Page 127 of Save the Date
***
The ballroom had been freshly painted and wallpapered, and Libba Strayhorn was tickled to be showing it off. She linked her arm through Marie’s as they walked around the room.
“I don’t know why we waited so long to freshen this room up,” she said, pointing out the new window treatments, and the polished floors. She looked over her shoulder at Brooke, who hadn’t uttered a single word since the tour had started.
“Thank you so much, Brooke, for agreeing to have the wedding over here. Even that old skinflint Mitchell is pleased with how things have turned out.”
Brooke forced a smile. “You’re welcome, Lib. It looks great.”
Cara paced off the room and showed the women the floor plan she’d drawn up for the bandstand, dance floor, ten-top tables and chairs.
“Do we have the fabric samples for the tablecloths yet?” Patricia asked, studying the sketches.
Cara blinked. “I thought you’d seen them, Patricia. I sent them to Brooke two weeks ago. The seamstress called yesterday, she thinks she’ll have them done early next week.”
Patricia glared at Brooke, who blandly looked away. “Sorry, I guess I forgot. I think I still have the sample in my car, if you really care.”
“Not at this late date, I don’t.”
“Okay, good,” Brooke said, smirking.
“I just love paying for something I haven’t even seen,” Patricia said under her breath.
Marie glanced helplessly from Cara to her daughter to Libba. The tension in the room was nearly as thick and unpleasant as the June humidity.
“Let’s go out and see the barn,” Libba suggested brightly. “You’re simply not going to believe how it looks.”
***
Cara let out an inward sigh of relief when they approached the barn and Jack’s pickup wasn’t there.
But there were signs everywhere that he and Ryan had worked their magic. A wide new walkway of worn flagstones wound through the newly mown field toward the barn. Nearby, an old farm wagon had been planted with white geraniums, trailing Swedish ivy and swirls of blue plumbago.
“After the guys cleaned the barn they dragged that out, and I told them to just take it to the dump,” Libba said. “The next time I walked over here, it looked like that.”
“The flagstones were Jack’s idea,” she said. “He pointed out that walking through the field would ruin everybody’s shoes, and particularly Brooke’s wedding gown, if they had to trail in the grass. And God forbid there might be rain that night.”
“It looks like it’s always been here,” Marie said approvingly. She glanced at Brooke, who trailed a few yards behind. “Isn’t it lovely, Brooke?”
“Nice,” Brooke said.
Cara stopped dead in her tracks as they got closer to the barn. It had been a month since she’d last been out to Cabin Creek, and the transformation in that time was dramatic.
The cracked and faded exterior barn boards had been pressure-washed and patched, with the new boards carefully stained to blend with the old. The standing-seam tin roof gleamed brightly in the glaring afternoon sun. Wide new windows had been cut into the walls, but the glass was old and wavy, with true divided lights picked out in a deep gray that contrasted with the original silvery exterior color.
Libba walked up to the newly painted glossy black barn doors. “This is one of my favorite things,” she crowed. She touched a black iron latch, and both doors slid open on the wrought-iron sliders.
“Isn’t that amazing? Those old doors, I could hardly yank them open anymore. Jack and Ryan found these doors and rigged some system of weights and counterweights, and I can open them with no problem.”
Libba spread her arms wide, her face wreathed in smiles as she stepped inside the barn. “Ta-da!”
***
Brooke stood in the middle of the barn and burst into tears.
“Honey?” Harris gingerly wrapped his arms around his fiancée. “Don’t you like it?” He rested his chin on Brooke’s shining hair and looked to his mother for help.
Libba shook her head, speechless.
