Speak Now (44 page)

“Mom?”

“Aak! Cara? What are you doing here?” Diane didn’t turn around to see. Instead, she groaned. “Oh no!”

“What?”

I just stabbed myself with the seam ripper. There’s blood on the dress!”

Cara grabbed tissues and shoved them into her mother’s hand and then grabbed the dress, trying to save it from further drops. There, in the middle of the skirt, three large blobs of blood stained the pale ivory fabric. “What do we do? Is it washable?”

“I don’t know. I—” Diane groaned. “I just don’t know.”

“Call a dry cleaner?”

Diane nodded.

Cara draped it over the chair, her heart sick over all the work her mother had put into something that was likely ruined—particularly with so little time left. The dry cleaner promised to look at it if they brought the dress in immediately. Cara rushed back into the room with the news. “I’m going to take it over right now.”

Diane grabbed shoes and her purse. “I’m going to go to the fabric shop and get content/wash information. I never write it down when I’m going to dry clean later. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“I’ll come right back here. We have housing issues.”

Cara rushed to the dry cleaner’s who promised to try to get the blood out as soon as they heard the content information. Diane called her immediately upon reaching the fabric store. “It’s 65% polyester, 20% rayon, and 15% acetate.”

The look on the dry cleaner’s face sent another wave of nausea over her. He shook his head and said, “I’ll try, but you need to sign this waiver. I can’t be responsible if the process ruins the garment.”

“Well, it’s ruined as it is. I’ll try anything.”

All the way back to her mother’s house, Cara fought back tears. First the argument in Georgia, then the housing situation, and now her dress was ruined? She had two options. She could consider it God’s way of telling her not to marry Jonathan or Satan’s way of trying to prevent a good marriage. Cara opted for the latter—and she planned to stomp Satan’s hopes. Cara Laas would marry Jonathan and be very happy
too.

Diane arrived minutes after her, ready to deal with a distraught daughter, but Cara sat in her father’s chair, his Bible in her lap, and a new look of peace and excitement on her face. Diane frowned. “Are you okay?”

“I wasn’t, but I am now.” Her eyes rose and met Diane’s. “Mom, I’m going to be a Lyman. I am going to be one of
the
Lymans. I’ll have money. I mean, the money I earn is totally unnecessary. It could be my allowance for all he cares. Allowance!”

“This isn’t news to you. You knew he had money when you met him.”

“Well, that part never sank in. I mean, when things had to be expensive and he took care of it, I got it. It made sense. However, it never really hit home that I would have access to that money. Mom, he invests in jewelry!
Jewelry!
I’m going to have the most amazing pieces of jewelry you’ve ever seen in my little safe in my bedroom.”

Cara stared at her mother. “Mom, I’m going to have a safe in my bedroom. No wonder the houses I found weren’t good enough for him. I was still shopping for expensive for
my
budget, not for reasonable for his. It’s unreal. I have money. I can afford to buy whatever fabrics I want for whatever outfits I want. I can take some of those classes I’ve always wanted to take. I don’t have to choose between manicure or pedicure. I can have both!
Both!”
She swallowed. “Mom, I can have them as often as I want.”

“Yeah...”

Cara shook her head. “I have to call Jonathan.”

Minutes later, Diane strolled down the hallway to change into cooler clothes and overheard her daughter say, “Jonathan, you’re going to have to give me a budget. I’m going to like this much too much.”

Yeah. So would he if she’d seen in him what she thought she had. Her heart swelled with happiness for her daughter. Then a new thought hit her. She poked her head in the doorway and interrupted. “I just realized something.”

Cara covered the phone with her hand. “Yeah?”

“On the nineteenth, I’m going to be a grandmother!”

~*~*~*~

The call came a couple of hours later. The dry cleaner’s verdict: ruined. Despite all their efforts, the man could not remove all of the blood from the skirt. While Cara spoke to a realtor in Fairbury, Diane hurried off to get the dress. Cara came out of the bedroom, ready to work out how to hide the blood and found the living room empty. Frustrated, she dialed Jonathan.

“The dress is ruined.”

“What?”

“My dress. I startled Mom and she jabbed the seam ripper into her thumb. There is blood all over the front now.” She sighed.
“Okay, so there are three big blood spots, but it
feels
like all over the front.”

“Dry cleaner?”

“Nope. They tried, but they couldn’t get it all out. I feel so bad. She’s put so much work into it and now she’ll have to take the whole skirt apart.”

“Does she have time? Does she need help? Can I hire someone or—something?”

Happy to have a sympathetic ear, Cara talked about the hours of labor put into that skirt that would now have to be redone until she’d nearly talked herself into a flat A-line design. “I think I should do that. It’s just a dress. Mom will be up all night for days if I don’t figure out a way to convince her to make it a simpler design.”

“What is it—I mean that you can tell me—that makes this more elaborate?”

“Well, she’s been hand embroidering, machine embroidering, adding tucks and all kinds of things. The work in that skirt is astronomical. I told her not to do it, before she even started, but...”

“Your mother’s only child is getting married. She wants to do what she can to make it a perfect day for you. Don’t take that away from her.”

Their roles reversed. For the first time since meeting Jonathan, Cara listened to the cadence of his voice as he soothed and encouraged her. Her throat choked, amazed at the self-sacrifice he showed even with such a simple thing, and somehow he spoke the exact words she needed to hear. For a man disinclined to speak, no one would ever accuse Jonathan Lyman of being inarticulate. In fact, his eloquence nearly overwhelmed her. He encouraged in gentle, almost poetic tones, and then he grew firm.

“I know you, Cara mia. You will do what you can to relieve what you perceive as a burden on your mother. And in doing so, this time, I think you will create a new one. You do this for me often. You take away the burden of conversation and carry it. It’s a ‘labor of love’ of sorts, and I cherish it. However, I can see that the day may come when I need to talk to comfort you, much like we’re doing now, and you won’t let me then. Remember today. I can carry it too. It’s a gift that we give the people we love—we shoulder their burdens and we allow them to shoulder ours.”

“You are amazing,” she whispered after several seconds of near silence. “I love you.”

“Good. That was kind of the point when I started this thing.”

“Since I have you, I should tell you that I spoke to a realtor. There’s a house that I think you should see. I’m going to email it. Hold on.”

They chatted as she logged onto her email from her mother’s computer, found the correct one, and zipped it to him. “Look at the property, it’s right on the water, but there’s a fenced yard in front and on the side so the kids have a safe place to play. There isn’t a mother-in-law suite on site, but she says there are several smaller houses that are crawling on the market right now. Two need extensive remodeling and one only has a single small bedroom. That one is within a five minute walk if you stroll and sniff the roses.”

“I like that kitchen. Verna would too. What about—yeah, look at the master suite. There’s a bedroom attached—probably meant to be a nursery—but you could put an office slash craft room in there, couldn’t you?”

“I could. What do you think?”

“I like what I see, but I can’t tell how large it is. Those pictures always make things much larger than they are.”

“Coming on Saturday?”

“Friday night. I’m thinking about bringing the kids to stay until the wedding. That way, Bryce can get started at a school there and have less interruption. If we take a place this weekend...”

“Where will they stay until you all move?”

“My mother’s house. She’ll drive them back and forth to school. It’ll work.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mmm hmm…” Jonathan sounded distracted. “It’ll give Verna a chance to make decisions around here, uninterrupted.”

The mention of Verna reminded her of a question she’d been meaning to ask.
“How are her kids handling the idea of her moving?”

“It’s no surprise to them.
They’ve known it was coming. She’s excited—thinks they’ll quit planning their weekends around entertaining her. ‘Once a month,’” he quoted in her southern drawl, “‘is more than enough for these old bones.’”

“She can’t be fifty!”

“She is—barely.” Jonathan sighed. “I just love that her kids
want
to keep her involved in their lives. So many get busy with their own and forget their parents.”

A text arrived during a budget meeting the following week. Cara paled as she saw the words. TROUBLE. CALL ME. TRENNA.

“Do you have something to add, Cara?” Derek stared at her pointedly.

“Everything is in my report. We need to plug the drain in the disconnect between internet options and the actual contract, or we’ll weaken our profit margin.”

“And how does legal think we can do that?”

The questions fired at her, but Cara managed to ignore the rising panic in her heart and concentrate on their profit and loss statements. However, the moment that she left the conference room, Cara called Trenna. “I’m just out of a meeting. What’s up?”

“Okay, well, the supplier is saying we can’t get halibut. Charis is scrambling, but we need a second option in case she can’t get what we need delivered in time.”

“What about money? What if we go to a more expensive supplier? Will that work?”

Silence hung between them until at last, Trenna sighed. “We could. I don’t want to do that—sets a bad precedent—but if you really want it, I could go... it could mean a twenty-five percent increase. We’d be able to take ten percent off our cut, but—”

“No, don’t lose your profit over me being stubborn. I just want it this way. We’ll pay the extra.”

“You shouldn’t have to pay extra for a supplier’s failure,” Trenna argued.

“Look, if you want me to call another agency, I get it.”

“I don’t want to do that, and you know it.” Silence hovered between them as Trenna thought. “I think I’ll talk to the original supplier and tell that if they breach the contract and fail to supply the product as promised, they’ll have to pay a ten percent fee for us to go elsewhere. I’m pretty sure that’s in the contract. It’ll give you a discount from another company without me losing my profit and you doing the guilt thing.”

Cara flushed and latched onto the first excuse to disconnect the call that she could think of. “Look, I need to call Jonathan and make sure there isn’t something else he would like to have in case you can’t get it.”

“Well, don’t forget to stop by and pick out a table setting sometime this week. It’s essential. I am down to half a dozen options now. Max.”

“I’ll come in an hour.”

Cara hurried to her car as she dialed Jonathan. “What other dinner option would not feel like a compromise?”

“What’s up?”

“Supplier problems. Don’t want to talk about it. Just give me options.”

“Um, Beef Wellington and maybe, um, scallops?”

“Deal. Gotta go.”

“Um, Cara?”

Impatiently, she tapped her fingers on her steering wheel. “Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Love you too, Jonafan.”

~*~*~*~

At The Agency, an assistant led her into a room full of two-man tables, each decorated with a tablecloth, settings, stemware, and silverware. The interchangeable centerpiece options only made the decision worse. Her eyes scanned the room, looking at different things she liked as an assistant pushed a table to the center of the room. “Does anything grab you?”

“I was trying to decide what color cloth first.”

“Well, maybe if you pick a table setting or place setting…”

She tried, but Cara’s mind wouldn’t work that way. At last, she pointed to a taupe cloth. “I think maybe that. Let’s try that.”

Just as the assistant, Jordyn, pulled a tablecloth from a cabinet, Cara shook her head. “No, ivory. Taupe topper. Do you have it in sheer?”

“Yes.... Oh, I think I see it, yeah.”

The ivory cloth covered the table and the topper followed it. Cara nodded at the sight. “I like it. We’ll need pink and ivory flowers. Let’s keep them pale and elegant. Tulips maybe.”

“Silver or gold?”

“Definitely silver.”

“Cut or smooth crystal?”

“Smooth and with those dishes.” Etched glass on ivory chargers would be perfect.