Summer of Joy (27 page)

“It couldn’t hurt. I’ve been praying about lots of things about the wedding. About being married. Like please let my new stepdaughters like me.” Leigh looked over at Jocie as she pulled out of the parking lot.

“You don’t have to pray that one. We already like you, and nothing will be all that different even after you’re officially our stepmom. That is, unless you want us to start calling you mom or something.”

“You can call me whatever you want. But for sure, I’d be proud to be your mom.” Leigh reached over to touch Jocie’s hand.

“Gee, that’s so nice you’re liable to make me cry or something, Leigh. Thanks. I guess that’s more than DeeDee ever was. She wasn’t too happy when I came along.”

“Her loss.” Leigh’s voice changed a little, got carefully casual. “Does she know your father is getting remarried?” She kept her eyes on the road.

“I don’t know. Tabitha writes her sometimes, sends her pictures of Stephen Lee, but I don’t know what she tells her about what’s going on here. She might have told her, but DeeDee never writes back. So who knows? She might have moved and not even be getting Tabitha’s letters.” Jocie studied Leigh’s profile a moment before she asked, “You aren’t worried about her, are you?”

“No, no, of course not. I was just curious, I guess. The first wife and all, you know.” Leigh glanced over at Jocie. Leigh’s face was a little red, but that could have been because of the sun shining through the car windows.

“I used to be curious about her too. But then I found out she never wanted me, and so I don’t worry that much about her anymore. The Lord gave me Dad and Wes and I’m happy.”

“Me too. I’m happy, I mean,” Leigh said. “I have to be the luckiest girl in the world or will be just as soon as we find that perfect dress today.”

They went to three different shops. Leigh tried on dozens of dresses. Some of them were really pretty. All very white. Some had long flowing trains. A lot of them had puffy sleeves that did make Leigh look a little top heavy. Others had high tight necks that Leigh yanked on so she could breathe. The fluffy chiffon skirts over the satin underskirts just weren’t Leigh’s style. A few times Leigh stood in front of the mirror and considered a bit longer on this or that dress, but she always ended up shaking her head. None of them were perfect.

They started for home, leaving behind them a trail of chiffon and satin and lace for the frustrated salesladies to put back in their plastic dress bags. Jocie’s feet hurt and she felt almost snow-blind from so much white. Her ears were ringing from all the clerks chirping about how beautiful this or that looked. One of the clerks had even looked at Jocie and said she was a beautiful child. As if that would make Leigh decide one of that clerk’s dresses was the perfect one.

“I’m sorry, Jocie,” Leigh said with a sigh as they pulled out into traffic after leaving the last store. “Maybe I should have gone on and taken that last one. It was nice enough.”

“But not perfect.”

“No, but maybe I shouldn’t expect perfection.” Leigh sighed again.

Just then a car pulled out in front of them and Leigh slammed on her brakes. Jocie held her breath and braced for the crash as the tires squealed. Leigh’s car stopped with bare inches to spare. Before he drove off, the man in the other car shook his fist at Leigh as though she’d been the one to pull out in front of him.

Leigh’s knuckles were white where she was gripping the steering wheel and her eyes were wide. “Oh my gosh!” Her voice sounded shaky. Horns started blowing behind them, but Leigh just sat there.

“Are you okay?” Jocie asked.

“I think I need to park a minute to give myself time to quit shaking. You see a place?”

“How about over there in front of that dress shop? What’s it say? Vintage dresses. Wonder what that means.”

“A fancy way to say ‘used,’ I’d guess.” Leigh pulled her car out of traffic into the parking spot. She took a couple of deep breaths. “I hate driving in Lexington. Everybody over here drives like a maniac.”

“Look, Leigh.” Jocie pointed toward the dress shop. “That dress in the window, it’s pretty fancy. Maybe they have some vintage wedding dresses in there.”

“They’ll probably look vintage.”

“Come on. Can’t hurt to look. And vintage sounds interesting to me.” Jocie pulled up on the door handle to get out.

“You’re not the bride,” Leigh said, but she turned off the key and scooted across the seat to get out of the car after Jocie.

The store was sort of dark and had a closed-up closet smell. The clerk barely looked up from the thick textbook she was studying and waved them toward the back when Leigh asked about wedding dresses.

There hanging on the wall was an antique ivory wedding dress with a lace-covered bodice that dipped down in a point at the waistline with the satin skirt flowing gracefully away from it. The lace sleeves had the same point to lie against the back of Leigh’s hands. Real-looking pearl buttons ran partway up the sleeves and all the way up the back and took forever for Jocie to button. But once Leigh had the dress on, it looked as if it had been made for her. The right size. The right length. The right everything.

Leigh whirled the skirt back and forth in the tiny space in front of the one mirror. The whispery sound was like music. Nobody said the dress was beautiful. No clerk told Leigh what a beautiful bride she would be in it. But it was beautiful. Leigh was beautiful. But even better, it was perfect.

Sometimes it was almost scary the way the Lord answered prayers.

32

D
avid had no idea getting married was going to be so crazy. When he’d done it the first time, it had been simple enough. He and Adrienne had driven a couple of hours to Tennessee, stood up in front of a judge, and come home Mr. and Mrs. Brooke. It might not have been a wise thing to do, but it hadn’t been hard. Or complicated.

Of course, the day after they’d come home from Tennessee, he’d caught a plane to go back to the submarine and finish out the war. He’d missed out on the wedding showers and all the newlywed advice.

No such luck this time. He’d always thought showers were just for ladies, but the women at church insisted he had to be at the one they were having on Saturday afternoon. David looked at his calendar on his desk. Wednesday, May 19. Not quite two weeks until he and Leigh were tying the knot. A happy feeling soaked through him and settled in his bones. He was willing to go through a little craziness to make that happen.

His calendar for the next few days certainly looked crazy enough. He had things scribbled in everywhere. A visit to Willie Jefferson who’d just found out he had lung cancer. An interview with Andrew Webster who was opening up a new feed and farm supply store on Center Street. A reminder in red to pick up his new suit and get a haircut before the wedding. A doctor’s appointment for Stephen Lee to be sure his ear infection had cleared up. Prayer with Jimmy Byrd who was home on leave before being shipped out to Vietnam.

David frowned when he read that entry. Nobody knew what was going to happen over there, but ever since the North Vietnamese had summarily rejected President Johnson’s peace offer, none of the news had been good. Air strikes had been going on for a while, but now the president had sent in an Army combat troop to join the Special Forces already there. Jimmy’s mom and dad were worried sick about Jimmy. David wrote himself another reminder to say extra prayers for Jimmy and all the other young men who were graduating high school or college and facing the likelihood of being drafted into the service.

Graduation. David had that on his to-do list already. The
Banner
needed pictures of the graduates. And of the Little League ballplayers. Pictures sold the
Banner
better than anything he could write. At least this week’s issue was already on the stands and in the mailmen’s packs.

And praise the Lord, circulation was increasing again. It helped to be the only paper in town. People could get mad, people could get morally outraged, people could decide David was doing everything wrong, but if they wanted to read about what was happening in Hollyhill, they had to buy the
Banner
. And most people did.

The
Banner
might not always be totally accurate, but it was more often than not and certainly more often than the rumor mill. Take the rumors that had gone around after Christmas about Zella. For a while there, the poor woman had practically slid down under her desk every time the bell had rung over the office door.

David didn’t know if Zella would ever get over people imagining her anything but morally upright and then having the incredible gall to pair her up with Wes. To her that went beyond ridiculous to insane. In fact the stories still kept popping up as irrepressibly as dandelions springing back up out of the grass after a lawn was mowed.

Wes hadn’t been worried about it at all. Hadn’t even been all that upset at Zella for poking unasked into his business. “I don’t know how she did it, but you got to give Zell credit. She’s a regular Miss Marple,” he’d said with a shake of his head. “But fact is, I’m thinking some of this just might be the good Lord’s doing. He must have known now was a good time for me to stop running from what happened. Rosa wouldn’t have ever wanted me to leave Robbie on his own the way I did.”

“From the looks of Robert Wesley, your son must have done all right for himself,” David said.

“Yeah, Robbie Jr. is okay. A little full of himself, but then so was I at his age. Thought I was smarter than the average joe. Something to do with being twenty, I think,” Wes said. “He’s bringing his dad down next visit.”

“His dad? Maybe you should think of him not as Robert Wesley’s dad but as your son.”

“Maybe I should,” Wes agreed, but he looked worried as he massaged his injured leg.

In spite of Wes’s misgivings, the visit had gone well. Wes and his son had circled each other like wary dogs not sure of the other dog’s welcome, but once they decided neither of them were anxious to bite or growl, they sat down and started talking. They had no way of ever getting back the years they’d lost, but they had gotten a good start for the years ahead of them. The son’s wife and daughter hadn’t come. Something about shopping for a prom dress.

David had found out, what with Leigh’s anxiety over finding the perfect wedding dress, that shopping could be serious business. Thank the Lord Leigh had finally found a dress she liked. Jocie hadn’t told him what the dress looked like. Seemed that was taboo in wedding rules and regulations. But she’d seemed to be as relieved as he was that Leigh had found what Jocie called the perfect dress. Said that when or if she ever got married, she was wearing blue jeans. That she was having a Jupiterian wedding.

When she’d made the pronouncement in the pressroom, Wes had looked at her and said, “I can’t recall ever telling you about Jupiterian weddings.”

“And I don’t want you to,” Jocie said. “When and, as I said,
if
I ever get married, I’ll figure out what a Jupiterian wedding is then. It might just be whatever I decide to make up.”

“Sounds Jupiterian enough for me.” Wes laughed.

“Let’s not be talking about any more weddings for a while,” David said.

Jocie looked from Wes to him and smiled. “It’s not me you need to be telling that. It’s Tabitha. I think she’d like to have a double wedding this summer.”

“I’m not sure she and Robert Wesley are quite ready for that. I know I’m not,” David said.

And he wasn’t. His own wedding was enough to worry about right now. Of course he’d seen Tabitha falling for Robert Wesley, and he’d been happy to see Robert Wesley returning her interest. The girl needed to feel attractive again after Stephen Lee had been born. But surely it was way too early to even be thinking about anything serious between the two of them. They’d only seen each other a few times.

He had filed the idea away in his head along with all the other things he needed to worry about. Like whether Jocie could make it through another week of school with that teacher making her life miserable. At least the man had quit giving her bad grades. Carl Madison somehow made sure of that after David had gone to school to talk to the principal. But Jocie still had to go to English class. She was still at Edwin Hammond’s mercy, and it appeared the man didn’t have much of that.

Or much sense either the way he was still chasing after Leigh. Leigh had told him she was engaged and uninterested, but he kept calling her, kept sending her flowers, kept mailing her poems, kept hanging around. Kept David seeing how much older he was than Leigh. But she said she loved him—David—and as amazingly hard to believe as that was, he did believe her. He wasn’t worrying about that.

And truly the Lord said worrying was the wrong use of a Christian’s energy. The Bible was pretty clear on that. A worry in the mind just meant a person was neglecting his prayer life and not turning over worries and problems to the great problem solver.

David had been praying. Every day. About the wedding. About being a good husband. About finding a way to convince his future mother-in-law that Leigh wasn’t completely ruining her life by becoming Mrs. David Brooke. About how they were going to find enough seats at Mt. Pleasant Church for everybody planning to come to the wedding. You’d think it was the social event of the century in Hollyhill.

Every time he walked up the street or went to the Grill or out to take pictures of the end-of-school activities, somebody came up to him and said they were looking forward to coming to his wedding. Leigh said the same thing was happening to her every day at the courthouse.

As great as it was that everybody was smiling and wanting to share in his and Leigh’s happiness, the fact was Mt. Pleasant Church might hold 120 people tops and that was with chairs in the aisles. That wasn’t going to leave much room for Leigh to walk down the aisle in her perfect wedding dress.

David looked at his watch and closed his calendar book. He wasn’t going to be able to solve anything by staring at all the things he needed to do. Besides, Leigh was coming up from the courthouse any minute now to go to lunch with him. Maybe they could figure out a way to tell half of Hollyhill they couldn’t come to the wedding.