White Christmas Wedding, page 16
Her eyes widened. “Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I’ve got a friend who knows I like coffee,” Winston said. “He works in Detroit and brings it back for me. There’s this farm-to-table coffee place downtown, gets these beans that were on the tree down in Colombia like sometime last week.”
“It’s delicious,” Sylvia said.
Winston’s grin turned wicked. “And you were complaining I wouldn’t take you to Starbucks,” he said.
Sylvia shook her head and rolled her eyes back at him. “Nobody had told me what the local options were,” she said.
“You didn’t seem real interested in hearing about them,” Winston shot back.
“Well,” Sylvia said, giving a decisive knock to the table to change the subject, since she knew she was losing this little argument. “If you ever wanted another business, you could have one, making this stuff.”
“Naw,” Winston said, in a tone of disbelief so thick it bordered on derision.
“You could,” Sylvia insisted. “People would pay a lot for this stuff in the city.”
“Only problem with that,” Winston said, still grinning, “is that then I’d have to go to the city.”
Sylvia raised her eyebrows. “I was thinking that might give you a chance to visit your friends there,” she said.
Winston laughed. “I’ve only got one friend in the city,” he said. “And that’s Beth.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Sylvia said. “I’d say you’ve got more than that.”
Winston looked at her with surprise. Then, as he started to catch her drift, he smiled. “Well,” he said, raising his own eyebrows. “That’s the only reason I could ever think of that might make me want to visit.”
Twenty-Four
“NOW WHERE DO YOU think you’re going?” Mitzi asked.
Halfway across the kitchen, Beth froze as if she were still a six-year-old and her grandmother had just caught her sneaking across the tile to get one more cookie in the middle of the night.
Before she stepped into the room, she had given it a once-over to make sure the coast was clear. But apparently Mitzi had been rummaging around in the pantry behind the fridge, which screened the pantry completely from the rest of the room. And when Beth had made it halfway across the tile, her grandmother popped up, seemingly out of thin air, like a fairy godmother arriving at the absolute most inopportune moment.
“Um,” Beth said.
Mitzi glanced skeptically at Beth’s head, which was currently wrapped in a bright emerald-and-pink scarf, one of her childhood treasures, which her mother had wrapped her updo in, after pin-curling the tendrils that she ultimately planned to leave loose and curly.
“Don’t tell me this is some New York wedding fashion,” Mitzi said. “You know, a whole lot of foolishness has come out of that place.”
“Don’t worry,” Beth said with a smile, patting the scarf and the beautiful coils and twists her mother had created under it. “This won’t make it down the aisle.”
But Mitzi was still planted between Beth and the door. And she cocked her eyebrow to make it clear that Beth still hadn’t answered her original question: Where was Beth off to?
“Um,” Beth said again, edging past Mitzi to collect her father’s boots, which were still standing by the door, because no one had had the heart to give them away. For years, her father’s boots had been her favorite choice to slip on when she had to make a quick run into the snow. And although she’d wished before that her mother would just let go of so many of the reminders of him that littered the whole house, she now felt a little surge of warmth and gratitude that these familiar things were right where they had always been. “I’ve just got to go out for a minute.”
“What do you need?” Mitzi demanded, with a disapproving glance up the stairs. “Can’t you get one of those bridesmaids to do it for you? Don’t those New York girls know they’ve got work to do?”
Beth wondered briefly where in the world Sylvia was, anyway. But this wasn’t some simple chore that Sylvia could do for her, in any case. And the longer she waited, the more complicated it was going to get.
“I’m just going to run over to Jen’s to do something.”
“Jen can’t do it?” Mitzi asked. “Don’t you two have telephones?”
Beth smiled and sighed. “Jen can’t do it, Grandma,” she said. “I have to talk with Tom.”
She braced herself, waiting for the inevitable barrage of traditionalist disapproval: a long list of reasons why it was bad luck for the bride to see the groom before the wedding, probably embellished with lurid tales of disasters suffered by couples who had been foolish or unlucky enough to break the ban.
But instead, Mitzi just lifted her chin. “You need to talk to him, eh?” she said, giving Beth a searching look.
“Yeah, Grandma,” Beth said. “I do.”
“Well,” Mitzi said, giving a decisive nod. “Then you go over there and talk to him. And make sure you tell him everything.”
Beth smiled in surprise.
Mitzi reached up to pinch Beth’s cheek, which still hurt just as much as it had when Beth was a kid. As Beth reached up to comfort the spot, which continued to sting, Mitzi’s face broke out in a wide grin. “And you keep telling him everything,” she said with a determined look. “Even after you’re married. You hear me?”
“I hear you, Grandma,” Jen said. She gave Mitzi a peck on the cheek, then pulled on a coat from the jumbled collection of work jackets hanging on the coat hooks beside the door.
“You tell him!” Mitzi called after her as Beth slipped out the door and tromped down the thick snow of the back porch.
Over at Jen’s place, Beth could see Mr. Fitzgerald in the yard, tossing snow this way and that with the help of a giant silver shovel, to clear the drive and the paths that ran between the house and barn.
But aside from a single set of prints leading down the back steps, the snow in the Dean yard was unspoiled. It had been so long since Beth had seen a wide field of white anywhere in the city, where the snow almost always melted immediately from the stored heat of the city streets, or turned into a gray slush even when it did stick around for any considerable amount of time, that the sight took Beth back to her childhood thrill at the sight of a first snowfall.
She leapt down the steps, two at a time, until she hit the fresh drifts of the yard, where she waded happily through them, gasping with delight at the cold air in her lungs and the clouds of fresh powder that rose up from around her knees with every new step as she followed the path to the Fitzgerald house, which she knew by heart even though it was completely lost from sight now, under the piles of snow.
When she broke through the lilac hedge into the Fitzgerald yard, suddenly the path was cleared, with glimpses of the evergreen of the crabgrass that was waiting to wake up, matted together with the snow that had gotten packed down into the earth as Mr. Fitzgerald cleared away the rest of it.
At her appearance, Mr. Fitzgerald paused in his exertions, his face red, puffs of white bursting from his lips with each breath. “Well, good morning, Beth!” he called from a few steps away.
“Good morning, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Beth said.
She tried to continue blithely on and up the Fitzgeralds’ back steps, but it wasn’t an easy trick to be blithe when she was also clodhopping through the snow in her father’s old boots.
“Ah, Beth,” Mr. Fitzgerald said, when she’d only gone a few steps. “You know, Tom’s in there at breakfast.”
There was no way to hide her intentions, so Beth decided the best way forward was just to be direct. “Good,” she said. “I need to see him.”
She could see Mr. Fitzgerald open his mouth to make the standard objection, but just as quickly as he did, he closed it again, then shook his head in a way that, without saying a word, conveyed both the fact that he believed city folk to be completely crazy, and quite a bit more than a trace of satisfaction over the fact that, once again, the city folk had proven him right by acting just as crazy as he’d always thought they were.
Before he could change his mind and mount another objection, Beth scurried by, caught the rail of the Fitzgeralds’ back steps, and tromped up them.
She pulled off her dad’s boots in the Fitzgeralds’ glassed-in mudroom, then peered through the glass of the mudroom door into the kitchen. To her relief, Tom was there. And he was alone.
When she stepped in, she realized in a flash how she must look, wearing a wild-colored scarf, a khaki work coat with a dark brown corduroy collar, and socks. But before she could even open her mouth to explain, Tom broke into a big grin at the sight of her.
He got up and pushed his chair back in one swift movement, with the same delight in his eyes that he always had when he saw her. It was one of the things she loved about him most. She’d dated other guys who had come on strong in the beginning, then seemed to lose their enthusiasm, or even any interest in her at all, as their relationship dragged on. But with Tom, he always seemed genuinely as eager to see her as he ever had in their early days. And over the entire year-plus that they’d been together, even in the midst of some situations that had been a whole lot less than delightful, that had never changed.
Except now it did. Before she even said anything, the smile faded from his face into worry, and after taking a few steps toward her, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.
At first, Beth wondered if there was something wrong with her—the outfit, the weird scarf. But his expression wasn’t just one of surprise or confusion. It was deepening into real fear.
That’s when she realized Mr. Fitzgerald and her grandmother weren’t the only traditionalists in the place. She and Tom had never intended to break the rule about the bride not seeing the groom before their wedding, either. So Tom knew that she would never have come over to talk to him on their wedding morning unless it was incredibly important. And from the look on his face, she could see that he was worried—deeply worried—about what she might have to say. Which only made sense, after the fight they’d had before the rehearsal last night.
As soon as she realized how much her arrival had unsettled Tom, Beth rushed over to him, nestled in his arms, and turned her face up for a kiss, which he gave her quickly and tenderly.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you,” he replied, as he always did. But there was still a question in his eyes.
Beth took both his hands in hers and looked up at him. “That’s what I came to tell you,” she said.
Tom took a deep breath, still watching her closely, as if he knew there was more to it than that.
“I thought about it all night,” Beth said. “And this morning, I realized I don’t care what your mother thinks about us. I don’t just want to marry you. I want to be part of your family. But the promises I’m making, I’m making them to you. And I’m not going to let anyone else get in the way of them.”
“What she asked you isn’t right,” Tom said. “I never would have asked you to do that. And I’ll tell her—”
Beth shook her head. “I know you would,” she said. “But you don’t have to. Because this isn’t about her. That’s what I came to tell you. It’s about us. You asked me to marry you. I said yes. We’re the ones who are going to join our lives and live together. I know in my heart, deep in my heart, that it’s the right thing. The rightest thing I’ve ever known,” she said.
She thought she saw Tom’s eyes brighten with what might have been tears as she said this, but she went on. “And I’m not going to let anyone mess that up for us,” she said. “I believe in your promises to me. And I hope you know you can believe in my promises to you.”
“I do,” Tom said.
Beth nodded. “Well, that’s enough for me,” she said. “And if it’s enough for you, then I don’t care what anyone else in the world thinks. Even your mom.
“I’m not going to let anyone stop me from marrying you,” Beth said. “And enjoying the heck out of it. Because we’ve worked hard for this day. And the day doesn’t even matter, compared to the whole life we’re going to get to spend together. And I don’t want to let anyone else steal any happiness from us, ever again. Is that a deal?”
This was a little joke between them, since Tom was always closing deals in real life—they made deals about everything from whether they’d have Thai or Turkish food for dinner, to how many people they’d invite to the wedding. But she’d never asked the question over anything this serious before.
“Deal,” Tom said instantly.
“And one more thing,” Beth said, as if she’d just remembered an important caveat to the whole arrangement.
Tom raised his eyebrows, listening.
“I love you,” Beth said.
“You said that before,” Tom said, cracking a grin.
As it always did, Tom’s grin momentarily derailed Beth’s train of thought. She kissed him.
“Mm,” Tom said as their lips parted. “If it’s bad luck to see each other before the ceremony, I bet it’s even worse luck to kiss.”
“Well, we’ve already tempted the bad luck,” Beth said. “So I guess you better kiss me again.”
Twenty-Five
“YEAH,” JARED SAID ENTHUSIASTICALLY. “Look at that. It looks a lot better.”
Standing under the snow-covered arbor at the front of what was supposed to be a wedding venue in a few short hours, Jen bit her lip to keep from crying—or yelling.
She wasn’t sure what, exactly, Jared was enthusing about. In the half hour since she’d discovered the disaster in the barn, she’d managed to find three shovels and a pair of brooms, all of which were being used to fill an old wheelbarrow that they carted out the back door to dump out seemingly every three minutes without making any significant dent, that Jen could see anyway, in the quantity of snow that remained under the roof of the barn.
Maybe it was better in the sense that being buried up to your knees in sand was better than being buried up to your neck. But at this point, Jen hardly felt like she was skipping freely down a beach. Or anywhere near ready for a wedding.
The main aisle had been mostly cleared, but there was still snow in every other aisle—and still dozens of wheelbarrows’ worth of snow piled up by the door, despite the full wheelbarrows they’d been carting away, one after another, in what felt like a never-ending procession.
That Greek mythological king who had been stuck pushing a rock up a mountain again and again flashed in Jen’s mind—not because he had it worse than her, but because at least he wasn’t also freezing to death as he rolled his stone back up the hill again.
As she contemplated the carnage, Destiny came down the aisle with a broom, the only implement that had still been available when she showed up. Bless her heart, Jen thought. Her duties as a bridesmaid shouldn’t have involved anything more than doing her hair and zipping Beth into her dress, and making sure neither of them had too many prewedding mimosas. But Destiny had made the mistake of poking her head into the barn on her way over to Beth’s place, and when she’d seen what was at stake, she hadn’t hesitated to dive in—a decision that had already had unfortunate consequences for her bridesmaid’s dress, whose hem was now caked with snow and hanging unevenly around the snow boots she’d worn over in the car.
Still, Jen was grateful to see that, as Destiny swept her way down the first row of chairs, the snow dusted on them completely disappeared from the concrete block they’d been set up on. And Jen had already managed to sweep the seats of the chairs clean of snow themselves. It was one of the first things she’d done when she realized what had happened, to make sure that the chairs themselves would be usable if they could only get the rest of the barn into shape.
Maybe, Jen told herself, if they could just get the area around the seats clear of snow, everyone else would make the same mistake that Gloria had when she first came in, and just assume that the piles of white stuff still drifting in the corners were just an unusual, even quaint, Midwestern wedding decoration.
But even as she thought this, she knew every flake of snow they could get out of the place had to be swept or shoveled away. The instant they heated the place up to a livable temperature, every single one of those flakes would turn into a drop of water. If they hadn’t managed to get most of it out, the place would turn into a soggy, humid, slippery mess. And if they wanted the temperature in the barn to be anything over fifty for the ceremony, they had to start firing up the heaters now. In fact, they should have been running for half an hour already—ever since she’d come out to the barn to turn them on, and realized what had gone on once the wind had blown the doors open and the storm had swept in.
But before Jen could build up a really good panic about how in the world they were ever going to get the barn up to temperature in time, the barn door creaked open behind her again. When she swung it open, there was Beth’s mother, Nadine, with Uncle Charlie in tow. And when Nadine saw Jen’s face, her own face turned to surprise and a kind of bashfulness, almost like a teenager who had gotten caught sneaking around with a boyfriend.
Jen looked from Uncle Charlie to Nadine and then back again, trying to make any sense at all of this new development—at the same time her mind was racing, trying to decide whether to chase them away from the scene of the disaster, or drag them in instantly and commandeer their help. Nadine was still wearing sensible farm clothes, not her mother-of-the-bride outfit. And Uncle Charlie was wearing what looked like a pair of Beth’s dad’s old boots.
“We don’t want to be in the way, honey,” Nadine said. “But Charlie wanted to see the barn all set up.”
Before Jen could make the decision about whether to shoo them away or ask them for help, it was made for her when Gloria came wobbling down the aisle with the wheelbarrow and poked her head through the door.
“What are you two doing here?” she asked.
“Oh my goodness,” Nadine said, pushing her way into the barn. Instantly, she took in what had happened. “The barn door…” she said as Jen nodded.
