Wedding Bell Blues (10 page)

I stepped back.

“Running.” He laughed. “I'm addicted to running. Have to get my run in before I do anything else or I'm a mess for the day.”

He ran his fingers through his white-blond hair. “After being on the road all night, the first thing I had to do when I got here was my run. And it was as good a way as any to see a little bit of the town.”

“Oh,” I said, which probably sounded as silly as I felt standing here in robe and slippers in the fast approaching daylight. And I just happened to be wearing my rattiest robe, the one with a coffee stain down the front. I pulled it closer.

“Had a late flight from L.A., then found an all-night car rental at Raleigh-Durham, drove like the dickens and now have to find breakfast and a place to stay.”

“I have breakfast,” I said and pointed to the Dixie Dew behind me, which didn't look all that welcoming or friendly with no lights burning. I hadn't even turned on the porch light. I almost said “and a bed,” then realized how provocative that might sound.

“It's a bed-and-breakfast,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm in the right place.”

I told him to finish his run, and by the time he got back I was dressed in one of the two last dresses I owned, a green and pink shirtwaist that matched (if you squinted) my tearoom tablecloths. I had bacon cooked, a breakfast casserole in the oven and the table set. Plus coffee, always coffee. I liked for the smell to waft up the stairs and get my guests moseying on downstairs.

While my two lady guests were eating, he signed the guest register. He put on his credit card two bedrooms. He said he'd take the Lilac Room and didn't give me a name for the person who would use the Daffodil Room, which Ida Plum had just cleaned. He did tell me he was with the festival and that he had no idea what a green bean was. He grinned, “Call this a mystery guest.”

“Some kind of wild herb?” he had asked. “Like ginseng?” I saw the cutest dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. I get weak-kneed over dimples.

I extolled the virtues of the ubiquitous green bean casserole that was a must at every Thanksgiving meal, then I told him about the value of green vegetables, vitamins and all that. He listened with his head cocked to one side as if he didn't believe a word I was saying but he liked the way I talked. I've read guys love a Southern accent and I've got a real one. That's one thing I never lost all those years in “Yankee Land,” as my grandmother called it. Somebody once told me that if you lose your accent, you can never go home again. I never lost mine and here I was, born and bred and back in Littleboro, North Carolina, the Tar Heel state. Home sure stuck to me.

He finished the paperwork and then took his leather duffel up the stairs, climbing the steps two at a time. Again, I said to myself, “My, my.”

 

Chapter Fifteen

I served Miss Isabella Buckley and her prize pupil, Debbie Booth, who wrote the food columns for
The News & Observer
and didn't look a thing like her little head-shot photo in the paper—Debbie turned out to be prettier, younger. They were judges for the green bean cooking contest. I was nervous about them judging my B and B food, but they loved the breakfast casserole. It was the standard eggs/milk/cheese thing, but I always added a jolt of red pepper and some ribbons of kale for color. And grits, I do grits in a silver compote with a lid. When you serve grits, they have to be hot. Grits can be country plain or dressed-up fancy. Anybody who has never had shrimp with grits hasn't lived, Mama Alice used to say.

Miss Isabella had retired from teaching home economics at Carelock U ages ago and moved to Glen Aire, a continuous care retirement community in Cary. She had to be nearly eighty, but prissy as ever in her blue voile dress with a lace collar and her little pearl button earrings, the screw-on type. Miss Isabella didn't strike me as someone who would ever allow piercings to her body, not even her ears.

Debbie, on the other hand, was the opposite of prissy. She wore green jeans (maybe in honor of the festival), a cute sweatshirt that had little red chili peppers stamped all over it and red sneakers. She looked as if she couldn't wait to get to this judging business, her red-blond curls bouncing. I bet somewhere on her body she had a tattoo. I tried to guess what it would be. A single red rose? No, not the type. A butterfly? Again no, not the type. I finally decided she'd have a tattoo of a small skillet and the words
BON APPETIT
above it. Or a tomato? A luscious, ripe one with an exclamation point. Very tasteful, but fun.

She and Miss Isabella left soon after breakfast, saying something about the Liberty Antiques Fair and that they'd be out until late.

Mr. Hollywood, the L.A. runner, had been up and down the stairs a dozen times, cell phone to his ear. He'd eaten my breakfast like a vacuum cleaner on suction, whooshed it down, then asked for a mug, more coffee, and gone out to swing on the porch. After about a five-minute swing I heard him spring up and saw him sprint down the walk. How much relaxing can you do in five minutes in a swing? I could tell he was not from the South. And he sure acted like he was in some high-pressure stress, stress, stress business. He needed a good swinging on a cool front porch shaded and scented with wisteria more than anybody I'd ever seen.

I cleaned the dining room and kitchen, realized the house was quiet and started in on the canapés for the trashion show. Baby cornmeal tortillas spread with garlic cream cheese then rolled around freshly washed raw okra pods. When I sliced them the little okra wheels looked like tiny flower mosaics. They crunched delightfully. I sneaked one myself just to “taste test.” Yum.

I mixed up a pimento cheese dip that I'd serve warm though my grandmother was rolling in her grave.
Warm
pimento cheese. Then I did some cold cheese things, made a dip or two more, some slices of raw turnips which I wrapped in bacon for Angels on Horseback. The original recipe used water chestnuts, but this was Littleboro and our homegrown turnips were just as sweet and crunchy as canned water chestnuts and organic.

I had cheese straws in the freezer. Any good Southern kitchen always had cheese straws on hand for all and every emergency. Of course I had ubiquitous brie and crackers.

Sundays in Littleboro tended to have a peaceful feeling, quiet with almost no traffic. People went to church, ate a big Sunday dinner and took well-earned naps. Kids played in the yards, but were told to play quietly: “It's Sunday.”

A fund-raising on a Sunday afternoon was a new thing for Littleboro and I wasn't sure how it would go over, but it wasn't my worry. All I had to do was make the food, show up and serve.

I had all my canapé stuff ready to go when Scott picked me up at one o'clock. He sat my insulated hampers in the back and as he drove, reached over and held my hand. Ah, I thought, and tried to send the thought his way, see how well we work together when we have a common goal. See how compatible we are as a couple. I bet you and Cedora never rode together in such companionable silence. “Isn't this nice?” I said.

“Very,” he said and kept driving.

At the trashion show Scott helped me take my food carriers in the back door to the kitchen, then he unloaded his speakers and music equipment, went to the barn to set up and I got myself organized in that big barn of a kitchen with its land of granite countertops and gleaming refrigerators. Almost a wall of them! And an AGA stove. I drooled. This was a dream kitchen but it wasn't mine. My own at the Dixie Dew was like a '60s model. All white, anemic-looking and just barely adequate.

The bar was in the barn and Mayor Moss had hired two people to staff it. I was only to do the food, thank goodness. Wine bottles and ice and all that are heavy to haul.

I watched the audience arrive. People who looked like “out of towners,” not from around here, but probably her friends from whatever big city she had come from. I had seen a helicopter on her back lawn and lavishly dressed people alighting from it. Really, I said to myself. This whole event was “big doings,” as Mama Alice would have called it.

The out of towners, definitely not Littleborians, were dressed to the nines, mostly in black. Elegant, designer black but some of the men wore golf pastels and lightened up the whole picture. A few of the women wore hats! Either large, lacy “picture hats” or small flips of feathers and a veil. So NYC, so Paris, so Milano. I hoped somewhere in the crowd Pearl Buttons, our mysterious society columnist for the local newspaper,
The Littleboro Messenger,
was taking note. Nobody knew what the real Pearl Buttons looked like. She (or it could be a he?) seemed to be everywhere, her eyes and ears on everything going on in Littleboro. There had never been a photo beside her column in
The Mess.

Mayor Moss, also in some sort of sleek black dress, stood at a podium at the head of the freshly built runway (I wondered if Scott had built it? He seemed to be doing everything but building my gazebo!), held a microphone and explained that wearables could be made from things like plastic garbage bags, bottle caps and metal soda tabs, cans and foil wrappers, paper products, anything that could be recycled. I'd been amazed and impressed when Malinda said she was going to be one of the models. Nobody had asked me to model, but then I was doing the food, little nibbles and dips, and I'd be busy. Plus one did not get paid to model and I was being paid to do food.

I had a feeling from the get-go that Malinda was going to be a hit in her long, swirling, strapless “dress” of purple plastic tablecloths covered with white 3-D polka dots, which were really prescription bottle tops. I'd helped her attach about a million of those bottle tops. We didn't dream it would take so many. Last week we were putting it together in the living room at the Dixie Dew. At eleven o'clock that night, making that dress, we ran out of bottle tops. We only had half that voluminous skirt covered. Panic time.

“There's a box of old caps in Gaddy's storeroom,” Malinda said. “Let's go get them. I have a key.” She jangled her ring of keys fetched from her purple purse that was made from a plastic place mat. That purse was the first thing we made. Easy. Fold in two thirds, stitch up the sides and let the top part flap over. Instant clutch purse. And it was shiny. “Dollar Store,” I said, “we did you proud.”

We walked downtown and Malinda unlocked the front door of Gaddy's. We didn't turn on any lights and after we got in Malinda locked the door behind us.

“Anybody passing by sees these lights on, they'll stop and I'll have to sell them a bottle of aspirin or a pack of gum. Anything that could have waited until tomorrow.” Malinda led the way through the store with a flashlight she kept in the cash drawer. “Never any cash left here. Last one out takes every cent and drops the deposit bag in the night slot at the bank.”

She was standing atop a ladder trying to reach the box on the top shelf when we heard the front door rattle. It sounded as if someone was trying to get in, then we saw beams from a flashlight sweep around the store, stop and stay on the entrance to the pharmacy counter. The light stayed there what seemed like a long, lingering time.

Neither of us moved. Did we breathe? What was going on?

“Mr. Gaddy?” I whispered to Malinda. “Some emergency maybe?” I imagined a child with a fever and no Tylenol. The parents would call Mr. Gaddy at home and he'd dress, drive over and unlock the store for them. That's what we do in small towns. We call on each other when there's an emergency.

“He's got a key,” Malinda whispered back. “He'd come in the front door like we did.”

The lights went away as did the footsteps.

Malinda handed down the box and we started to leave when a voice said, “Stop where you are.”

We stopped.

“Stay right there.”

We stayed stock-still.

The voice sounded very male and very guttural. I knew that voice. It made my toes tingle and not in a good way. Suddenly all the lights clicked on and there in front of us stood Ossie DelGardo with a gun drawn and pointed straight at Malinda and me. “What's in the box?” he asked. His gun hand didn't waver.

“Bottle tops,” Malinda said. “You want to see?” She opened the flaps and Ossie stepped closer.

“Just bottle tops?” He peered in, then with the hand that didn't hold the gun, riffled through it. “Bottle tops,” he said and stepped back. He holstered his gun and held the front door for us to go out. “You two must have a story to tell, stealing prescription bottle caps at two in the morning.”

“What did you think we were doing?” I asked.

“With you”—he grinned at me—“I never know.”

Malinda tried to explain trashion and how she'd be wearing a purple tablecloth studded with these bottle caps. I watched his eyes glaze over. He shrugged his shoulders and grimaced, as if to say, Two more crazies in a town of crazies.

“And what were
you
doing?” I asked. Mr. Ossie, the big-shot city cop, on the job as town watchman? I had imagined him napping all day in his office and sleeping (or not) at Juanita's at night.

“Only my job,” he said. “I check the downtown, every lock, every night. I walk my beat.”

Then he turned and walked one way, Malinda and I walked the other back to the Dixie Dew. At three a.m. we were still going crazy making those white bottle caps look like 3-D polka dots.

“This is the winner,” I said. “It better be. We just got the Ossie DelGardo seal of approval. Ha ha.” After that I yawned and crashed on the couch and Malinda rolled up our creation, picked up her purse and went home. I knew she would win. Or at least if I'd been placing bets, I would have bet on her.

Today before the models lined up at the trashion show, Malinda and I did a fist bump. “Break a leg,” I said.

“Drop a tray,” she said.

Minutes later, I watched Malinda swish up and down the runway in the middle of the barn, get catcalls and whistles. She hammed things up, waving and throwing kisses. She looked stunning. Tall, radiating confidence, her mahogany skin glowed. She wore her signature large gold hoop earrings. With her hair in a topknot bun she looked even taller, more regal. Our Malinda had always been a “looker.”