Page 2 of Save the Date
“Uh-oh.”
Cara flung the door of the cooler open. “Oh, God.”
She couldn’t believe her eyes. All the flowers in all the buckets in the cooler were limp, dead, dying. Torie Fanning’s bridesmaids’ bouquets, so carefully wrapped in their silk-satin binding, were toast. She glanced at the thermometer hanging from the top shelf and felt like weeping. It had been at 35 degrees last night, before she’d gone upstairs. But now it was at 86.
She let the door close and pressed her face against the glass. The reassuring hum of the compressor motor was silent.
“The cooler is dead,” she said. “And so are the flowers. The motor must have conked out sometime overnight.”
Bert reached for the Rolodex on the desk. “I’ll call the repairman. Didn’t he just fix this thing like six weeks ago?”
Cara nodded glumly. “He did. To the tune of three hundred dollars. But he warned me then, he didn’t know how long it would keep running. When I opened the shop I bought it off a guy whose pizza place had gone out of business. Turns out this thing is so old, you can’t find new parts for it. My guy had to jerry-rig it with secondhand parts he had lying around his shop.”
“What are we gonna do?”
Cara closed her eyes, hoping for inspiration. “I have no idea. All I know is, Lillian Fanning will shit a brick if she finds out about this. You heard me, I just promised her we had everything under control. The most demanding bride I’ve ever worked with—and this had to happen today.”
She opened the cooler door again and grabbed the nearest bucket. Three dozen long-stemmed white iceberg roses were crammed into it, and their heads drooped like so many sleepy toddlers.
“Dead.” She dropped a handful of roses into the trash and reached for the next bucket, and the next, repeating the diagnosis—and throwing them away.
When she was done, the big plastic trash bin was full and all that was left on the counter was one bucketful of leatherleaf ferns—“You can’t kill these things, even if you tried,” Cara noted—and a raggedy assortment of single blossoms that had somehow managed to survive.
Bert grabbed one of the pale blue mophead hydrangea blossoms and with his secateurs snipped off the end of the stem. He turned on the faucet in the worktable sink, let the water heat up, then filled an empty bucket with hot water. He plunged the first hydrangea in, and reached for another.
“We can save these,” he said. “I’ll reprocess all of them, strip the leaves, trim the stems. Put some Floralife in the water. They’re not all a total loss. I bet they’ll perk right back up.”
Cara kicked at the trash can with the toe of her sandal, wincing in pain as soon as she’d done it. “That’s twelve thousand dollars’ worth of flowers, gone. Even if we save some of them, there’s no way we can even put together a boutonniere out of this mess, let alone enough flowers for Torie, eight bridesmaids, and all the flowers for the church and the reception. And it’s too late to get more flowers shipped from California in time for tomorrow.”
Bert looked around the room, as though a new shipment of flowers might magically appear from thin air.
“What about the wholesale house? Can’t you call them? Or we could run over there and see what they’ve got.”
“Breitmueller’s? On a Friday morning in May? With all the weddings and proms going on around town? They’ll be picked clean by now. Anyway, they don’t carry the kinds of flowers we promised Torie. Lilies of the valley? Ranunculus? Casablanca lilies? Peonies?”
“What about Lamar?” Bert asked. “I know we usually see him on Thursdays, but maybe, if you called and told him what happened…”
Cara blinked back tears. “Lamar’s clear up in Atlanta, Bert. He’s not gonna come all the way down here just to save my bacon.…”
Bert pointed at the phone. “C’mon, Cara. That old man loves you. He might make a special trip, if you explained what was at stake.”
Cara shrugged and reached for her Rolodex. But before she could flip to Lamar’s card, the shop phone rang.
She picked up the phone and looked at the caller ID, and her hand froze. The area code was one she knew by heart: 614 for Columbus, Ohio. And, of course, the caller was one she knew all too well, too.
She should let the call roll over to voicemail. Ignore it. He’d only call back, and keep calling until she picked up. Her day couldn’t get much worse now. So why put off the inevitable?
Cara swallowed hard and tapped the receive button.
“Hi, Dad.”
***
“Cara? Are you all right?” Her father’s voice boomed so loudly she had to hold the phone several inches from her ear. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kryzik’s idea of a whisper was more like a shout to most people.
“Fine, Dad. How are you?”
Cara felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach. She knew exactly why the Colonel was calling; had, in fact, been expecting this call for weeks now.
