, and there were twenty lined up on the bookcase in her bedroom.

  “I told you that I’d open a file on my laptop and record the whole trip, and that’s only if I decide to go,” Tessa said. “I tried to make up my mind all the way home. I did the pro and con thing and tried to talk myself into it, then tried to talk myself out of it. I can’t decide.”

  “Then let me decide for you. Your father and I want you to do this, Tessa. You need to do this, especially after the Matt situation.” Sophie set two bottles of coke
on the coffee table and plopped down on the sofa beside her daughter. “That journal is to record your private feelings. You can use your laptop to keep track of the places you’ve been, the things you’ve seen and maybe even use all that on your travel agency’s website. This is for personal and private ideas and thoughts about your trip and new family. Someday you’ll want to go back and remember more than the long ride all around the state of Texas. You will want to know how you felt at the beginning of a day or at the end of it. What emotions that day evoked. You are an excellent writer, and I know you will be happy that you recorded more than events.”

  Tessa laid the journal on the coffee table. “Thank you, Mama. But this is all more than a little surreal. I don’t know if I can really do this. I’ve never thought about finding my birth parents or really cared about all that. You and Daddy and all my Cajun cousins were enough for me.” Tessa smiled. “This can’t be easy for you.”

  Sophie laid a hand on Tessa’s knee. “Your dad and I are secure in our place and we never want you to look back and wish you’d taken a different path. After the way Matt’s mother treated you when she found out you were adopted, well, I don’t want that hanging over your head. I want you to know that you came from good people biologically. Lola made bad choices, but that does not make her a bad person. You need to know that deep down.”

  Tessa wiped away a tear. “I love you and Daddy.”

  “And we love you, chère. Promise me you’ll write in the journal.”

  “Like my first diary.” Tessa laughed.

  “You were five,” Sophie remembered.

  “And it started me on journals. You gave it to me because I was too clumsy to dance and said that someday I’d be a famous writer. That pretty often authors were eccentric and couldn’t dance.” Tessa nodded. “I’m just a travel agent. I’m still waiting on a life-changing experience that will make me a famous author.”

  “Patience, my child,” Sophie said. “That life-changing event will happen and when it does you’ll be glad that you recorded every minute. Now, tell me about Lola and her mother. Three of you on a trip for a whole month. I think it will be fun.”

  “Three?” Tessa sighed. “Try five!”

  Sophie sank into the sofa beside her daughter. “Lola had more children? Did she adopt them?”

  “No, but Frankie has a friend and that friend has a niece who rolls her eyes and acts like a spoiled brat,” Tessa answered.

  “How old is she?” Sophie smiled.

  “Melody? She’s sixteen.”

  “I remember a little girl who rolled her eyes and was a spoiled brat when she was sixteen. The proof is in your journals from that time.” Sophie laughed softly.

  “You can’t read emotions like that in words,” Tessa protested.

  “Oh, yes, you can,” Sophie disagreed. “Tell me about the dinner. I want to know everything. Your first emotion when you walked into the house, when you saw Lola for the first time, what you ate, all of it.”

  “Well, Ivy met me in the yard, toting an oxygen tank behind her that she calls Blister because it’s like a blister on her ass. She hugged me first and then Branch and I went inside. Around the table was Ivy, Frankie, Branch, Melody, Lola, and me.” She went on to tell her mother every single thing that she could remember, except the way that sparks danced around the room every time she looked at Branch. That much she kept deep in her heart. Lord, help! The cowboy might be engaged or in a relationship. He wasn’t married, because she’d checked his hand for a ring, but that didn’t give her any rights, not even to the electric vibes she felt when he was close.

  Tessa threw an arm around Sophie and hugged her. “Mama, I’m not sure I want to go. It was a crazy day and I’m not sure if I’m up to this trip. Besides, Lola might have given birth to me, but now that the can of worms is opened, I don’t know if I want to know the woman who didn’t want me,” she said longingly.

  “It will always, always bother you if you don’t go, and I do not want you to look back on your life with regrets,” Sophie said.

  Tessa barely nodded as a picture flashed in her mind of that table with all the ladies and Branch around it. She nodded again, this time more emphatically. Her mind was made up in that instant. She would go on the trip, not because it would make her mother happy but because she didn’t want regrets later in her life. Fate had dropped this into her lap, so she’d play it out, one day at a time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tessa got lost four times on the way from the school parking lot to Frankie and Lola’s house. Each time she called Branch and he told her what to do to get back on course. When she finally parked her car in the circular driveway, crossed the driveway without falling over a single chunk of gravel, and made it up the steps without stumbling one time, she was feeling right proud of herself. She hit the doorbell with her fingernail and waited.

  “Just go on in. They’ve got their things loaded up already and are waiting on you,” Branch said right behind her.

  She whipped around so fast that one toe hung on the welcome mat, and she pitched forward right into his arms again. It was one of those déjà vu moments that embarrassed her more than the last one.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Branch said.

  “I’m so sorry. Clumsy is my middle name, but you know that from the dinner conversation we had on Sunday.” She put her hands on his chest and righted herself and wasn’t amazed one bit at the way her heart tossed in a couple of beats.

  “Sounds like you might share a name with Lola,” he said. “I was out in the garage getting things arranged. If you’ll give me your keys, I will put your car in the garage and get your suitcase arranged in the trunk. Is it in the backseat? And hopefully you followed Frankie’s orders and brought only one. With six folks going, we had to limit the amount of baggage.”

  “Yes, it’s in the backseat and yes, there is only one, but it’s packed pretty heavy,” she answered.

  “She’s here! She’s here!” Ivy squealed behind her as cold air rushed out the door and hit Tessa in the back.

  She turned slowly and kept her eyes on that pesky doormat. “Good morning.”

  “Come on in. Are you hungry? Need a cup of coffee to go?” Ivy asked.

  “I’m good except for maybe a trip to the bathroom,” Tessa said.

  “Frankie and Lola have been on pins since Saturday. They were scared to death you’d back out.” She held the door open for Tessa.

  Melody met her in the foyer and did one of those insolent eye rolls. “Thank God you’re here. They would have been, like, horrible if you hadn’t shown up. You are, like, the chosen one who can do no wrong. Did you pack your wings and halo?”

  “I’m not that important. I’m like the new puppy. Wait until I spill a chocolate milkshake all over the car seats. They’ll be ready to put me on an airplane and send my clumsy butt back home.” Tessa smiled.

  “They’d probably have it, like, cleaned up and put in a shrine,” Melody smarted off.

  The girl was dressed in designer jean shorts and a black tank top, and her red hair had been pulled through the hole in the back of a black cap. Hot pink lettering in glittery script on the bill said I’m Retired. “And we have to wear these shitty caps because Frankie and Aunt Ivy said so.”

  Tessa escaped into the bathroom, glad for the excuse to be alone one more time.

  When she came out Lola was waiting beside the door, holding a cap and a ponytail holder. “We aren’t wearing these for style even if Mama did have them special made for us.” She touched the bill of her cap. “Turn around and I’ll get you all fixed up and ready to go. They are to keep our hair out of our eyes and mouth and to provide shade for our faces so we don’t burn. This is a big thing for her and Ivy, and she is so excited that you agreed to go.”

  “And you?” Tessa asked.

  “I’ve thought about you every day, Tessa, for the past twenty-nine years and hoped I made the right decision that day when Sophie asked if she could adopt you. I don’t ex
pect to be your mother, but I would like to be your friend. And yes, I’m tickled that you are going with us,” Lola whispered softly. “Now let’s get that hair up or else Mama will come back in here and fuss at both of us for holding up the big send-off.”

  Tessa pulled a hairbrush from her purse and handed it to Lola, who quickly whipped her blonde hair up into a ponytail and put the cap on her head.

  “You will have to adjust it. Did you bring sunglasses?” Lola asked.

  Tessa took a pair of huge white-framed sunglasses from her purse and put them on and adjusted the hat. “There’s an extra pair in case I drop these. I buy cheap ones because I break at least one pair a week.”

  “Me, too.” Lola smiled.

  “Nine o’clock on the button. Time to get this wagon train rolling,” Frankie yelled from the driveway and gave a shrill whistle.

  Tessa half expected to see a covered wagon coming from around the back of the house where she figured the garage was located. She breathed a sigh of relief when the nose of a red car made its appearance, but when the whole Cadillac was parked in the front yard with Branch sitting in the driver’s seat, she was almighty glad she had on sunglasses.

  “It’s my first brand-new car. My husband bought it for me in 1959 when his first oil well came in like a gusher,” Frankie explained. “He promised me a trip in it all around the state of Texas someday, but he didn’t live long enough to retire.”

  “Branch is going?” Tessa’s heart threw in an extra beat.

  “He’s our driver,” Lola said.

  As if on cue, Branch unfolded his long legs from the car and opened the back door like a chauffeur. “Ladies,” he said with a big smile and a wave of his hand toward the broad backseat.

  He wore khaki shorts, a snowy white T-shirt, and sandals. His eyes were covered with mirrored sunglasses and a snap-bill cap set on top of his head. He looked better in tight jeans and a cowboy hat, but either way made Tessa’s mouth go dry.

  She started to crawl into the backseat, but Frankie laid a hand on her shoulder. “Darlin’, this is my retirement trip so I call the shots. Ivy and Blister get to sit behind Branch, then Melody in the middle and me on this side. You are sitting in the middle of the front seat with Lola on the passenger’s side. That’s our seat assignments for the whole trip. And Tessa, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you are along for this trip. It means the world to me. It’ll give us time to really get to know one another.”