The Paris Wedding, page 5
So Rachael headed that way, only to spot Beverley ahead in a Lisa Marie wig. With a frisson of guilt, she veered left and ran straight into Sammy, who was jogging through the crowd. She had on a pair of skinny jeans, ballet flats, and a tight Blue Hawaii shirt, and looked fresh and appealing except for her red eyes. Rachael instantly forgot Beverley.
“Yes, I know, I’m so sorry I’m late,” Sammy said, looking harried. “I was just running across to find you. You must have been waiting.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just something silly. I couldn’t find Marty.”
Rachael looked around. “Where is he?”
“Not coming, as it turns out. I finally reached him on the phone, and he’s gone to see a mate in Orange. So it’s just us. Do you want to get some food?”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
Sammy turned away, smoothing her hair. “Yeah, I’m good. I wish he’d told me, but he says this mate might have a job opening. Now, what’s this thing you didn’t want to talk about on the phone?”
Rachael took Sammy by the arm and drew her away from the noise of the stage, where the tribute act was demonstrating his best Elvis legs, much to the shrieking delight of the ladies in the front row. Across the park and behind a water fountain, she found a space with comparative quiet.
“Do you remember when we went camping what you said about me maybe going back to study?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ve been trying to research it for the last few weeks.”
“That’s great—”
“But every time I try, I find myself googling Bonnie Quinn.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t split them apart, Sam.”
Sammy frowned. “I didn’t think you were going to try.”
“Not Matthew and Bonnie,” Rachael said, impatient. “I mean, Matthew and whatever I do next. I don’t think I’ll be able to move on until he’s completely out of my system. I need to decouple him from my life, you know, like, like . . . a tractor and a drill.” She shrugged helplessly.
Sammy laughed at the metaphor, then said slowly, “That does make some sense. You were saying you wanted to go back in time to when you still had both those things. But how are you going to get over Matthew?”
Rachael pulled the crumpled invitation from her pocket. “I have to go to the wedding. If I see him get married, I’ll know that he’s gone and it’s over with. Then I can move on properly. What do you think?” She bit her lip. She had no other ideas. If Sammy thought it was a dud, she was lost.
But Sammy was nodding. “That might just work.”
Rachael grinned. “I’m so glad you agree. Because . . . I want you to come.”
“What?”
“My invitation is plus-one. We can see Paris together, and I might need you for moral support. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather go with.”
Sammy’s lips parted just slightly to admit a gasp of air, a faint horror brushing her features. It came and went so swiftly that Rachael was unsure she’d even seen it, but she had the deep sense that Sammy was about to refuse.
“You don’t want to?” she asked. “Is this about Marty? Oh, sorry. Of course. You’d want him to come too.”
“It’s not that at all,” Sammy said. “I’d love to.”
“I didn’t think . . . I just asked you to go overseas without him.” Rachael shook her head. “And Paris at that. I—”
Sammy put a hand on her arm. “You’re my best friend, Rach. Of course I want to go. You just surprised me.”
Rachael searched Sammy’s face, but could find nothing of the hesitation she’d seen moments before. She smiled. For the first time since her mother’s death, she could almost see the glittering possibility of being free of Matthew, of being able to find her own future.
Sammy grinned back. “Of course, you know what we have to do now, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Research! I’ll raid the movie shelf at the motel. We have to watch Midnight in Paris, The Da Vinci Code, Moulin Rouge, and The Bourne Identity to start with. They’re all set in Paris.” She seemed completely recovered.
“There is one thing I have to warn you about, and it might make you reconsider,” Rachael said. “Bernie and Bev both got invitations too.”
Sammy’s eyebrows shot up. “I knew Bernie did, but Bev? Both of them on the same plane? Why do I somehow feel like we might make the news?”
They both laughed.
* * *
Rachael didn’t know if it was the festival atmosphere or the rockabilly skirts, but when she returned to the farm in the late afternoon, she pulled out the plastic storage tubs from the shelves above the sewing machine. She hadn’t wanted to touch them since her mother had passed away, but now she had purpose.
Rifling through, she found a bolt of salmon-pink Italian slub silk her mother had ordered on sale from Hong Kong years ago and never used. In another tub was a big piece of polka-dot silk chiffon, a remnant of a formal dress from 2008, and a gorgeous blue oriental print that demanded something truly special. Silk again. Rachael had inherited her mother’s love of silk—its lightness, its shimmering luster, the way it draped and sewed. There were other promising finds: a large piece of pale green jersey with an elegant print of blushing red roses. Scraps of lace and tubes of buttons and clasps.
She waited until last to pull the footstool from under the table. Amid the collections of vintage buttons and closures, patterns and couture books that Tess had rifled through was a packet of corset boning and a huge piece of silk lining, so thin and light it could have been woven from a spider’s web.
Rachael pulled a few patterns from the box and skimmed her finger over the line of their skirts. If she was going to face Matthew getting married in Paris, she needed to look the part, and a gorgeous project, or three, was just the way to do that. The anticipation of making beautiful things and moving on with her life stirred an almost-happiness in her heart. She turned to a blank page in her sketchbook and started with a sweeping line, matching a vintage pattern. She drew and adjusted and redrew as the hours flew away and the sun dragged the blinds down on the day.
Finally, as dusk gathered, Rachael stretched out her aching hand and put the drawings aside. Her plan still lacked one critical element, and she couldn’t avoid it any longer.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said when Tess answered the phone.
“Can it wait? I’ve just got the kids to the table.”
“I’ll be fast. I wanted to know if you’d be able to come down to the farm for a week in April? I’m thinking of going to a wedding.”
There was a pause, and then the sounds of clattering plates and children became muffled. Tess must have gone to another room.
“Whose wedding?”
Rachael paused. “Matthew’s. It’s . . . in Paris.”
She braced herself, but Tess surprised her by saying, “I heard about that.”
“How?”
“We get gossip up here too. The rumor mill runs all the way to Dubbo.”
Silence followed, until Rachael could no longer bear it. She imagined Tess’s face, all the things she might be thinking.
“If you can’t come it’s not a problem,” she said in a rush. “I can find someone else. And I don’t want to hear anything about it being a bad idea.”
“Keep your pants on. I’m just thinking,” Tess said sharply, “and looking at the calendar. I do have a few things to work around, you know.”
“Oh.”
“And who said anything about it being a bad idea? Who turns down an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris?”
Rachael said nothing. She could hear Tess muttering under her breath as she looked through the dates.
Finally, she said, “Should be able to come. But we’d better have a talk about your planting plan to make sure. I’ll call you Monday with Joel for a conference.”
“Thanks so much. I owe you,” Rachael said, but didn’t hang up.
Another awkward silence. She was simultaneously desperate for advice and wary of Tess’s opinions.
“Tess . . .”
“Mmm?”
“I’ve been trying to decide what to do now that Mum’s gone.”
“What do you mean, what to do?”
“With my life. At the end of school I was going to go to university. I was thinking of maybe doing that now.”
“And what, sell the farm after it was just left to you?” Tess demanded.
“No, I would never do that.”
Tess let out a huge breath. “Listen, Rachael, the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. If you want my advice, I’d say stick with what you know. Choose the farm. You can always do side hobbies, but farms are where real work happens. It’s a good life.”
Rachael tried to give this the consideration it deserved, but her heart felt absurdly deflated.
“All right, I’ll speak to you Monday,” she said.
“Rachael, wait.”
“Mmm?”
“This wedding must be pretty upmarket—you making some new clothes?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m looking at patterns right now,” Rachael said, remembering too late that Tess was openly jealous of the sewing skills Rachael had learned from their mother, which she had missed out on by going with their father.
“What else?” Tess asked.
Rachael’s mind went completely blank. “You mean like shoes?”
“No, I mean sort out your awful nails. What good’s a nice dress if you’ve got chewed stumps on your hands? And make sure you get a haircut too. Do you need me to find a salon?”
Rachael hastily assured her she could manage. But after the call, when she looked at the red ends of her fingers and ragged bitten nails, then peered at her lank ponytail in the hall mirror, she had to admit that maybe Tess was right. Maybe she did need to do something about her chewing habit. And her hair.
She had just over three months to prepare herself to end this silly preoccupation with Matthew. It sounded like more than enough time.
* * *
Two months flew by in a blur of early mornings and late nights. Rachael’s sewing station came alive, piles of materials steadily spreading away from the table to occupy the whole lounge. She stopped protesting against Beverley’s cleaning visits and didn’t even mind when she came in with bucket and damp gloves to admire what Rachael was doing and ask questions. Rachael was so busy keeping the farm together amid the sewing that she forgot to chew her nails, and for the first time she could remember there were little white crescents at the ends of her fingers.
Taking it as a sign, the next day she headed into Parkes. Sammy was doing a shift at the motel but the hair salon seemed unintimidating, and this way if the result was a disaster there would be no witnesses. She would never have admitted it to Tess, but the closest she’d come to a hairdresser in the last ten years was trimming the ends of her ponytail with an old pair of craft scissors. What was the point when she wore a hat all the time?
She tugged her cap down as she pushed inside, delighted to find the salon nearly deserted, even if the woman behind the desk had hair an alarming shade of blue and cut in an asymmetrical bob.
“Rachael West,” she said. “I booked for ten o’clock.”
“Rachael!”
Rachael spun and was mildly horrified to see Beverley coming through the salon door as if she’d been tailing her. There was no hope of hiding now.
Beverley tried very hard to be helpful. When Rachael had no idea what she wanted, she pulled out a magazine and began showing her pictures. When this didn’t help, Bev got her talking to Bronwyn about fifties’ fashion, causing Bronwyn to suggest a long bob with a fringe cut in.
“The length will be modern, but the fringe is pure Audrey Hepburn. Very chic, and perfect for your face shape,” she added, holding her hands above Rachael’s shoulders to illustrate. She tactfully made no comment about the elastic band in Rachael’s hair, which was so used it looked like a shriveled dead spider.
Rachael took a breath. Now or never. “Do it,” she said.
Beverley clapped her hands in anticipation.
An hour later, the final result was surprisingly sophisticated. Rachael stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair had never been so smooth and glossy, like a perfect sheet of warm brown armor.
Beverley squeezed her arm. “Your mother . . .” she began, then broke off, her voice a little choked. “You look so lovely.”
This moment of warmth somehow led to Rachael going shopping with Beverley and being furnished with a new powder foundation in the right skin tone, an eyeliner pen, and three lipsticks in deep red, bright fuchsia, and satin baby pink. Then it was into a nail salon, which Rachael left with the new ends of her nails coaxed into smooth half-moons. The whole time, Beverley kept up a chatter about the history of Paris and all the things she and Rachael must see and do. By the end, Rachael was thoroughly overdone and crowded. She wanted nothing more than to go home and dive into the finishing details of her projects.
She was just summoning the courage to reject Beverley’s offer of lunch when they passed the Little Black Dress boutique. Beverley glanced in the window and her mouth twisted into an odd shape.
“Rachael, I have a little problem, and I don’t have your mother to ask anymore.”
“What’s that?”
The lines between Bev’s brows were deep. “It might be better if I show you.”
That was how Rachael ended up not back at the farm, but in Beverley’s house, standing in front of her open wardrobe. The opera music had been turned off today. Despite the alarming amount of chintz in the room, the clothes Beverley pulled from dry-cleaning bags were surprisingly tasteful.
“These are quite lovely,” Rachael said, admiring a blue dress that was layer on layer of chiffon, and a ball gown in black with a fitted bodice.
“I often showed your mother the pictures before I bought them. Lovely on the hanger, but once I put them on . . .” Beverley shook her head. “I don’t seem able to buy anything that looks any good, except suits, and I can’t wear those to a cocktail party in Paris.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Rachael said, thinking of Bonnie’s fifties’ white jacket and pants. “But let’s see.”
One by one, Beverley put on the dresses and Rachael could see what she meant. Something that looked wonderful on the hanger looked lumpy or shapeless on Beverley. Finally, Rachael asked if she had a tape measure.
“I think I see the problem,” she said, after taking measurements. “You’re short-waisted.”
“What’s that?”
“Your legs are long but your torso is short. It means that the waist is always too low for you in anything you buy off the shelf. All these clothes are made for a standard body shape. That’s why they look wrong—they just don’t fit right.”
“So everything is going to look horrible?” Beverley looked as though she might cry.
“Not at all.” Rachael was busy pulling out dresses, muttering to herself. “We can’t do anything about this chiffon one because it’s all single pieces, though I might be able to dart the underdress. The one with the bodice will be impossible with all the layers. But this and this . . .” She pulled out an attractive satin print dress and a two-piece evening suit made in brocade. “I can pull these apart and recut the pieces.”
“Do you have time to do that?”
No, thought Rachael, but she could see the look on Beverley’s face, the pride of this woman who wanted to keep her house and garden immaculate, and who had lost her best friend in Rachael’s mother. Beverley, who came and cleaned and tried to look after Rachael, however much Rachael sometimes wished she would stop. She felt all of this as a great debt, and she was also trying to ignore Presley, whom she’d glimpsed through the window earlier, probably stoking the fires of the feud with his activities.
“I can do it,” she said. “Just let me take some more measurements. I’ll do one first and we’ll see how it looks. And if you buy anything new, go for an empire cut.”
* * *
That afternoon, Rachael went down to the waterhole, where she floated on her back and mentally reshuffled her time for the next month. As long rays of apricot light turned the fields orange, she climbed out and headed home to change for Sammy’s movie night. She hadn’t brought a towel so she rode the trail bike wet under her clothes, her squelchy shoes slipping on the clutch. Still, she was fresh and energized in a way she hadn’t been in a long time.
She packed a piece of her current dress project to hand-sew while movie watching. When she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror on the way out, her sleek bob had dried into pleasing windswept layers around her face, and the new fringe framed clear eyes. She looked like someone who was ready to move on.
Sammy said as much when she opened the door to the shed. “You didn’t tell me you were getting a haircut. Let me see. Oooh, glamorous.”
“I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.”
“But you like it?”
“I do. It’s a bit hard to tie it back, but I’m managing.”
Rachael looked around as Sammy went to check on a pizza in the oven. She and Marty had been living in this converted shed behind Bernie’s house for the past five years, with the intention of saving money for a house. While the place was small and not strictly legal, Sammy staunchly defended the low rent as a necessary step in their journey to a better place and buying their own business. Boxes were piled in one corner, full of items there was no room to unpack. An exception had been made for Sammy’s extensive movie collection, which was stacked two-deep in a bookshelf. All that was normal. But among the magnets pinning various calendars and photos to the fridge, Rachael saw a brochure for marriage counseling services.
“How’s Marty?” she asked.
“Same old, still looking for work,” Sammy said as she shoved a garlic bread in the tiny oven. “He got back from Orange today. He’s trying out surrounding towns. Wow, I’ve just seen your nails.”
“Oh, right.”
Rachael tried to steer the conversation back, but Sammy wanted to know all about what had happened at the salon and when Rachael had stopped chewing her nails, so Rachael ended up relaying the day instead, including about Beverley and her clothes.
“Yes, I know, I’m so sorry I’m late,” Sammy said, looking harried. “I was just running across to find you. You must have been waiting.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just something silly. I couldn’t find Marty.”
Rachael looked around. “Where is he?”
“Not coming, as it turns out. I finally reached him on the phone, and he’s gone to see a mate in Orange. So it’s just us. Do you want to get some food?”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
Sammy turned away, smoothing her hair. “Yeah, I’m good. I wish he’d told me, but he says this mate might have a job opening. Now, what’s this thing you didn’t want to talk about on the phone?”
Rachael took Sammy by the arm and drew her away from the noise of the stage, where the tribute act was demonstrating his best Elvis legs, much to the shrieking delight of the ladies in the front row. Across the park and behind a water fountain, she found a space with comparative quiet.
“Do you remember when we went camping what you said about me maybe going back to study?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ve been trying to research it for the last few weeks.”
“That’s great—”
“But every time I try, I find myself googling Bonnie Quinn.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t split them apart, Sam.”
Sammy frowned. “I didn’t think you were going to try.”
“Not Matthew and Bonnie,” Rachael said, impatient. “I mean, Matthew and whatever I do next. I don’t think I’ll be able to move on until he’s completely out of my system. I need to decouple him from my life, you know, like, like . . . a tractor and a drill.” She shrugged helplessly.
Sammy laughed at the metaphor, then said slowly, “That does make some sense. You were saying you wanted to go back in time to when you still had both those things. But how are you going to get over Matthew?”
Rachael pulled the crumpled invitation from her pocket. “I have to go to the wedding. If I see him get married, I’ll know that he’s gone and it’s over with. Then I can move on properly. What do you think?” She bit her lip. She had no other ideas. If Sammy thought it was a dud, she was lost.
But Sammy was nodding. “That might just work.”
Rachael grinned. “I’m so glad you agree. Because . . . I want you to come.”
“What?”
“My invitation is plus-one. We can see Paris together, and I might need you for moral support. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather go with.”
Sammy’s lips parted just slightly to admit a gasp of air, a faint horror brushing her features. It came and went so swiftly that Rachael was unsure she’d even seen it, but she had the deep sense that Sammy was about to refuse.
“You don’t want to?” she asked. “Is this about Marty? Oh, sorry. Of course. You’d want him to come too.”
“It’s not that at all,” Sammy said. “I’d love to.”
“I didn’t think . . . I just asked you to go overseas without him.” Rachael shook her head. “And Paris at that. I—”
Sammy put a hand on her arm. “You’re my best friend, Rach. Of course I want to go. You just surprised me.”
Rachael searched Sammy’s face, but could find nothing of the hesitation she’d seen moments before. She smiled. For the first time since her mother’s death, she could almost see the glittering possibility of being free of Matthew, of being able to find her own future.
Sammy grinned back. “Of course, you know what we have to do now, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Research! I’ll raid the movie shelf at the motel. We have to watch Midnight in Paris, The Da Vinci Code, Moulin Rouge, and The Bourne Identity to start with. They’re all set in Paris.” She seemed completely recovered.
“There is one thing I have to warn you about, and it might make you reconsider,” Rachael said. “Bernie and Bev both got invitations too.”
Sammy’s eyebrows shot up. “I knew Bernie did, but Bev? Both of them on the same plane? Why do I somehow feel like we might make the news?”
They both laughed.
* * *
Rachael didn’t know if it was the festival atmosphere or the rockabilly skirts, but when she returned to the farm in the late afternoon, she pulled out the plastic storage tubs from the shelves above the sewing machine. She hadn’t wanted to touch them since her mother had passed away, but now she had purpose.
Rifling through, she found a bolt of salmon-pink Italian slub silk her mother had ordered on sale from Hong Kong years ago and never used. In another tub was a big piece of polka-dot silk chiffon, a remnant of a formal dress from 2008, and a gorgeous blue oriental print that demanded something truly special. Silk again. Rachael had inherited her mother’s love of silk—its lightness, its shimmering luster, the way it draped and sewed. There were other promising finds: a large piece of pale green jersey with an elegant print of blushing red roses. Scraps of lace and tubes of buttons and clasps.
She waited until last to pull the footstool from under the table. Amid the collections of vintage buttons and closures, patterns and couture books that Tess had rifled through was a packet of corset boning and a huge piece of silk lining, so thin and light it could have been woven from a spider’s web.
Rachael pulled a few patterns from the box and skimmed her finger over the line of their skirts. If she was going to face Matthew getting married in Paris, she needed to look the part, and a gorgeous project, or three, was just the way to do that. The anticipation of making beautiful things and moving on with her life stirred an almost-happiness in her heart. She turned to a blank page in her sketchbook and started with a sweeping line, matching a vintage pattern. She drew and adjusted and redrew as the hours flew away and the sun dragged the blinds down on the day.
Finally, as dusk gathered, Rachael stretched out her aching hand and put the drawings aside. Her plan still lacked one critical element, and she couldn’t avoid it any longer.
“I have a favor to ask,” she said when Tess answered the phone.
“Can it wait? I’ve just got the kids to the table.”
“I’ll be fast. I wanted to know if you’d be able to come down to the farm for a week in April? I’m thinking of going to a wedding.”
There was a pause, and then the sounds of clattering plates and children became muffled. Tess must have gone to another room.
“Whose wedding?”
Rachael paused. “Matthew’s. It’s . . . in Paris.”
She braced herself, but Tess surprised her by saying, “I heard about that.”
“How?”
“We get gossip up here too. The rumor mill runs all the way to Dubbo.”
Silence followed, until Rachael could no longer bear it. She imagined Tess’s face, all the things she might be thinking.
“If you can’t come it’s not a problem,” she said in a rush. “I can find someone else. And I don’t want to hear anything about it being a bad idea.”
“Keep your pants on. I’m just thinking,” Tess said sharply, “and looking at the calendar. I do have a few things to work around, you know.”
“Oh.”
“And who said anything about it being a bad idea? Who turns down an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris?”
Rachael said nothing. She could hear Tess muttering under her breath as she looked through the dates.
Finally, she said, “Should be able to come. But we’d better have a talk about your planting plan to make sure. I’ll call you Monday with Joel for a conference.”
“Thanks so much. I owe you,” Rachael said, but didn’t hang up.
Another awkward silence. She was simultaneously desperate for advice and wary of Tess’s opinions.
“Tess . . .”
“Mmm?”
“I’ve been trying to decide what to do now that Mum’s gone.”
“What do you mean, what to do?”
“With my life. At the end of school I was going to go to university. I was thinking of maybe doing that now.”
“And what, sell the farm after it was just left to you?” Tess demanded.
“No, I would never do that.”
Tess let out a huge breath. “Listen, Rachael, the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. If you want my advice, I’d say stick with what you know. Choose the farm. You can always do side hobbies, but farms are where real work happens. It’s a good life.”
Rachael tried to give this the consideration it deserved, but her heart felt absurdly deflated.
“All right, I’ll speak to you Monday,” she said.
“Rachael, wait.”
“Mmm?”
“This wedding must be pretty upmarket—you making some new clothes?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m looking at patterns right now,” Rachael said, remembering too late that Tess was openly jealous of the sewing skills Rachael had learned from their mother, which she had missed out on by going with their father.
“What else?” Tess asked.
Rachael’s mind went completely blank. “You mean like shoes?”
“No, I mean sort out your awful nails. What good’s a nice dress if you’ve got chewed stumps on your hands? And make sure you get a haircut too. Do you need me to find a salon?”
Rachael hastily assured her she could manage. But after the call, when she looked at the red ends of her fingers and ragged bitten nails, then peered at her lank ponytail in the hall mirror, she had to admit that maybe Tess was right. Maybe she did need to do something about her chewing habit. And her hair.
She had just over three months to prepare herself to end this silly preoccupation with Matthew. It sounded like more than enough time.
* * *
Two months flew by in a blur of early mornings and late nights. Rachael’s sewing station came alive, piles of materials steadily spreading away from the table to occupy the whole lounge. She stopped protesting against Beverley’s cleaning visits and didn’t even mind when she came in with bucket and damp gloves to admire what Rachael was doing and ask questions. Rachael was so busy keeping the farm together amid the sewing that she forgot to chew her nails, and for the first time she could remember there were little white crescents at the ends of her fingers.
Taking it as a sign, the next day she headed into Parkes. Sammy was doing a shift at the motel but the hair salon seemed unintimidating, and this way if the result was a disaster there would be no witnesses. She would never have admitted it to Tess, but the closest she’d come to a hairdresser in the last ten years was trimming the ends of her ponytail with an old pair of craft scissors. What was the point when she wore a hat all the time?
She tugged her cap down as she pushed inside, delighted to find the salon nearly deserted, even if the woman behind the desk had hair an alarming shade of blue and cut in an asymmetrical bob.
“Rachael West,” she said. “I booked for ten o’clock.”
“Rachael!”
Rachael spun and was mildly horrified to see Beverley coming through the salon door as if she’d been tailing her. There was no hope of hiding now.
Beverley tried very hard to be helpful. When Rachael had no idea what she wanted, she pulled out a magazine and began showing her pictures. When this didn’t help, Bev got her talking to Bronwyn about fifties’ fashion, causing Bronwyn to suggest a long bob with a fringe cut in.
“The length will be modern, but the fringe is pure Audrey Hepburn. Very chic, and perfect for your face shape,” she added, holding her hands above Rachael’s shoulders to illustrate. She tactfully made no comment about the elastic band in Rachael’s hair, which was so used it looked like a shriveled dead spider.
Rachael took a breath. Now or never. “Do it,” she said.
Beverley clapped her hands in anticipation.
An hour later, the final result was surprisingly sophisticated. Rachael stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair had never been so smooth and glossy, like a perfect sheet of warm brown armor.
Beverley squeezed her arm. “Your mother . . .” she began, then broke off, her voice a little choked. “You look so lovely.”
This moment of warmth somehow led to Rachael going shopping with Beverley and being furnished with a new powder foundation in the right skin tone, an eyeliner pen, and three lipsticks in deep red, bright fuchsia, and satin baby pink. Then it was into a nail salon, which Rachael left with the new ends of her nails coaxed into smooth half-moons. The whole time, Beverley kept up a chatter about the history of Paris and all the things she and Rachael must see and do. By the end, Rachael was thoroughly overdone and crowded. She wanted nothing more than to go home and dive into the finishing details of her projects.
She was just summoning the courage to reject Beverley’s offer of lunch when they passed the Little Black Dress boutique. Beverley glanced in the window and her mouth twisted into an odd shape.
“Rachael, I have a little problem, and I don’t have your mother to ask anymore.”
“What’s that?”
The lines between Bev’s brows were deep. “It might be better if I show you.”
That was how Rachael ended up not back at the farm, but in Beverley’s house, standing in front of her open wardrobe. The opera music had been turned off today. Despite the alarming amount of chintz in the room, the clothes Beverley pulled from dry-cleaning bags were surprisingly tasteful.
“These are quite lovely,” Rachael said, admiring a blue dress that was layer on layer of chiffon, and a ball gown in black with a fitted bodice.
“I often showed your mother the pictures before I bought them. Lovely on the hanger, but once I put them on . . .” Beverley shook her head. “I don’t seem able to buy anything that looks any good, except suits, and I can’t wear those to a cocktail party in Paris.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Rachael said, thinking of Bonnie’s fifties’ white jacket and pants. “But let’s see.”
One by one, Beverley put on the dresses and Rachael could see what she meant. Something that looked wonderful on the hanger looked lumpy or shapeless on Beverley. Finally, Rachael asked if she had a tape measure.
“I think I see the problem,” she said, after taking measurements. “You’re short-waisted.”
“What’s that?”
“Your legs are long but your torso is short. It means that the waist is always too low for you in anything you buy off the shelf. All these clothes are made for a standard body shape. That’s why they look wrong—they just don’t fit right.”
“So everything is going to look horrible?” Beverley looked as though she might cry.
“Not at all.” Rachael was busy pulling out dresses, muttering to herself. “We can’t do anything about this chiffon one because it’s all single pieces, though I might be able to dart the underdress. The one with the bodice will be impossible with all the layers. But this and this . . .” She pulled out an attractive satin print dress and a two-piece evening suit made in brocade. “I can pull these apart and recut the pieces.”
“Do you have time to do that?”
No, thought Rachael, but she could see the look on Beverley’s face, the pride of this woman who wanted to keep her house and garden immaculate, and who had lost her best friend in Rachael’s mother. Beverley, who came and cleaned and tried to look after Rachael, however much Rachael sometimes wished she would stop. She felt all of this as a great debt, and she was also trying to ignore Presley, whom she’d glimpsed through the window earlier, probably stoking the fires of the feud with his activities.
“I can do it,” she said. “Just let me take some more measurements. I’ll do one first and we’ll see how it looks. And if you buy anything new, go for an empire cut.”
* * *
That afternoon, Rachael went down to the waterhole, where she floated on her back and mentally reshuffled her time for the next month. As long rays of apricot light turned the fields orange, she climbed out and headed home to change for Sammy’s movie night. She hadn’t brought a towel so she rode the trail bike wet under her clothes, her squelchy shoes slipping on the clutch. Still, she was fresh and energized in a way she hadn’t been in a long time.
She packed a piece of her current dress project to hand-sew while movie watching. When she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror on the way out, her sleek bob had dried into pleasing windswept layers around her face, and the new fringe framed clear eyes. She looked like someone who was ready to move on.
Sammy said as much when she opened the door to the shed. “You didn’t tell me you were getting a haircut. Let me see. Oooh, glamorous.”
“I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.”
“But you like it?”
“I do. It’s a bit hard to tie it back, but I’m managing.”
Rachael looked around as Sammy went to check on a pizza in the oven. She and Marty had been living in this converted shed behind Bernie’s house for the past five years, with the intention of saving money for a house. While the place was small and not strictly legal, Sammy staunchly defended the low rent as a necessary step in their journey to a better place and buying their own business. Boxes were piled in one corner, full of items there was no room to unpack. An exception had been made for Sammy’s extensive movie collection, which was stacked two-deep in a bookshelf. All that was normal. But among the magnets pinning various calendars and photos to the fridge, Rachael saw a brochure for marriage counseling services.
“How’s Marty?” she asked.
“Same old, still looking for work,” Sammy said as she shoved a garlic bread in the tiny oven. “He got back from Orange today. He’s trying out surrounding towns. Wow, I’ve just seen your nails.”
“Oh, right.”
Rachael tried to steer the conversation back, but Sammy wanted to know all about what had happened at the salon and when Rachael had stopped chewing her nails, so Rachael ended up relaying the day instead, including about Beverley and her clothes.
