Save the Date (3 page)

“Lamar? It’s Cara, in Savannah.”

“How you doin’, girl?”

“Not too good,” she admitted. “My cooler conked out on me overnight, and most of those flowers you delivered Wednesday are DOA. I’ve got a huge wedding tomorrow. Can you help me out?”

“Aww, Cara,” he moaned. “I can’t be coming all the way back down there today. I got other customers besides you, ya know.”

“I know, Lamar, but none you love as much as me.”

From across the room Bert rolled his eyes.

“That’s true,” Lamar said, with a chuckle. “But don’t you be telling my wife ’bout us.”

“What about it? Pretty please? This is a big order, so I’ll make it worth your while.”

“You know how much gas my van burns up when I make a trip clear down there to the coast? Anyway, much as I wish I could help, I can’t do it today.”

“How far south are you coming?” Cara persisted.

“On my way to Macon next,” Lamar said. “Last call of the day.”

“Perfect! I’ll meet you anyplace you say. I’m working with the pickiest bride on the planet, and her mother’s even worse, so make sure you save the good stuff for me, okay?”

“Don’t I always?” Lamar said. “I’ll see you at the Cracker Barrel on Riverside Drive at two.”

*   *   *

After tracking down the repairman and issuing dire threats about what would happen if he didn’t return to the shop to get her cooler up and running again, Cara sent Bert to the wholesale house to try to buy more stock, and spent the rest of the morning fielding phone calls and dealing with appointments and brides.

When Bert returned to Bloom at noon, Cara was waiting by the door. “I’m headed to Macon to meet Lamar,” she informed him. She glanced over at Poppy, who was lounging nearby, watching her every move. “Can you do me a favor and watch you-know-who? I’d take her with me, but you know she gets carsick after more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and I haven’t had enough advance time to give her the meds.”

“That’s cool,” Bert said easily.

“And if Lillian Fanning calls again, and she will call, lie through your teeth and tell her we’ve got her friggin’ ecru candles.”

“Got it,” he said.

3

After working all night on Torie Fanning’s
second
set of wedding arrangements, by Saturday morning Cara was operating on Red Bull and desperation. She would have given anything for an hour of sleep. But this was May, and she’d sleep, she promised herself, when wedding season was over.

Right now, she had a ten-o’clock appointment. She took another covert sip of Red Bull and poured two flutes of orange juice, topping it off with Sam’s Club champagne.

She set the silver tray down carefully on the big worktable in the shop and beamed at today’s couple, Michelle and Hank.

“All right then, you two,” she said, hoping she sounded cheerful. “Let’s talk about your big day!”

*   *   *

Michelle pushed her iPad across the zinc top of the worktable. She poised one pink polished fingertip on the screen. “This is my board for the altar centerpieces. As you can see, I’m looking for something loose and relaxed, in the blue and purple range, with greenery that’s a softer silver, gray. For the containers, I’d like big ironstone pitchers like these.” She tapped one picture on the screen, then slid her fingertip across the screen.

“Now. Here’s what I’m thinking for my bouquet and the bridesmaids. White tea roses, white Stargazer lilies, pale, pale yellow stephanotis. Hand-dyed ribbons in the colors of the girl’s dresses.”

She slid over to the next board. “These are the girl’s dresses. I’m having ten attendants. I would have kept it at eight, but
his
mother”—she cut her eyes sideways at her fiancé, a budget analyst named Hank—“is having a cat fit and insisting I have his sisters—and I’m sorry, honey, but Geneva is clinically obese, and LeAnne has that unfortunate red hair, so I can’t have anything pink.…”

She sighed heavily, then clasped her fiancé’s hand and wrinkled her pert button nose. “You agree, don’t you, Hank?”

Hank’s hair was also what Cara thought of as an unfortunate shade of red, but he nodded agreement. “Geneva’s thinking about gastric bypass. If she goes in this summer, I think we can count on her being a size sixteen by October. Anyway, pink does nothing for Michelle’s coloring. So that’s why we’re thinking mostly blues, purples, some silver and gray for everything at the church.”

“Right,” Michelle agreed. “Then, at the reception, which will be in the Westin’s ballroom, we’ll segue into deeper, more dramatic colors.”

“Show her the tablecloths,” Hank urged. “Ombré! Michelle got an unbelievable deal on the fabric at this online store.”

Michelle slid her fingertip and a new Pinterest board popped up. This one was labeled “Ideas for wedding receptions.”

Cara Kryzik nodded and jotted down notes. “Got it. Blues, silvers, purples. No pink. Loose arrangements. Mostly white for the bridesmaids. Are we doing anything else at the church? Pew bows, anything like that? You did say it’s at St. John’s, right?”

“No pew bows,” Hank said emphatically. “That’s just so … nineties.”

Michelle snapped the cover of the iPad. “So I guess that’s it for now. You’ll put together a mood board for me? And a proposal? By, say … Wednesday?”

“Wednesday will be fine,” Cara said. She glanced at Bert, who’d also been taking notes throughout the two-hour meeting. “I’ll email it, and then we can talk.”

Bride and groom stood and left, holding hands.

The bells on the shop door jingled merrily as the couple left.

Cara rolled her eyes. “Cute couple. Controlling bride. Passive-aggressive groom. I give them three years, tops.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Bert said, still jotting down notes. “Less than that if she wises up and figures out she’s married a raging homosexual.”

Cara Kryzik raised one eyebrow. “You think?”

“Takes one to know one,” Bert said.

*   *   *

May and June were always a blur for Bloom, but this year, Cara thought, might be the year that topped all years. If those talking-head economists wanted a real signal that the recession was over, they had only to look at her upcoming wedding calendar.

May was already manic, and it was just the first Saturday of the month. June would be even busier. Her calendar was full with showers, rehearsal dinners, and weddings.

But busy didn’t necessarily mean profitable. If she could just avoid any more equipment-related disasters, she might, just might, be able to put together enough money to send the Colonel a big fat check by the end of the month.

This morning she’d delivered the centerpieces for a bridesmaids’ brunch at nine, met with Michelle and Hank, and by one she was already behind schedule finishing up the flowers for the most demanding bride she’d ever worked with.

Cara wrapped a single white rose with green floral tape and inserted it into the already over-the-top centerpiece of white ranunculus, orange parrot tulips, and green and blue hydrangeas that were spilling out of an heirloom Georgian silver soup tureen destined for the buffet table.

“What do you think?” she asked, turning to her assistant.

Bert put down his scissors and gazed over the top of his wire-rimmed granny glasses at the towering arrangement.

“Baudy, gawdy, and fabulous,” he decreed. “But you know our little bride Torie. More is always more with that girl.”

“I know,” Cara said with a sigh, selecting another flower from the dwindling bucket on the floor. “Half these flowers would be a showstopper, but I can’t make Torie see that. She is determined to have the most ostentatious wedding in the history of Savannah. It’s too bad we have to waste all this effort and beauty on a girl who doesn’t know a pansy from a petunia.”

“As though Torie Fanning would ever deign to sniff anything as incredibly middle-class as either a pansy or a petunia,” Bert said.

The shop phone rang and Cara glanced over at the caller-ID screen. “Speaking of which, there’s the smother of the bride now.” Her hand hovered over the receiver. “I swear, if Lillian calls me with one more demand, I am going to go stark, raving bonkers.”

“Think of the invoice we’re going to present when this whole circus is over,” Bert advised.

“No. I’m thinking of the look on the Colonel’s face when he opens the envelope with his check,” Cara corrected.

“Exactly,” he said, nodding. “Just hold your nose and smile pretty.”

The phone kept ringing.

“Brides!” Cara muttered. “If I ever even entertain the idea of getting married again, Bert, you are authorized to smack me upside the head and have me committed.”

“Never say never,” Bert warned.

“I’m serious,” Cara said. She looked across the workroom. “Here Poppy,” she called.

The curly-haired goldendoodle puppy raced over to her side and propped her front paws on Cara’s knees. Cara bent down to let the puppy lick her chin. “Puppy love. That’s all I need. No more men, and definitely no more weddings.”

Bert pointed at the phone, which was still ringing. “Really. Don’t you think you’d better get that?”

“I’m not answering,” Cara said defiantly. She got up from her stool and stretched. “And I am not stuffing any more flowers in this centerpiece. The wedding is in less than five hours. We’ve got to get these arrangements loaded in the van and get them out to Isle of Hope before three. Whatever Lillian wants, it’ll just have to…”

Before she could finish the sentence, they heard the tinkling of bells coming from the front of the shop. Poppy pricked up her ears and started toward the sound.

“Close the door!” Cara hollered. “Don’t let the dog get…”

But it was too late. Sensing an opening, the seven-month-old goldendoodle, Poppy, streaked toward daylight.

“Grab her,” Cara called to the startled stranger who’s just entered Bloom. He paused for only a split second, pivoted, and lunged toward Poppy, managing to grab on to her collar. But Poppy, an obedience-school dropout who was as determined as she was undisciplined, easily wriggled out of the collar and was out the door in a flash, joyously running full-tilt down West Jones Street.

“Shit!” Cara cried.

“Not again,” Bert echoed. “Not today.”

“Sorry,” the stranger said, turning from Cara to Bert, still holding the collar in his right hand. “I wanted to get some flowers sent to my sister in the hospital…”

“Can you help him?” Cara gave Bert a pleading look. “I’ll go after Poppy. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, start loading the van without me.”

Cara sprinted out of Bloom without looking back.

*   *   *

“Poppy!” she called, cupping her hands over her mouth as a makeshift megaphone. “Poppy, come back!”

She passed the restored nineteenth-century town houses and elegant storefronts in her block, and dashed across Barnard Street, dodging cars as she ran.

Three tourists with cameras strung around their necks and unfolded street maps stood on the corner, arguing loudly about where to have lunch.

“No more barbecue,” snapped a twenty-something girl in a tie-dyed shirt and white shorts.

“Did you see a dog run past just now?” Cara interrupted. “Curly white hair, maybe thirty pounds?”

“That way.” The girl’s middle-aged father pointed east. “She sure can run.”

Cara continued east down Jones. She paused by the line of people still queued up for lunch outside Mrs. Wilkes’ boardinghouse. “Did you see a dog run past here?” she asked breathlessly.

“Thataway,” volunteered a bespectacled senior citizen with a plastic tour-company lanyard around her neck.

Cara ran on, crossing Whitaker, Bull, Drayton, and Abercorn. Her thin-soled sandals flapped against the steaming concrete sidewalks. Her face was sheened with sweat, her T-shirt glued to her chest.

“See a dog?” she asked, pausing beside a college kid locking his bike to a utility pole in front of a classroom building on the art-college campus.

“Huh?”

Twenty minutes had passed. But nobody else had spotted the puppy. Reluctantly, she started jogging back toward Bloom, breathing heavily and sweating profusely.

Bert had the van pulled around to the front of the shop by the time she got back. “Anything?”

“No,” Cara said, near tears. “Look, just wait here. I’m going to take the van and see if I can spot her.”

“Cara? Lillian has called back twice, and now Torie’s started calling. And her wedding director wants to know why we aren’t already out at the church. You know it’ll take us thirty minutes to get out to Isle of Hope.”

“Stall ’em,” Cara said. “I can’t let Poppy just wander around downtown. She’ll get hit by one of those tour buses, or run over by one of the horse-drawn carriages. And even if somebody does find her, they won’t know who she is, because she’s not wearing her collar. Please, Bert?”

Bert shrugged and went back inside the shop to try to mollify their clients.

Cara drove east and north this time, trolling the side streets, leaning out the window of the pink-and-white-striped van, calling her puppy’s name, straining for a familiar glimpse of curly white fur, but to no avail. While she cruised, her cell phone rang and pinged and buzzed, with incoming calls, texts, and emails, all of which she ignored.

She was backtracking toward the shop, turning up Habersham at East Charlton, when she saw a tall, bare-chested man dressed in nylon running shorts and expensive-looking running shoes, tugging a medium-sized, furry white dog by a piece of rope. He was walking down the lane behind Charlton.

“Poppy!” Cara cried. She veered left and into the lane.

“Hey!” she called to the man. She leaned out the open window of the van. “Excuse me, that’s my dog.”

He was in his mid thirties—the man, not the dog. His dark hair was pushed back from his forehead and his chest gleamed with perspiration. Even in her extreme distress, Cara noted that he was seriously ripped. The man glanced down at the puppy, then back up at Cara.

He frowned. “The hell it is. This is
my
dog.”

“No.” Cara put the van in park. “Honestly. That’s Poppy. My goldendoodle.”

“No,” he said impatiently, starting to walk away. “This is Shaz. Unfortunately, this is
my
goldendoodle.”