Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (4 page)

Dottie was
eccentric
.

And delightful. Truly. Never mind that her grandson had completely broken my heart, I had nothing but happy associations with her. It was impossible not to. She was just that kind of person.

“You will never guess,” she said, peering over the counter at me. A waft of Estée Lauder’s Beautiful nudged over me. One of her only nods to the past couple of decades.

“Did you save another robin?” I asked.

“No.” She smiled. “Well,
yes
, but that’s not the news. This is
big
. Guess again, Quinn, go on!”

“You got the parlor wallpapered?” Maybe she forgot she’d told me that last month.

She looked at me as if I had just told her I was giving up the shop to join the circus. “That was quite a long time ago.” She screwed up her brow. “I’ll give you one clue: I may need to
borrow
something.”

So, okay, in retrospect I see why she thought it was a good clue, but at that moment, she could have meant
anything
. She could have meant she’d smashed some Waterford and wanted to borrow my vacuum cleaner; she could have meant she was picking up her ancient sister from the airport and wanted to borrow my car; or she could have meant she was about to sneeze and wanted to “borrow” one of the embroidered handkerchiefs in the case before her.

“I just don’t know, Dottie,” I said, shaking my head. “I give up. Tell me.”

She pressed her lips together, and her cheeks bloomed like apples. “I’m getting
married
!”

“Married?” I echoed dumbly. I hadn’t seen this coming. At all. This was crazy. Dorothy had rattled around that old farm for almost twenty years since her husband had died, without one date that I knew of, without any hint or gossip in town about her fraternizing with any man. “What do you mean?”

She gave a spike of laughter and her expression sharpened into absolute clarity. “How many things could that mean, Quinn? I’m getting married. M. A. R. R. I. E. D.”

I didn’t want to insult her by letting out all the confusion that came first to mind. “To
who
?”

“Well.” Apparently satisfied that I was taking her seriously now, she gave a secret smile. “I met him online.”

“You’re online?”

“Good lord, child, I’m not that out of touch! Just because I don’t carry an ePad around, doesn’t mean I don’t understand what’s going on in the world of technology!”

I had to smile at that. “Point taken.” I stood up and ushered her over to the sitting area—i.e., several very comfy boudoir chairs outside the fitting room—that we had set up for those who generally had to sit and wait for brides to try on hundreds of different dresses, then try them again, and dither, and beam, and hope, and dream. “Have a seat and start from the beginning.”

This was what I’d done almost every day of my life for more than a decade—I welcomed nervous/happy/excited/terrified/etc. women into my place of business and tried to make them feel good about themselves. Most of them were brides-to-be, some were prom dates, and there were smatterings of other Honored Guests of Special Occasions, but almost without exception their roles all carried high emotion of one sort or another.

Usually it was happy excitement.

Not always, though.

In this case, I wasn’t sure at first.

“I didn’t want to tell anyone.” She perched on the edge of the chair, so excited she could clearly barely contain herself. “You just know they’re all going to say there’s no fool like an old fool.”

“No!” But yes. I could imagine people saying that.

Dottie knew too, the look she gave me showed me that. “Well, one night after perhaps a little too much whiskey”—no delicate sherry or brandy for Dottie, she was a whiskey girl all the way—“I decided to click on one of the dating advertisements next to my list of Facebook friends.”

Dottie had Facebook too?

This was too much to process.

For one thing, if she was on Facebook, why hadn’t she friended
me
?

“It was for Silver ’n’ Gold Singles,” she went on, then turned the corners of her mouth down in a mock frown. “Doesn’t that sound absolutely ghastly?”

It kind of did.

Fortunately I didn’t have to commit to my agreement, as she kept on talking. “But I figured, what the hell, I’m silver
and
gold at this point, and most definitely single.”

“Okay…?”

“Oh, stop looking at me like I’m making up stories! I know that look! Do you think I don’t see it all the time? Heavens, girl, I am not a fool, I know people are skeptical about some of the things I say, but I never,
ever
tell a lie. I may have embellished here and there, possibly obfuscated, but have you ever known me to tell a
lie
? Come on, be honest.”

“No, of course not.”

“Good, then we can move on to business. Because I, Quinn, am telling you the truth when I say I am going to need the fanciest dern wedding dress you have ever made, and I’m going to need it a month from yesterday.”

“Wow.” Such an understatement. She wasn’t kidding. I couldn’t swear she wasn’t
crazy
—this still wasn’t adding up to the Dorothy Morrison I knew.

“Wow indeed.” She reached into her purse, an old black leather cavern of a bag that Thelma Ritter might have carried and called a
pocketbook
. She pulled out a smartphone and started moving her pudgy fingers across the screen as quick as a kid playing a video game. Then she triumphantly turned it to me and said, “Here he is! Lyle! Isn’t he handsome?”

Lyle. This was becoming real before my very eyes and it was cute
and
disconcerting.

Lyle
was
handsome, actually. And easily a decade and a half—maybe more—younger than Dottie. Not exactly a baby, he was in his late fifties, close to sixty or just over the mark, I’d have to guess, but he wasn’t the octogenarian I might have expected, had I expected
any
of this.

He had salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, and the smooth forehead of the fully Botoxed. But his eyes had a kind crinkle to them and a certain sincerity in them that I wouldn’t have expected if someone had just been telling me this story without showing me the picture.

There’s no fool like an old fool
. Poor Dottie, she was right. People were bound to leap to the worst conclusions first. But maybe this was on the up and up. I kind of got that feeling looking him in the photographic eyes.

Not that I hadn’t been fooled by eyes before, of course, so what did I know? But those revealed a man who had smiled a lot, laughed a lot, and it was hard not to see a smiling, laughing man as a kind one.

“He’s hilarious,” Dottie said, as if reading my mind. “Does the best Bob Barker imitation.”

I laughed. Bob Barker? I guess you
would
know a Bob Barker imitation if you heard it, though who would ever expect it? That was almost like doing an excellent Kristy McNichol—it would be familiar to some, but why bother?

Then again, the answer was right there in Dottie’s eyes. Bother because the
right
person is going to think it’s hilarious.

The
right
person would get it.

In my business I see a lot of
right
people, and a lot of
wrong
people. It’s terrible when there’s one of each in a couple, because you know someone will end up with a big heartache. At one point I started doing an x-stitch (idea being I was pre-disastering them so they’d be okay) on the back hems of gowns I imagined were going to lead to disaster, and though I didn’t know how
all
of them ended up, and
some
of them were still playing out, I knew enough to know I’d been more right than wrong.

I’d stopped that, though, because my friend Glenn called me a ghoul and said maybe I was jinxing people and, believe me, I always,
always
hope my clients have a happy ending.

It’s just that, all too often, one person is getting more out of the relationship than the other. There are obvious cases of wealthy men and shallow younger women—though who’s using whom more in those cases is hard to define—but sometimes it’s a wildly enthusiastic, nurturing bride I see, eagerly asking a distracted fiancé’s approval for all of her decisions about the wedding, and I just know what that’s going to look like down the road. Excessive attention to the seasoning of a pot roast, followed by the subtle but distinct letdown of disinterest. High-thread-count sheets, carefully washed with lingerie fabric softener, only to be met by the exhausted, beer-breathed body of a husband who falls asleep during foreplay. Clock-watching primping with the anticipation of greeting him at the end of the day, dressed in something he once called pretty, only to see the hands wind around the clock like something in a cartoon, until finally she calls him and is told he’s working late.

Is he?

It’s not just women I see headed for doom, though. Marriage is an equal opportunity for disappointment. Sure, obviously I’ve seen the lithe young brides, ordering custom dresses and paying with a black Amex card bearing a man’s name, while talking on their cell phones to someone whose male voice is decidedly younger and sexier than their intended’s.

But there are more subtle disappointments showing themselves in the shop every day as well: the girl who
insists
on extracting her fiancé’s opinion, only to trounce it the minute he produces one. The bride who bullies her mother and bridal party so much they’re like head-shy dogs, flinching at her every gesture and word.

And then there’s my favorite: the Ace Manipulator. It was so subtle at first I didn’t detect it: the bride who seems so meek initially that her groom brings her in with the gentlest lead, his chest puffing out bigger with every small, modest objection she makes to “fanfare.”

These are women who will do whatever it takes to please that man until her retractable nails are firmly in his back. You’d be amazed at the subtle but steady trajectory of their steeliness, from acquiescent at first, to what can only be described as
testing
(“What if I can’t make lasagna like your mom’s, you won’t call off the whole wedding, will you?”), to the last I see of them before they start their life together: “You agreed to this, and this is how we’re doing it! God! What is your
problem
?”

It doesn’t take long for people to get beaten down.

Which was why I never tried the whole relationship/marriage thing again. Once burned, and all that. Look, I went into my relationship with Burke with a
completely
open heart. It was all his for the taking. I didn’t read, or follow,
The Rules
, there was no hard-to-get in my playbook. I loved him, I loved touching him, tasting him, pleasing him, nourishing him in every way I could. You could even call it selfish in a way because
I
, myself, got so much out of being indispensable to
him
. It never felt like I was sacrificing myself in
favor
of him, but more that everything I did for him was rewarded with adoration.

To this day, though, I don’t know if I was even the only one who felt that way.

And that, right there, is the problem with betrayal. For five minutes of your life you’re pissed at the other person, but the bulk of the response is to the doubt you have left in
yourself
. In your own judgment.

In your trust in
anyone
else,
ever.

Because who are you left with at the end of a relationship? Only you. The other person is gone—their choice, your choice, mutual choice, whatever, they’re gone—and you have only yourself to fall back on.

And if you have given yourself—whole heart, mind, body, and soul—to someone who betrayed you, perhaps spent months or even
years
betraying you, well, how do you even fully trust the meter on the gas pump at your local Shell station?

Everything
becomes questionable, because you went so long
unquestioning
. Making idiotically sincere declarations like, “
Oh, he’s home tonight because he’s tired, poor thing. He worked outside for so long today.…
” Then you have to wonder if the person you were talking to knew better, was laughing at you behind your back.

Poor little fool
.

Nope. For me, it wasn’t worth taking the chance. And I mean that seriously, not bitterly, not with crossed arms and a snarl, but it was just the decision I had made for myself. I had great friends and I got
plenty
of relationship drama—and intrigue and even the occasional truly romantic story—at the shop.

Like now.

For Dottie, I didn’t know if this was going to be truly romantic or
drama
, but so far it was certainly
intrigue
.

And I was damn glad it wasn’t my own.

“What does Lyle do for a living?” I asked, bracing myself for just about any answer, including “magician.”

Actually, I think I was kind of
expecting
magician. He had the kind of face that would love looking at itself under a top hat and over a cape.

She fidgeted with a screen display of earrings on the counter. “He’s independently wealthy. Doesn’t have to work at all!”

Red flag.

Worse than magician.

“But he is a wonderful artist. He calls it a hobby, since his job is selling furniture, but I think his paintings could sell for a lot of money.”

Still—red flag.

“Well, that’s very romantic, isn’t it?” I said. It did have romantic potential. Imagine having been Renoir’s love interest!

She pointed a pink-lacquered fingernail at me. “That’s what
I
said. Tell
that
to the boys, though.” She snorted.

The boys.

The boys.

Burke and Frank. I hadn’t seen them, either of them, in ten years. Somehow I’d always been lucky enough
not
to be at the same place at the same time as them if they were in town. I heard about them from Dottie, of course, so it wasn’t one of those taboo subjects either. Frank was a lawyer at a firm in D.C.—a once-venerable firm now more famous for one of the partners having written a crazy bestselling novel about the U.S. president going on a Jack-the-Ripper-style murder spree in Georgetown.