The Chocolate Bridal Bash (2 page)

“Oh, my goodness!” Aunt Nettie had reason to be surprised. My mom and I usually communicated by e-mail. If Aunt Nettie got involved, it was with a casual, “Say hi to Sally.”

Aunt Nettie washed her hands, turning off the water with her elbow in health department–approved style. She headed toward the phone in the break room.

She and my mom were talking by the time I got back to the office phone, and I listened in. My mom hadn’t messed around with a lot of preliminary politeness; she was asking a direct question. It was one that surprised me.

“Who’s sheriff of Warner County now?” she said.

“Sheriff?” Aunt Nettie sounded puzzled. “Let me think. It’s some man named Smith. I don’t remember his first name.”

“Then Carl Van Hoosier is out?”

“Van Hoosier? He left office years ago.”

“I suppose that there’s no hope that he’s dead.”

Aunt Nettie laughed. “I don’t have the slightest idea. If he’s alive, he’d be a hundred years old. I could find out.”

“No! No, it’s okay. I just want to make sure he’s not still throwing his weight around. Lee? Are you on the line?”

“Sure am. Do you want me to hang up?”

“Oh, no. What’s the date for the wedding?”

I told her, adding, “It’s on a Saturday.”

“Three weeks after Easter,” Aunt Nettie said. “I told Lee people in the chocolate business can’t take honeymoons until the last bunny’s been sold.”

I could almost hear my mom forcing her voice to sound cheerful. “I’ll clear my schedule and plan to be there. And I’ll be polite. Maybe I can come a few days early and help fill the rice bags or something.”

“That would be wonderful, Mom.”

She sighed again, and when she spoke her voice sounded faintly worried. “It’ll be okay. I’m sure it will.”

I promised to keep my mother informed on the wedding plans, and we all hung up. Then I met Aunt Nettie in the break room. I was curious. “What’s the deal with this former sheriff? What did he have to do with Mom?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea, Lee.”

“She didn’t leave town one step ahead of the law?”

Aunt Nettie laughed. “As far as I know the sheriff wasn’t after her, though the minister might have been.”

“The minister? Why would the minister have been concerned? I never heard of Mom darkening the door of a church.”

“That was the problem, I guess. She didn’t darken the door when she should have.”

“What are you talking about?”

Aunt Nettie’s eyes widened. “Don’t you know about how your mother came to leave Warner Pier?”

“She took the bus, I guess. She always told me she wanted to see the world and could barely wait to get out of town.”

“She never told you any details?”

“What details?”

“Lee, your mother ran away from Warner Pier on what was supposed to be her wedding day!”

A
unt Nettie might as well have tossed a barrel of Lake Michigan’s wintry water on me. I had never been so astonished in my life. I stood there gaping.

My mother had been engaged when she left Warner Pier? She had left on what would have been her wedding day?

How could she do that?

And how could she never have told her only daughter about it?

It was a family secret I’d never had a hint existed. I hung on to a stainless steel worktable, staring at Aunt Nettie. “Tell me all!” I said.

Unfortunately, before she could comply, there was a knock at the door. Aunt Nettie’s dinner date, Warner Pier Police Chief Hogan Jones, had arrived. Aunt Nettie went to let him in, and our chance to talk was gone. But before they left, Aunt Nettie took me aside. “Hogan and I won’t be late. I’ll tell you everything I know—and that’s not a lot—when I get home.”

“Wait! There’s one thing I’ve got to know now. Who was Mom engaged to?”

A shadow fell across Aunt Nettie’s face. “It’s a long story.”

I took a deep breath and voiced my greatest fear. “Was it anyone I know?”

“Oh, no!” The shadow on Aunt Nettie’s face grew deeper. “No, you never knew him.”

She once again assured me that she’d tell me what she knew when she got home. Then she and Hogan went out, leaving me in a state of shock. My mom had been engaged? She’d run off on her wedding day?

A picture of Mom climbing onto a bus wearing a wedding gown popped into my mind.

But that was silly. I did know a few things about my mom’s youth, and one of them was that her father had died during her senior year in high school. His death had left the family in bad financial shape, she’d told me. But Mom had been in airline school in Dallas by the next fall. So the runaway bride episode must have happened during the summer after her senior year. If she’d been planning a wedding that soon after her father’s death and when the family was feeling hard up, it would have been something small—probably no elaborate wedding dress would have been involved.

But in a town the size of Warner Pier—permanent population 2,500—even a small wedding is a major social event, or at least that was what Joe and I were finding out. Everybody from the druggist to the postmaster expected an invitation. The last-minute cancellation of a wedding would have had the town on its ear.

No wonder so many people aged fifty and older had asked me if my mother was coming to my wedding.

And no wonder Mom had never wanted to come back to Warner Pier in the thirty-three years since she had left. She would forever be remembered as the bride who didn’t show up at her own wedding.

But who had the bridegroom been?

When my own dinner date, my fiancé Joe Woodyard, came to pick me up, I asked him what he knew about the whole thing.

Joe’s a Warner Pier native and his mother is a Warner Pier native. In addition to having a bushel of brains, plus dark hair, bright blue eyes, and regular features that add up to yummy good looks, Joe is a natural athlete. In high school he made his mark by becoming a state wrestling champ and captain of Michigan’s best high school debate team in the same year. He went on to earn a law degree and fought for the underdog as a public defender. Then a bad marriage forced him to reassess his life goals and drop the practice of law for a career as what he calls an “honest craftsman,” operating a shop that specializes in the restoration of antique wooden boats. But he’s edged back into law; he’s also part-time city attorney for Warner Pier.

Joe moves in so many circles—city government, boat owners, old high school pals—that he usually knows everything about everybody around Warner Pier. I was sure he’d know something about my mother’s runaway-bride past.

But his answer was evasive. “I don’t know much.” His eyes sort of bounced off mine.

“But you did know something about it.” I made it a statement. “Why didn’t you ever mention this?”

“I tried talking about your mother a few times, thinking you’d tell me the whole story. But when you didn’t seem to want to . . .”

“I didn’t know the whole story! I didn’t know there was a story!”

“I see that now. But at the time, I just thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Do you know whom Mom was planning to marry?”

“I don’t remember his name.” Joe shrugged.

“Is he still around?”

“No.” Joe’s voice was final. “Come on, we’re going to be late meeting Tony and Lindy.”

Tony and Lindy Herrera were our closest friends. They both worked—Tony days and Lindy nights—and they had three school-age kids, so an evening out was a big treat for them. I didn’t want to spoil it.

“Don’t mention this tonight,” I said to Joe. “I’d better get the family’s official line from Aunt Nettie before I say the wrong thing around Warner Pier.”

I admit I was absentminded at dinner, but I managed not to say anything too dumb. Oh, I talked to Lindy about a “runaway” for the wedding reception, when I meant a “runner” on the main serving table, and I told her my dad wanted to “escape” me. “I mean, escort!” I said quickly. “He says he didn’t get to give me away the first time I got married, so this time he wants to take a powder. I mean, do the honors!”

My dad wasn’t the only parent concerned with the second-time-around aspect of our wedding. It was also giving Joe’s mom trouble—which meant she was giving us trouble.

Joe and I had both been married and divorced. We wanted our wedding to be simple—with more emphasis on meaning than on pomp. I was wearing a streetlength dress, and Joe was wearing a business suit. I didn’t have an engagement ring; Joe had had his mother’s engagement diamond set on a wide gold ring that I planned to wear as a wedding band. Lindy and Tony would be our only attendants. The ceremony was to be held in Aunt Nettie’s living room, with family only. We saw no need to have a rehearsal dinner.

The only thing that was getting out of hand was the reception. We were planning to invite all our friends to that, and it kept getting larger and more elaborate every day. Especially if Joe’s mom had her way.

Joe’s first wedding had been an elopement, just as mine had, so Mercy Woodyard hadn’t been present. This time she wanted to be involved, but we weren’t cooperating.

As soon as we picked a date, Mercy offered to give a rehearsal dinner, of course. She hadn’t been too disappointed when we told her we didn’t want one. As a successful insurance agent, she declared, she had plenty of money to spend on her only son’s wedding, so she would be hostess for the reception.

She hadn’t asked. She’d announced.

I hated this idea, and I’m happy to say that Joe did, too. I’m sure Mercy meant well, but letting her be hostess would mean we lost control of the event. Neither of us was willing to do that, and we’d tried to make it clear to her. But every time we thought we had her convinced, she popped right back with a new approach.

Aunt Nettie wasn’t being a lot of help either. In the two years since I’d come to Warner Pier to be business manager for her chocolate company, I’d lived with her in a hundred-year-old house built by my great-grandfather. Aunt Nettie thought having the wedding in the family home was fine. It was giving her a good excuse for redecorating.

I didn’t think this was a good idea. For one thing, I loved the old house—slightly shabby and full of hand-me-down furniture—just the way it was. Besides, there wasn’t enough time to bring in paint, to order and hang new draperies, and to shop for new furniture. Not with Easter, one of the most important chocolate holidays of the year, to fit into our professional lives. But Aunt Nettie kept coming up with new ideas about updating the living room.

That night it helped me to talk the reception over with Lindy, who’s been a friend since I was sixteen and who in her job as a caterer would be doing a lot of the hands-on work for the event. But the news that my mother had fled her hometown on the eve of her wedding haunted me. All through dinner I was more concerned about what Aunt Nettie was going to tell me than about socializing with Lindy and Tony.

So I asked Joe to take me home right after dinner, and I invited him to stay and learn the family secrets from Aunt Nettie.

“No, thanks,” he said. “Aunt Nettie may want to tell you something that’s not fit for masculine ears. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He gave me a big kiss and held me for a long moment. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m sure Nettie will make everything clear.”

Over coffee and Baileys Irish Cream bonbons—yes, Aunt Nettie and I work with chocolate all day, then eat it at home—Aunt Nettie told me about my mom’s adventures as a runaway bride.

“I want to warn you that I don’t know a lot,” she said. “All this happened the year Phil and I started TenHuis Chocolade. We lived over the shop, and we might as well have lived inside it. We were the only two employees, and we worked night and day. We had to. If we hadn’t made a success of it that summer, we would have had to give up the idea of having a chocolate shop in Warner Pier or anywhere else—ever. So when your grandfather died, we were not a lot of help to your grandmother and Sally. Looking back, I see that Sally was in a dangerous emotional state, but at the time all I could think about was making and selling chocolate.”

She sighed. “If we hadn’t failed to help Sally, maybe things would have been different.”

I patted her hand. “She must have been a prickly teenager.”

“Well, Sally and her mother were at odds all the time. Phil was ten years older than Sally, and he felt that he had to take his mother’s part, so that put Sally at odds with us. Mother TenHuis was terribly shocked by your grandfather’s death—we all were. I guess we felt that Sally should carry on bravely and support her mother. We didn’t really notice that she also needed support. But the arguments with her mother were getting worse all the time; I’ll admit we were relieved when she and Bill Dykstra told us they were going to get married.”

“Bill Dykstra? That was her fiancé’s name? There are lots of Dykstras around here. You said I didn’t know him, but do I know any of his relatives?”

Aunt Nettie’s eyes dodged mine. “I don’t think you do,” she said. Then she went on with her story.

Bill Dykstra had been my mom’s high school sweetheart, Aunt Nettie explained. She described him as “a nice boy,” two years older than Mom. He’d just finished a two-year course in electronics at a Holland technical school. That branch of the Dykstra family was “hardworking,” rather than wealthy, she said. Bill’s mother had been a science teacher. His father was an electrician, and like many local craftsmen in the Warner Pier area, he also opened and closed cottages for the summer people—the people who own the hundreds of vacation homes on the shore of Lake Michigan and in the countryside around Warner Pier.

Like my mom, Bill had been eager to leave Warner Pier and see the world. He had landed a job in Chicago, and the two of them had been excited about moving to the big city. Their wedding had been scheduled for the first Sunday in August at the Warner Pier Reformed Church.