The Wedding Dance (11 page)

“Eat,” her mother insisted. “You’ve always said it would make me feel better. And you were always right. Trust me, it
will
make you feel better.”

The meal her mother made her didn’t do anything to make the hurt go away, but the simplicity and normality of it seemed to almost ground her a little, helped her to think about something other than just how badly things had ended with Patrick. Not only how badly
she’d
ended them...but what he’d said about her needing to be the one to change her mind about love if things were ever going to work between them.

“Can you tell me what happened now?” her mother asked. “Is this about Patrick?”

“We decided to start dating...and then we split up.”

Her mother took her hand. “It’s all right, Cally. I’m here for you now. Just tell me everything and together we’ll work through it, I promise.”

“We spent a lot of time together in the past two weeks. And then yesterday, we went on the most amazing date. It was incredible.” She took a shaky breath before saying, “He made me breakfast, Mom. No one’s ever done that before. He even said—”

Oh God, it was hard to say the words aloud. Even though she’d replayed him saying them a thousand times in her head already.

“—he said he loved me.”

“Oh, Cally, honey. If he loves you and you lo—”

Phoebe had to cut her mother off before she could actually say it. “But then, he started talking about going back to Chicago for a long term project. And we argued.” Phoebe bit her lip, remembering the things she’d said, the way she’d thrown the word
fling
at him. “It all went wrong, Mom, and now…now it just feels so bad.”

“It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

Phoebe shook her head. How could her mother say that when it felt like nothing would ever be right again?

“It will be,” her mother insisted. “You’ll get him back, and things will be fine again, you’ll see. Just look at David and me. When I was at your apartment, I never would have thought that things would work out, but now…well, our relationship isn’t perfect yet, but we’re working on it.”

“You think that I’m going to get back together with Patrick after being with him once made me feel like this?”

“I know it hurts right now, but just think of how happy you were when you were together. You could be like that again.”

“I could be like
this
again,” Phoebe insisted, moving back from her mother on the couch. “If I get back together with Patrick, then I’m just setting myself up for even worse heartbreak later.”

Her mother reached out for her, but Phoebe moved back again. “You don’t know that, honey. He seems like a lovely young man. I don’t think he’d just abandon you.”

“You didn’t think Dad would walk out either, and look what happened there.”

Phoebe saw the hurt look on her mother’s face, and she realized that she’d gone too far. Again. Just as she had with Patrick.

“Neither one of us has all the answers,” her mother pointed out in a gentle voice. They sat there for several seconds like that, before her mother shook her head and said, “You know, honey, sometimes I think I’m never going to understand you.”

“Funny,” Phoebe said, even though right then she definitely didn’t find it the least bit humorous, “I was just thinking the same thing.”

How could they both be so different? How could her mother keep insisting that happiness was just the next man away? Right then, those seemed like questions to which Phoebe would never have the answers. Yet she knew one thing: relationships hurt no matter how you felt about them.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t have brought up Dad.”

“Well,” her mother said softly, “I’ve never been the best of role models when it comes to relationships, have I?”

Perhaps she hadn’t, but Phoebe finally understood that love didn’t follow a strict list of rules and regulations.

It happened whether you wanted it or not.

“You did your best,” Phoebe said.

“We both still got hurt, though, didn’t we?”

Phoebe was only starting to realize that sometimes you couldn’t help hurting people, even when you didn’t want to. Even when you cared about them.

Especially
when you cared about them.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“I know. So am I.” Her mother put an arm around her. “You see, making up with someone isn’t all that bad, is it?”

Phoebe shook her head. Her mother was one thing, but Patrick was another. Her mother was family. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be quite as easy with Patrick.

He wasn’t tied to her by blood, so what was to stop him walking away the way her father had? The way so many of the men her mother had dated had?

Yet wasn’t there something almost brave about that? Just as Patrick had once said,
“Sometimes the rewards are worth the risk. And even if the odds aren’t great, they’re still so much better than if we never take a risk at all.”

Patrick had been perfectly honest with her from the start about the way he felt, and his belief that love was something to be cherished. It had seemed like such a foolish way to look at life, but now she finally understood that the alternatives weren’t much better.

Phoebe looked up, out of her mother’s window. It was getting dark, but for a moment or two, it seemed like she could see things more clearly than she had for a long time. She impulsively hugged her mother.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“For what?”

“For everything. For being there for me whenever I’ve needed you. For teaching me to love beauty and cherish it.”

“You’re welcome, honey,” her mother said. Phoebe thought she heard something catch in her mother’s voice as she said it. “Are you going to stay tonight?”

“Thanks, but I need to get back home.”

“You’re sure?”

Phoebe nodded. “There’s something I have to do.”

Chapter Seventeen

By the time Phoebe arrived at the Rose Chalet early the next morning, things were well in motion for Marge Banning’s wedding that evening. RJ was setting out furniture. Tyce was running through a last minute sound check, though Phoebe didn’t remember much punk being on Marge Banning’s set list last time around. Rose was bustling around, fetching the linen for the tables, rushing over to the kitchens to make sure that the food was going well, and looking like she was absolutely convinced that the whole thing was going to fall apart any second. She was behaving exactly like she normally did on the morning of a wedding, in other words.

Rose looked around as Phoebe walked in. “Where were you yesterday? I thought you’d be here in the afternoon getting ready. Did you get my text messages?”

Phoebe was too tired to come up with a good answer to that. “Sacramento.”

“Sacramento? What were you doing in Sacramento?” Rose shook her head. “No, there’s no time. Are you okay? You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“I have.” Which was probably not the best thing to admit to her boss right then. Even if it was Rose. But Phoebe wasn’t able to keep the separation between work and personal life any longer. She wasn’t frankly sure that she wanted to anymore.

She expected Rose to read her the riot act. Instead, her boss simply put a hand on her arm. “I hope everything’s okay.”

Phoebe felt those darn tears spring back up. She swallowed hard. “I hope it will be, too.” She forced a trembling smile. “I’ve got a lot of work to do on the arrangements. Because Marge deserves the best wedding ever, don’t you think?”

Surprise gave way to a smile on Rose’s face. “Yes,” the other woman said, “she definitely does.”

Phoebe headed off to her work room, where the flowers were waiting for her thanks to RJ and her suppliers. She put her laptop down on the workbench, determined to concentrate on her centerpieces, but her heart wasn’t in it. Not when she still hadn’t managed to make any headway on her plan from the previous day. After she’d returned home from her mother’s house, she’d spent hours making calls and sending out dozens of email queries to locate what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet. Even her friend Lisa hadn’t been able to help.

“I’m sorry, Phoebe,”
Lisa had said, “
can’t we substitute something else?”

“No,”
Phoebe had insisted, “
there’s a message in that particular flower.”

Turning away from the flowers in her chalet workroom, Phoebe opened her laptop back up and started scouring for florists she hadn’t approached yet. Although at this point, even if she could find the flower, could anyone possibly deliver it on time?

Finally, a man she was speaking to on the phone named Brian said, “I’m sure someone mentioned something to me about them recently. The trouble is I’m not sure if I can remember exactly who.”

“This is really important, and you’re the first glimmer of hope I’ve had so far,” she told him. “Please, if you could try your hardest to remember, it would mean so much to me.”

“I’ve got your number, so if I think of it, I promise to let you know.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Phoebe put the phone down and looked up just as Rose walked into the room with RJ.

“Phoebe, I just wanted to check to make sure you had everything…oh my God. You’ve barely even
started
. What have you been doing?” Rose was clearly working hard to keep it together in the face of all the work Phoebe obviously hadn’t done on the centerpieces.

“What’s going on with you?” Frustration morphed to worry on Rose’s face. “I’ve never seen you like this. You’ve always been so reliable. So steady. If something’s wrong, you can tell me.”

But Phoebe didn’t know how she could possibly explain about what had happened with Patrick. Not with RJ right there behind Rose. Besides, she knew what everyone thought of her.

Phoebe, who didn’t have relationships.

Phoebe, who never let herself be hurt by anyone or anything.

And why did they think that? Because she’d worked very hard at making it true.

Except that right now it wasn’t.

“How about if I help out with the arrangements?” RJ suggested. “Tyce can take care of any issues with Tara. It’ll be nice to see him do something other than strum that guitar of his on the day of a wedding.” He turned to Rose and added, “Phoebe covered for me when it came to the work on your house. The least I can do is help her out today.”

Rose finally nodded, although she clearly looked reluctant to leave Phoebe in such a state. “Just let me know if you need anything today, okay? Anything at all.”

Phoebe had to swallow past the lump in her throat. “Okay. Thanks, Rose.”

Her boss hurried out, leaving Phoebe alone with RJ. He started picking out the flowers, looking them over.

“Do you have a design I can follow?”

She nodded and passed it over silently, not daring to speak. Not when all she wanted was to ask how Patrick was doing since he’d gone back to Chicago.

“So,” RJ asked, “is this about what happened with Patrick?”

Her mouth opened in shock. “You know about that?”

“Of course I know. He’s my brother. Even if he doesn’t tell me everything, I still know how he felt about you.”

She hesitated for a moment or two before asking, “And you’re still helping me? I mean, shouldn’t you hate me?”

“Of course not, Phoebe.” He shot a glance towards the door Rose had walked out through. “The truth is, we don’t always get what we want, and no one can force two people to be happy together.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, not when Patrick was the one she should be talking to about this, not his brother. Fortunately, RJ seemed to understood as he changed the subject.

“We’d better get going with these arrangements, should we? At this rate, it will be a miracle if everything is ready for the wedding.”

Miracles. They seemed to need a lot of them at the moment. It was definitely what they’d need to get the arrangements for the wedding finished on time. And a miracle was almost certainly what it would take to fix things with Patrick after the way they’d argued. Unfortunately, as for the miracle of finding what she was looking for, the odds on that seemed to be getting longer by the second.

The hours passed by in a blur as she and RJ worked as fast their fingers would let them. And then, suddenly, her phone rang causing her to drop a handful of roses onto the floor.

She recognized the number, because it was the last one she’d called before Rose and RJ had walked in. She picked it up in breathless anticipation.

“Brian?”

“Hello, Phoebe. I think I have just remembered where to find what you were looking for. Actually, it’s slightly embarrassing that I didn’t realize where I’d seen them before now. My sister grows them. Only, she doesn’t sell them, so I’m not sure if it’s really any help to you. I guess that’s why it slipped my mind.”

On any other day, Phoebe might have left it there and kept looking, but today…well, if today wasn’t a day for taking chances, then when was?

“Could you give me her number? And if I can convince her to say yes, could you deal with the delivery side of things right away?”

“I guess so, though I really must warn you that the odds of Jane handing over one of her precious blooms aren’t good.”

“I’d like to try anyway,” Phoebe told him before hanging up then dialing the number she’d just been given. She introduced herself to the woman who answered and explained exactly what it was she wanted.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said on the other end of the phone, “but my brother’s right. I’m not a florist, and if I sell you one, then hundreds of other people will want them. Soon, I won’t have much of a garden left.”

“Please,” Phoebe said, offering the woman the bulk of the contents of her last paycheck, enough that RJ’s eyes widened from across the worktable.

“Please, I can’t take your money. Especially not that much,” Jane said. “They really aren’t for sale. You sound like a perfectly nice young woman, but I’m not here to fill flower orders for your customers.”

“This isn’t for one of my customers,” Phoebe pleaded. “This is for me. Please, I’m running out of options, and this is the only way to make things right with a man that I—” She took a deep breath, feeling RJ’s eyes on her. “—that I love.”