Save the Date (49 page)

“Maybe later,” Cara said.

“Was Brooke shacked up with the geeky ranger like you figured?” he asked.

“She’s staying with him, but not sleeping with him. And she swears that calling off the wedding is not about the strip club or the geeky ranger or even about torturing her father and stepmother. I think she basically wants to hit the reset button with her life.”

“Hmm.” Bert slid forward with his hands under his shoulders, straightening his legs, lowering his head, and pointing his butt toward the sky. He held the pose for only a few seconds before dropping back onto the floor. “Ugh! Now I remember why I hate the Downward Dog pose. It makes all the snot run out my eyeballs.”

“Just out of curiosity, how are you learning yoga? Are you going to class?”

“Nah. Classes cost money, and I don’t like the idea of being in the same room with a lot of stinky, sweaty women. I just watch YouTube videos.”

“Makes sense. By the way, thanks for packing up all the stuff, Bert. I was dreading coming home to face that. But mostly I was dreading coming home without Brooke in tow.”

“I really thought you would pull this one off, Cara. I was sure if you found Brooke you’d be able to talk her into going through with things.”

“Me too. I even had a brilliant five-point plan worked out.”

“What happened?”

“I was outgunned. So that’s it. No humongous two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar wedding means no humongous check. Patricia called me to make that perfectly clear. I called most of our vendors during the drive back from St. Marys. Everybody’s disappointed. Nobody more so than me. I’ll have to talk to the Colonel in the morning to break the bad news. He’s going to pop a vein when I tell him I can’t send the rest of his money the way I promised.”

“He called today, by the way.”

“My dad?”

“Yup.” Bert got up and handed her a stack of pink message slips from the console table. “He tried calling your cell phone too, but said the calls wouldn’t go through.”

“Thank God for crappy reception on that island. I don’t think I could have dealt with talking with the Colonel today. Wait a minute. How’d he get my cell number?”

“Not from me,” Bert said.

Cara shook her head, then held up the other message slips. “Who are all these people? I don’t recognize the names.”

“Ahhh. Well, it seems your former nemesis Lillian Fanning has transformed herself into your own personal patron saint. The top three slips are all from brides or mothers of the brides wanting an appointment to talk wedding flowers, and two of them said Lillian referred them. The third girl, Taylor Vickers, and her mom, you’re seeing tomorrow at eleven because she just had a tragic breakup with her former florist, and the wedding is only three weeks away.”

“What florist did she break up with?” Cara asked.

“Some old mean queen named Cullen Kane.”

“What! Bert, I appreciate your trying to make things up to me, but I do not want to be poaching Cullen Kane’s clients.”

“It’s not poaching,” he assured her. “I met Taylor while I was um, seeing Cullen. You know he wines and dines all these brides when he’s trying to get them to commit, but she just discovered he’s doing another big wedding the same date and time as hers, at a church across town, and when you meet Taylor’s mama, you’ll understand that she is
not
having a florist double-book on her date. I ran into Taylor at Whole Foods this morning, and she remembered me and told me the whole sad story. I might have slipped her one of your business cards. Not an hour later, her mama called here.”

“You are shameless,” Cara said.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“I told the other two brides you’d call them in the morning. This one”—he plucked the top slip and waved it in front of her—“is from the general manager of that new boutique hotel that opens at the end of July in the old Kresge’s store downtown on Broughton Street.”

“The Ibis? Did he say what he wanted?”

“
She
would like to discuss your developing a signature floral look for the hotel. I told her Wednesday noon would be good for you.”

“Here? She can’t come here. The shop is going to be all torn up. We’ve got to be of here by Friday. And we’ve got to finish up all the stuff for that beach wedding Saturday.…”

“Relax,” Bert said. “Deep, cleansing breaths. In, out. Release the tension. You’re meeting her at their new lobby restaurant. She’d like you to bring along some concepts, which I told her you’d be pleased to do.”

“Concepts? I can’t just come up with a whole look out of thin air by Wednesday. I don’t know anything…”

Bert grasped her by the shoulders. “I got this. Okay? I went online and looked at the chain’s website. There are seventeen Ibis hotels, all over the country, mostly out West, in California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. This is their first property in the South. Each of the hotels has a different name and theme, keyed to the location. I printed out photos I found of their hotels in Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. I think they go for a pretty eclectic, bohemian look.”

“You did all that? Today? On top of packing up my stuff?”

“I also finished off one of the oyster-shell chandeliers for Saturday.”

“How many do we have left to do?”

“Two.”

Cara groaned. “Then I guess I better go fire up the glue gun, huh?”

62

Jack found Libba in the barn Wednesday morning. She’d left the big sliding doors open, and she was standing in front of one of the windows, staring out at the pasture, where a mare and her foal drank from a galvanized watering trough.

She turned at the sound of his footsteps. It seemed to him that Libba Strayhorn had aged ten years since he’d seen her last. Her gray-streaked hair was pushed behind her ears, and the sunlight revealed the network of fine lines and creases radiating out from her warm gray eyes and downturned mouth.

“The wedding is off, Jack.”

“I heard.”

“Already? Yeah, what am I saying? The gossip mill in Savannah must be working overtime.”

“Ryan’s mother-in-law, Lillian, is friends with Marie Trapnell,” he said.

“I should call Marie,” Libba murmured. “Let her know I don’t blame her.”

Libba thrust her hands in the back pocket of her jeans. “Right now, I feel like a big old fool putting all this time and money and work into this place. Libba’s Folly, that’s what the neighbors around here have been calling it, and they haven’t even gotten the word yet that the wedding is off.”

Jack set his toolbox down on the floor. “I don’t know what to say, Libba. How is Harris dealing with all this?”

“About like you’d expect. He’s crushed. Hurt.” Her laugh was bitter. “Pissed off. He and Brooke lived together for six years. Six years! That girl was like family to all of us. Nobody understands it.”

Jack nodded. “Uh, we don’t have to finish the work here if you don’t want to. We can leave off tiling the bathroom. The kitchen fixtures have been delivered, but I can probably send them back and just pay a shipping and restocking fee.”

“No,” Lillian said sharply. “Mitch and I talked about this last night. We want you to go ahead and finish everything, just as planned. Harris is going to get past this. We’ll all get past it. He will find somebody who has her head on straight and eventually get married to a girl who can appreciate what she’s found in him. Holly has a new boyfriend, and that’s gotten pretty serious. They will get married, and eventually we will have a large time right here. And someday, my grandbabies are going to laugh and run and play in this barn.”

With that, Libba Strayhorn burst into tears.

Not knowing what else to do, Jack awkwardly patted her back.

Libba took a crumpled tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. “Please forgive a crazy old fool. I know this must be embarrassing for you. Go on and do what you need to do. I’ll get out of your way in a few minutes.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said. He hesitated. “I don’t know if this is any consolation, but earlier this year, my live-in girlfriend left me, too. It came out of nowhere. She met some other dude and blew town with him. At first, I was destroyed. I mean, what the hell? But then … the longer she was gone, the more I saw that things hadn’t been going that great between us. We didn’t have much in common. Zoey wanted me to be somebody I wasn’t. This sounds mean, but when I look back on it now, I realize we were just a habit. She did me a favor by leaving. But it still hurts like hell when the other person does what she did.”

“Don’t I know it,” Libba said, sniffing. “What happened to the girlfriend?”

Jack rolled his eyes. “She’s back in town, pestering the hell out of me. I let her stay at my place one night, while I was away, and now she keeps turning up, claiming she’s just visiting the dog. I’m gonna have to get the locks changed to keep her out.”

“But I gather you were able to move on,” Libba prompted.

“A couple months ago, I met somebody new.” His face darkened. “Okay, I don’t know where I was going with this, because that didn’t have such a happy ending either.”

“Cara?” Libba asked gently.

“Yeah.”

“You two broke up? Already? I’m so sorry. She’s a lovely girl. A joy to work with, and so creative.”

“She’s all of that,” Jack admitted.

“Do you mind my asking what happened?”

He made a helpless gesture. “The thing is, I don’t know what happened. One minute, things were going great. We had fun together, we like the same things. We even have the same kind of dog. Cara has had some bad luck and tough times, financially, and it seemed like everything was coming down on her at once. I wanted to help out. Her shop is in this cool old building downtown on West Jones Street, and some asshole was gonna buy it and put Cara out on the street, out of professional jealousy. It just happens that I used to take piano lessons from the old lady who owned the place. I went to see her and I guess I sort of sweet-talked her a little because I was able to outbid the other guy.”

“That’s so thoughtful,” Libba said.

“I thought so,” Jack said wryly. “But apparently I was mistaken. I kept it a secret because I wanted to surprise Cara. The building hadn’t been maintained at all, and it needs a lot of work, but I thought we could work on it together, you know? Really transform the place.”

Libba squeezed his arm. “You could make anything awesome. I still can’t get over the miracle you worked with this old barn. That’s the one good thing that came out of all this. I’m just telling myself I didn’t lose a daughter-in-law, I gained a fabulous barn.”

“Thanks, but that’s not how Cara saw it. She was mad as hell. Furious. Accused me of going behind her back, and making some sinister power play to get control of her and her business. She actually thought I was going to jack up the rent on her after making the improvements, and when I insisted I wasn’t, that pissed her off even more, because she said I was insinuating she couldn’t pay her own way.”

He shook his head again. “I just don’t get it. I did this for her. Out of, you know…”

“Love?” Libba raised one eyebrow.

“I guess.”

“Had you two talked about your feelings, or how serious things had gotten between you?”

“Not really. I didn’t think we needed to. I mean, we were together, and it was going good.…”

“And then you bought her building, out of love.” Libba laughed. “Some guys would have settled for a nice piece of jewelry, Jack.”

He looked confused. “Why would Cara want jewelry? She was going to lose her shop, and her apartment. Her father’s breathing down her neck to repay him some money she owes him, and this seemed like a good solution.”

“I’ll tell you a little story, Jack. Back in the early eighties, Mitch and I had been married a couple of years, and we were renting a crummy garage apartment on Washington Avenue, when I got pregnant with Harris. One day, some friend told Mitch about a little fixer-upper in Kensington Park, so he went to see it on his lunch hour, then came home that night and proudly announced he’d bought us a house.”

“And you weren’t thrilled?”

“I was enraged! I had three years’ worth of back issues of
Southern Living
, bookmarked with ideas for our first house. And this place was a dump. Two bedrooms, one tiny little bath that didn’t even have a shower. No washer or dryer, and the kitchen was a nightmare. If Mitch had bothered to show me the place, I could have pointed that out. I could have pointed out the fire station across the street, and predicted that every time there was an alarm, those fire trucks would go racing out of there with sirens wailing, waking our sleeping baby. But most of all, I hated that my husband didn’t understand me enough to know you don’t make that kind of a decision without consulting your partner.”

“Point taken,” Jack said.

“I tell you, I stewed and fumed over that house every day, until when I got pregnant with Holly, I laid down the law, we sold that house, and we picked out another house together in Ardsley Park.”

“And you lived happily ever after.”

A smile crept across Libba’s round, ruddy face. “We did, didn’t we?”

“I don’t see that kind of ending for us,” he said. “Cara is determined to move into another building, over on East Hall. The guy who owns it is a bottom-feeder, had it on the market forever, and couldn’t unload it. I took a look at it, just out of curiosity, and it’s a real piece of crap. That block is no place for a florist’s shop, and it’s no place for her. But I’ve learned my lesson. I’m staying out of it.”

“No chance of a reconciliation?” Libba asked.

Jack shook his head vehemently. “I tried. Now I’m done. A man can only crawl for so long.”

63

Cara heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. She stuck her head around the kitchen doorway. “Bert? Is that you?”

A blond head came into view. “It’s Leo.” He topped the last stair and flashed her his trademark Southeastern Region Salesman of the Quarter smile. “The shop door was open and unlocked, but there was nobody around downstairs, so I thought I should come up here and check things out. You shouldn’t leave your door unlocked in this neighborhood, Cara. Anybody could walk right in here, like I just did.”