“So you didn’t want to?”
He let out a half laugh. “Nah. I thought I wanted to, but it was never going to happen. Corey told me she was pregnant and that she had no interest in getting married in a speech that lasted all of two minutes and was plainly well-rehearsed. Her adamant statement that she’d never marry me shocked me as much as the pregnancy.”
He swallowed hard, then tightened his fingers around Katie’s for a moment. “Don’t get me wrong. I was no saint. I loved her as much as I was capable of loving someone back then, but marriage wasn’t on my radar screen. I’d been accepted to a couple small colleges and that’s where I was headed, with or without Corey. But when she looked at me and said she was pregnant with my child, my gut was telling me we had to get married, that it was the proper thing to do. Even though I was stupid and got her pregnant, I was raised with very traditional values. You marry the mother of your children, and you take care of her and respect her, no matter what.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“No, not after her speech. And if I had gone ahead and proposed, and somehow managed to change her mind about marriage, it would have ended in divorce. She wouldn’t have stayed with me for long. I have no illusions about that. She wanted to move on to bigger and better things.”
Things like life in a big city and all the perks that went with it. Movie theaters showing a dozen films at once. Restaurants and coffee shops on every street corner. Places to go dancing, museums to explore, professional sporting events to attend. New faces every day.
Corey never planned to spend her life tied to Bowen, Nebraska, living in a house her husband built himself on open land behind the Eberhardts’ cornfield, eight miles from the nearest one-screen movie theater and more than an hour from the nearest megamall, talking to the same people she’d seen every day of her life.
“You sound awfully matter-of-fact about it.”
He shrugged. “It’s the truth. And it was seventeen years ago. A lot can happen in seventeen years. You can even learn to forgive yourself. I’m a completely different person than I was then, and I’m sure Corey is, too.”
“Mandy says she’s living in the Chicago suburbs.”
“That’s my understanding. She trained as a paralegal and lived in an apartment in the middle of Chicago for years, near Navy Pier, but last time we talked—about six months ago—she mentioned that she’d been renting in Downers Grove for a while but was house hunting nearby. She’s married to a lawyer, but I don’t know the guy’s last name, since she kept her maiden name. It’s not something we’ve talked about.”
“I see.”
“When she calls, we mostly talk about Mandy. I usually ask about her mom and dad and she asks about mine. Of course, her parents wanted to kill me back then. First for getting her pregnant, then for not marrying her. When she moved away, it was the last straw. You were probably in college by the time her parents left town. It wasn’t pretty. They made sure all their friends knew how angry they were with me before they moved.”
“I’m so sorry, Jared.”
“It sounds awful when I explain it now, but in reality, it’s all good.” A cloud drifted past the moon, and he strained to see Katie’s expression. He wanted to erase her doubts, to assure her that any relationship he had with Corey was way back in the past. Ancient history.
“What happened was right, in the end, both for me and for Corey. I have no regrets. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’d do it all over again, either.”
Katie was kind enough to laugh. “No, I imagine not.”
“I just hope this whole crazy marriage idea works out for Mandy. You said it yourself: she’s a great kid. Very smart and responsible. Since it’s always been just the two of us, she’s had to be. But in a lot of ways she’s still growing into the person I know she’ll become. She needs space to grow and change, and if she gets married now, it might work out fine. But it won’t be the same.”
He let the thought drift into the night air. Though Katie didn’t say anything, he knew she understood. That alone lifted the weight of worry from his shoulders.
“But what about you, Jared? What’s the right thing for you now? Things will change for you in the coming months, no matter what Mandy and Kevin do.”
“I’m not certain.”
It felt natural, sitting on the front porch under the emerging stars, talking with her while the crickets made their nightly racket and the cornstalks rustled in the breeze. He ran his thumbs over the outside of hers, then said, “But I wonder if—whatever comes—you’re going to be part of it. I’ve never even had a ‘maybe’ thought in that direction. Never met a woman I connected with so quickly. It’s made me think.”
Even as he said the words, he thought, where the heck did that come from? You didn’t tell a woman something like that unless you were willing to back it up, and they hardly knew each other. Only enough to know their backgrounds were as dissimilar as they were similar, and that they had some damned good physical chemistry.
He glanced past Katie toward the screen door, where a dark shape pressed against the mesh. Suddenly needing the distraction—had he just hung himself out on a limb or what?—he called, “C’mon, Scout.”
He waved the dog out and stomped his foot on the porch, making the planks vibrate. He explained, “Scout’s beyond old. Deaf as can be and completely harmless. If you’re afraid of dogs, don’t be.”
“I’m not,” Katie replied, extending her hand so the German shepherd, who’d nosed his way through the door at the invitation from his owner, could sniff it and discover she posed him no threat.
“So is Corey what you wanted to talk about?” he asked. “I was expecting something related to my daughter and her current bout of teen angst. Or about us.”
Like why Katie had initially shied away from going out to dinner. He couldn’t see a single reason why someone like Katie—young, hot, successful, and apparently available—would hesitate to go on a date. Especially since she’d changed her mind so soon after turning him down.
“Well, it is about Mandy, in a way. But also about us.” She seemed to swallow the word us as she said it, as if worried that using the term would make it a reality she wasn’t ready to pursue.
Her tone made him pretty sure he’d blown it.
He should have kept his mouth shut until he knew where he really stood with her. Maybe nothing would come of a relationship between them, but he’d at least wanted to keep the possibility open. Not kill it before it even got off the ground.
Scout rubbed his back against the side of Katie’s rocking chair, then pushed his head into Katie’s lap, apparently deciding she passed muster. Katie smiled, then gently withdrew her hands from Jared’s to scratch behind Scout’s ears.
He wondered if it was an excuse to break their contact, a desire to appease Scout, or because she drew courage from the affectionate dog.
“You mentioned that Mandy read the article about The Bowen Bride in the Gazette.”
He nodded, but Katie didn’t respond. He wondered if she had difficulty seeing him in the moonlight, so he added, “She saw it.”
A sigh escaped her, barely audible even from an arm’s length away in the late September night. “Well, I know it sounds farfetched—that everyone who wears one of my gowns stays married forever—but as far as I know it’s true.”
What was she getting at? He leaned back in the swing and stretched his legs. “Doesn’t surprise me.
Bowen doesn’t exactly have the highest divorce rate in the country. Most people here end up marrying someone they’ve known since birth. They know their partner pretty well before exchanging vows.”
“It’s not just Bowen. It’s every dress ever made in the shop. Every dress my grandmother ever made. I’ve gone through her records—I actually spent this afternoon going through them to be sure—and every single couple is still together.” She let out a small laugh. “Well, except for the dead ones. My grandmother’s long gone and so are quite a few of her clients. But n
ot one of those, to my knowledge, ever divorced or separated from their spouse.”
She sounded distressed by that fact. “It’s a little hard to believe there were no divorces at all, but isn’t that a good thing when couples stay married?”
“I don’t know. I mean, some couples don’t belong together. It’s just a fact of life.” He could almost hear her unspoken thought: couples like you and Corey.
He pushed against the porch with his feet, giving the swing a gentle rock backward. “I agree. But you’re telling me you think that just because you make a woman’s wedding dress, that’s the reason her marriage hangs together? Not to crush your ego or disparage your skill as a dressmaker, but I’m guessing that’s not the main reason.”
In his mind, the right wedding gown didn’t even enter into the equation. A woman could wear a rucksack when she walked down the aisle if the couple loved, respected, and honored one another. Wouldn’t make a bit of difference to the marriage. Certainly the pricey designer gowns worn by Hollywood brides and splashed across People magazine hadn’t helped their marriages stick.
“I never thought so, either.” Scout let out a low, contented growl as Katie kneaded the fur between the dog’s ears with more pressure. ‘‘My grandmother mentioned it to me once, saying that no one who wore one of her gowns ever divorced, though I’m not sure that’s exactly how she phrased it. I tucked that statement in the back of my mind with all my grandmother’s other tales. Oma was always a big storyteller.”
“I suspect your grandmother had a lot of stories to tell.”
He remembered the Schmidts. Once, as a child, he’d sat on his father’s shoulders to watch Katie’s grandparents lead the town’s Fourth of July parade right down Main Street. In Bowen, to lead the parade was a huge honor. “When I was a kid, everyone knew who she was. Your grandfather, too. They were very involved in the community. Knew everyone and everything that went on.”
She let out a puff of air. “True. But after that article ran in the Gazette, I started to wonder if it really was just another of her wild stories. At first I thought the reporter who came to my shop asking for an interview was just trying to fill his pages for the next issue. You know, run a profile of a local business since there were no athletics to cover with school out for the summer.”
Jared grinned into the darkness. “I figured you’d handed the reporter a press release or sent over your business card and a flyer, like every other Bowen business does.”
“No. At least, I haven’t done it since I opened my shop a few years back, and even then, I certainly didn’t mention my grandmother’s claim. But here’s the weird part. The reporter told me his mother’s gown had come from The Bowen Bride, back when it was Oma’s shop, and his mother told him the same story my grandmother told me.” Her hand stilled over Scout’s head, and she angled her chin. “Don’t you find that a little odd?”
“That your grandmother told his mother if she bought a gown there, it was good luck? Doesn’t sound odd at all. Sounds like a good salesperson at work.”
Scout whimpered, and Katie resumed the head rub. “It’s more than that. My grandmother claimed that each gown leaving her shop was, for lack of a better term, magic. And this reporter said his mother believed that wholeheartedly.”
“Magic? As in abracadabra, woo-woo magic? Are you serious?”
He tried not to laugh. Brides in magic gowns? In Nebraska? What next, enchanted carriages from fairy godmothers? Pixie dust falling on the town common?
“Absolutely. And so was the reporter.”
“That’s, uh, hard to believe.” The Gazette wasn’t the New York Times, but it was no supermarket tabloid, either. Many of its articles were puff pieces, given the paper’s coverage area, but they’d always been professionally done.
“I know. But that’s apparently why couples stay together. The magic. Remember the old spool of thread you saw in my shop this afternoon? It’s in the hem of every gown I sew. I only use it because my grandmother did, and it makes me feel good to do it. But she told me she used it specifically because of its magic. Though for the life of me I can’t remember her exact words about how it worked.”
‘‘How’d you explain it to the guy from the Gazette?”
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “I didn’t even mention the thread to the reporter because, frankly, I didn’t believe the whole no-couple-ever-divorces bit was anything other than coincidence made to seem more important by my grandmother’s wild tale. I just nodded along when he told me his mother’s story. And I didn’t contradict him on the statistics because, for one, I couldn’t think of anyone who’d divorced off the top of my head, and second, a rumor like that floating around town can be extremely good for business.”
“And now?”
She looked up from Scout and met Jared’s gaze straight on. A mixture of concern and worry flickered in her eyes, her emotions so apparent he could read them even in the light cast from the windows.
“Now I’m beginning to think his story—my grandmother’s story—might actually be true. And that’s a big problem.”
Jared couldn’t believe his ears. Katie was completely, one hundred percent, serious, and she spoke as if she wanted him to buy the story, too.
He straightened on the swing. This was why she wouldn’t finish the kiss they’d started when she arrived? If she had some problem with dating a single father, fine. Concerns their professional and educational backgrounds were too divergent? Completely understandable. But a failure to believe in magical wedding gowns?
Maybe she wasn’t as into him as her kisses and flirtation indicated.
Or maybe he just couldn’t read women anymore. He tried to process her logic. “Setting aside the ludicrous idea that couples staying married poses a major societal problem, you’re telling me you honestly believe you’re making dresses with magic thread. No offense, Katie, but that idea’s three bases short of a home run.”
“I know!” She spread her hands wide as she spoke, causing Scout to raise his head off her lap in surprise. “Do I look like the type who believes in the supernatural? I’m a practical person. But when you go through hundreds of records and you know most of the couples—and in some cases their children and grandchildren—and then you look up the others online—”
“You looked up your grandmother’s clients online?”
“If I could, though some are so old they have no real Internet footprint. Those I found in the county phone directory. Most are still in Blair, Tekamah, Herman, Macy and Fort Calhoun,” —she ticked off the small towns on her fingers as she spoke— “but I even found a few on the resident lists for nursing homes in Omaha, Lincoln, and Sioux Falls.”
“This is unreal—”
“It didn’t take me as long as it sounds. People around here don’t move very often. I don’t want to believe it, but with today’s divorce rate, the odds of all those couples staying together must be astronomical.”
He ran his hands over his denim-clad knees and stared past the porch rail, toward the long rows of corn rustling in the night wind, lit by the stars and moon above. He loved this view. Peaceful, quiet, easy. It was where he could unwind physically and mentally after a long day at work. But things weren’t falling into place now.
He returned his attention to Katie. “So why are you telling me this?”
“Because there’s a problem with the magic. Think of what it might mean for Mandy. I’m worried about what events I might put in motion if I make a gown for her. What if...well, what if?”
Jared froze for a moment, staring at Katie, then stifled a laugh as the tension drained out of him in a rush.
He really shouldn’t make fun of Katie’s—or her grandmother’s—beliefs, especially when Katie seemed so troubled. But this was silly. He’d been afraid there might actually be an issue.
This could be cured in a sec. They could pick up where they left off, and he’d definitely invite her inside. They had plenty of time until Mandy came home, and he wanted to make the most
of it. Wanted to let her into his home and maybe, just maybe, into his life. But first he wanted to kiss her senseless. See what kind of bra she wore beneath her cute little pink top. Remove it with his teeth.
She shifted, jolting him back to reality. “Jared? You’re smiling. This isn’t a joke.”
“I know. And I’m worried about Mandy, too,” he clarified. “But the kind of thread you might or might not use in her wedding gown—which I’m still hopeful she won’t need, by the way—doesn’t figure into it.”
“I know it sounds insane.” Exasperation tinged her voice. “But I can remember my grandmother telling me about this thread. She was adamant that I treasure it and take care of it. She was practically on her deathbed when she gave it to me, so I know it was important to her—”
“No offense, Katie, but that doesn’t mean—”
“It means something.” Her voice was as sure as college football on an autumn Saturday. “I don’t claim to know what the magic is or how it works, and it’s that unknown part that I’m afraid of. I thought my grandmother was just babbling, so I didn’t pay close enough attention. But look at the evidence! What if I make a dress for Mandy? Does that guarantee she’ll marry Kevin? Does it guarantee a happy marriage, or does it mean she’ll be stuck in a marriage no matter what?”
Jared frowned. “Katie, I can’t imagine that an old spool of thread stuck to a pegboard in the back of your shop will make one bit of difference to what happens with Mandy. Not unless I use it to tie her bedroom door shut with her inside so she won’t be able to run off with Kevin.”
“And I’m afraid it might.” Agitation filled her voice. “I’m not sure I can live with that risk. When I agreed to make a dress for her, I didn’t believe my own reputation, not the way the Gazette portrayed it, at least. But now I’m not so sure. And if whatever this is between us continues...I don’t know. But it’s something we need to address. Don’t you think?”
The Bowen Bride Page 10
