Page 89 of Save the Date
“It’s worth a try,” Melinda said. “But Cara? I don’t want to scare you or anything, but in the meantime, just in case, maybe you’d better start looking around for a new address.”
Cara looked around her tiny shop, and thought of the comfortable aerie she’d fashioned for herself upstairs. Her budget was stretched to the max already. A new address?
She wondered what her brides would think of a florist who lived and worked out of a petal-pink van.
35
When the going got tough, Cara headed for the shower. She didn’t know when she’d started treating the shower like a combination confessional and therapist’s couch.
Maybe it had started when she’d first moved to Savannah. Leo was the kind of man who made friends effortlessly. Within a month of their move, he was having drinks after work with clients, weaseled his way into a golf foursome, was on a first-name basis with all their neighbors.
“Never met a stranger, that boy!” the Colonel liked to say of her ex.
It was harder for Cara. Every time she opened her mouth, people would stare at her and ask, “Where are youfrom?” And when she said Ohio they looked at her with pity. Nobody could pronounce her name—“Kryzike? Krisshick? What kind of name is that?”
“Krizz-ick,” she’d say patiently. “It’s a Croatian name.”
To which they’d look even more puzzled. “Croatia? That’s a country?”
She had little in common with the neighbors in their subdivision, most of whom were young mothers, who already had their own friends—their own play groups, their own supper clubs, their own girlfriends. They never came right out and said it, but the situation was clear. Nobody was currently taking applications for new friends.
Once, that first fall after they moved in, out of desperation, she’d written out invitations to a soup supper and slipped them into the mailboxes of all eight houses on their end of the block.
She’d fixed a huge pot of Italian wedding soup, a salad, and an apple streusel pie, and set everything out on the dining room table, along with a gorgeous arrangement of fall flowers she’d placed in a hollowed-out pumpkin. Exactly one couple—Arnie and Sheila Jenkins, retirees who lived at the head of the street—came. They’d eaten their soup hurriedly, made lame excuses for why nobody else had come—“Georgia has a home game tomorrow”—and rushed off without even touching dessert. She would never forget the look of pity on their faces.
Cara had thrown the whole pie in the trash and retreated to the shower to weep and curse.
Friday nights during the spring were the worst. She’d come home from work, and see women standing in knots in the cul-de-sac, chatting, sipping from plastic wineglasses, while their children circled on bikes or scooters. She’d smell the charcoal drifting from backyard grills, see couples hurrying to each other’s houses with covered casserole dishes, or coolers tucked under their arms.
Cara would retreat to the shower. She’d stand under the shower and cry while she washed her hair. She’d curse the snobby neighbors and call them crackers and ignorant rednecks while she shaved her legs. While she was rubbing conditioner into her scalp she’d tell herself it wasn’t her—it was them. She’d had friends back home. Lots of friends.
When her marriage to Leo crumbled, Cara hid in the shower. She could still remember that night—that awful Valentine’s Day night—when she’d figured out he was having a fling with the dental hygienist. She’d locked herself in the bathroom and stayed in the shower for two hours, only emerging after the hot water ran out. Then she’d packed her bags and run away from home. And cursed again, when she realized she’d left a nearly new bottle of expensive shampoo in her old shower. Would the dental hygienist use it?
Now, two years later, just when she’d thought maybe her luck was changing, just when she’d managed to feather a new nest for herself, the tiny pink bathtub in her downtown apartment—the one Jack referred to as the Barbie dream tub—became her solace once again. Her building sold? Where would she go? Where would she get the money to start over? Not from her father, she knew. She already had a missed call from the Colonel this morning. He always called on the shop phone, thank goodness.
The old lead pipes in the town house knocked and shuddered when she turned on the spigot, and normally the hot-water heater took a full fifteen minutes to heat up, and would run out before she’d finished crying—or rinsing her hair. But today she was taking a cool bath.
Somehow, this time, when she stepped onto the bath mat, she felt a little better. Maybe Sylvia Bradley was mistaken. Any landlord would be an improvement over the Bradleys. Maybe the new owner would finally fix up the building and allow her to stay. And if not? This was not the only house in the historic district. Nearly every block had at least one “for lease” sign in a front window. She’d call her real-estate agent and start looking. At least, she thought, she had the Trapnell wedding coming up. She’d have to postpone paying off her debt to the Colonel. She’d just have to make him understand. He was her father—he’dhaveto understand.
***
The one good thing about sleeping on the shop floor was that she was up early every morning. By eight o’clock, she’d already finished making the four bridesmaids’ bouquets for Saturday’s wedding. She’d pulled incoming orders off their internet server, and written up the phone orders so that Bert could get started on them when he got in at nine. She frowned, remembering the earlier confrontation with her assistant. He’dbetterget in at nine.
At 8:45, she was wheeling the vintage garden cart out to the sidewalk when she saw Jack’s big black truck come down the block. She felt a little tug in her chest. It was pathetic and needy, but yes, she’d wondered if and when he’d call again.
He parked across the street and jumped out of the truck. He was dressed for work, blue jeans, clean white T-shirt, work boots. She found herself studying him, measuring him against Leo, Leo in his expensive sport coats and silk ties and spit-polished shoes. Leo with his salesman’s smoothness. No. Make that slickness.
Jack Finnerty wasn’t polished and he wasn’t smooth, and his jeans were faded and ragged at the knee, and he looked so good right now she got a little weak in the knees as he crossed the street, bounded onto the curb, and grabbed her around the waist for a kiss.
“Some welcoming committee,” he said, when he let her go.
“What are you doing in town?” Cara asked, smiling up at him. “I thought you were working out at Cabin Creek all week.”
“Ryan’s over there now, waiting on a lumber delivery,” he said. “We found some old-growth heart pine that came out of a closed-up textile mill in Greenville, South Carolina, for the new floor for the barn.” He hesitated, then frowned.
“You’re not gonna like what I’ve got to tell you.”
She sighed. “I guess you’ve heard. Probably Torie told Ryan and Ryan told you, right? Well, it’s true. Somehow, I managed to lose Lillian Fanning’s heirloom silver epergne. She’s called the police, and now it’s a whole big thing.”
