A Wedding on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  “We did make his career,” Derrick assured him, “not to mention his fortune—or at least his wife’s. They’re moving to Dallas to open their own restaurant, I’m sure I told you. They’re calling it Annabelle’s.”

  “Dallas,” murmured Paul, disappointed. “That is rather far.”

  “We got a lovely note from them. Didn’t you see it?”

  “Actually,” Paul said a little hesitantly, “we might not know a caterer, but we do know someone who knows every caterer on the east coast.”

  “Do you mean …” Derrick straightened up from refluffing the pillows and looked across at him, his eyes clouding with dread. “Harmony?”

  Harmony Haven had become a more-or-less permanent guest at the Hummingbird House. To say she was eccentric would be to damn with faint praise, but she was eminently connected in the hospitality industry and, despite her many flaws, had a way of always coming through in a pinch.

  “It’s not,” Derrick went on quickly, “that she didn’t completely save us from certain doom the last time, and no one can deny that she’s more than capable of getting the job done but … seriously? Must we?”

  “You know we’re not going to be able to keep her out of it,” Paul explained practically. “We may as well put her to good use.”

  “Well, if that woman’s involved,” declared Purline with a decisive snap of her gum, “you can leave me out of it for sure.” She took the throw off the bed before Paul could stop her, shook it out, and folded it into a square. She glanced toward the window at the sound of tires crunching on gravel. “Your folks’re here. Fancy car. Look like big tippers.” She started toward the door. “Guess y’all want me to set out the good wine.”

  “It’s all good wine,” Paul muttered under his breath, because it was hardly the first time he had told her so, while Derrick said, more pleasantly, “Thank you, Purline. That would be lovely.”

  Then, with one last critical look around the room, they went to greet their guests.

  ~*~

  Chapter Three

  Children and Other Disasters

  TO: LadiLori27@locomail.net

  FROM: Bridget@LadybugFarmLadies.net

  SUBJECT: Wedding News

  Lori,

  You won’t believe it! We have a real wedding date, with a spreadsheet and a countdown and a to-do list and everything. It’s October 25, 4:00 p.m., on the hill overlooking the vineyard, with a reception to follow in The Tasting Table. We haven’t quite ironed out all the details but this time it’s really on! You’ll be here, won’t you? Because Lindsay and Dominic would be SO disappointed if you weren’t! Dominic was just saying the other day how much he misses your help in the winery. I know you’re doing important work and this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for you, but we really miss you here. So even if you can’t come home forever, please, please try to come home for the wedding.

  I wish you could see the sunflowers in the garden. They’re taller than you are! Lindsay wants to harvest them and toast the seeds, but I say leave them for the birds. The cardinals love them, and there is nothing prettier than those red birds when the ground is covered with snow. Except maybe the sunflowers.

  I was going to send pictures of the new kitten but they all turned out blurry. I’m thinking of calling him Casper.

  Write soon. We love you!—

  Bridget

  TO: LadiLori27@locomail.net

  FROM: Cici@LadybugFarmLadies.net

  SUBJECT: Wedding News

  Hi Sweetie,

  I guess you’ve heard from Aunt Lindsay by now that we have a new wedding date—Oct. 25—and this one appears to sticking. We’re mailing twenty-five hand-designed invitations this week so it had better be! Yours will probably make it through the Italian postal system by Christmas. It would mean so much to both of them if you could be here. I know your dad would send you the ticket (even if it does have to be round-trip). Please let us know so we can kill the fatted calf. (Just kidding! No calves, and even if there were Bridget wouldn’t let us kill it even if we were all starving and it was the last edible thing on earth). I wish I heard from you more often. Do you need more minutes on your phone? I know you said the signal is really weak there, which I guess is why I’m never able to get through when I call, but maybe you could go to town once in a while and call your old mom? I love you, sweetie, and miss you like crazy—

  Mom

  TO: LadiLori27 @locomail.net

  FROM: Lindsay @LadybugFarmLadies.net

  SUBJECT: Wedding News

  Hi Lori!

  You are cordially invited to attend the nuptials of Lindsay Sue Elizabeth Wright and Dominic Robert DuPoncier October 25 of this year at four p.m. at Ladybug Farm, Virginia. A reception will follow at The Tasting Table restaurant on the premises. The pleasure of your company will be most fervently appreciated!

  RSVP the sooner the better. Dominic says we’ll drink the first toast with Ladybug Farm wine, but how can we do that if the winemaker isn’t here? We love you and miss you—

  Lindsay & Dominic

  Lori sat on the sagging brown sofa in the tiny lobby of her hostel and struggled to find a Wi-Fi signal on her phone, crushed between a sweaty fat man who was shouting either German or Portugese—she had no clue which one—into his cell phone and a doe-eyed teenage boy who kept inching his leg closer to hers and smiling at her in an enraptured way. The sofa was covered in dog hair, although she’d never seen a dog inside, and smelled of garlic—although, come to think of it, that might have been the oversized gentleman to her left. The manager, a black-eyed, greasy-haired man with a perpetual two-day growth of beard, kept craning his neck to look at her from behind the desk, and whenever Lori happened to glance up he would wink and his leer would only grow wider, revealing teeth that were as yellow as the stains on his shirt. She had grown used to the creepiness factor by now and, for the most part, found him easy to ignore.

  The sweaty German, on the other hand, was proving to be more of a challenge.

  She knew she stood out in the small Italian village with her cascade of wild red curls, her porcelain white skin and blue eyes. She’d thought that would be an advantage, and she played it as much as she could, but the effort was getting old. Besides, standing out was not as much fun as it should have been in a culture that valued testosterone more than it did common sense. Or at least that’s the way Lori saw it.

  She typed: Mom, great to hear from u! She paused, shifted her weight a little to avoid the encroachment of the teenager’s thigh—he had the body temperature of a blast furnace—and then shrank back as she felt a wedge of flabby skin press into her opposite side, leaving a damp patch on her sleeve. She thought about standing up and walking away but she knew from experience that the only Wi-Fi signal in the entire building began at one arm of the sofa and ended at the other.

  She deleted the sentence and tried again. Congrats, Aunt Lindsay! Wish I could be there but

  But what? She looked around the dingy little room and couldn’t think of a single way to finish that sentence.

  The hostel had once been a municipal building of some sort, and must have been magnificent in its day. Now the black and white terrazzo tiled floor was so covered with embedded grime that the difference between the black tiles and the white tiles was only a matter of degree. The wide marble staircase was stained yellow with half a century of cigarette smoke, and the scrolled marble banister was so encrusted with neglect that it was sticky to the touch. At first Lori had been horrified at the casual disregard with which the fine craftsmanship of these ancient buildings was treated, but after the first month she had begun to see the historic structures the way the natives did—not as treasures, but as just old.

  The two arched windows that faced the street were boarded over, but the front door was open to admit a trickle of dingy light and the smell of dank sewer water from the street beyond. Lori’s eight-by-eight cell of a room with its one narrow window was already so hot and stuffy at ten o’clock in the morning that she was grat
eful for any semblance of a breeze at all, even one that smelled like garbage and urine.

  She erased the message and typed: Aunt Bridget, thanks for the great news! I hope this time is the charm. I wish I could see the sunflowers.

  She stopped typing because the words in her head were coming too fast to keep up with her fingers. I wish I could see the sunflowers and Aunt Lindsay’s rose garden, especially the way it looks in late summer after a rainstorm with the petals scattered all over the grass like multi-colored confetti. I wish I could see the kitten chasing shadows on the porch, and I wish I could sit and watch the sun set over the mountains with you. I wish I could be in the kitchen when you’re baking sticky buns for breakfast and the whole house smells like cinnamon, or when Ida Mae is roasting a chicken for Sunday dinner, and the way she puts those fresh herbs under the skin that get all buttery crisp, or even when it’s canning season and tomato juice is everywhere and the humidity in there is like a steam bath and everything smells like vinegar … I wish I could wake up to Rodrigo the rooster crowing in the middle of the night, and watch Rebel chase the sheep across the meadow, and oh, what I wouldn’t give for just one slice of your pecan pie. I wish I were there, I wish I were there, I wish I were there …

  She stared at the screen until her vision cleared and the hot moisture left her eyes. Then she erased the message and started over.

  TO: Cici@ LadybugFarmLadies.net, Bridget @ LadybugFarmLadies.net, Lindsay @ LadybugFarmLadies.net

  Cc: Dominic@LadybugFarmsWine.biz

  FROM: LadiLori27 @locomail.net

  SUBJECT: Your Wedding News

  Hi everyone!

  Great news about the wedding date. So excited for you!! You totally should have the burning of the vines ceremony the same day, print up flyers, get it in the paper, send out a press release to the travel mags, put it on the website—great publicity for the winery! I would love love LOVE to be there and am going to do my very best. I promise. Things are really busy here this time of year so I must rush! More later. Love you all!

  Lori

  PS. Here is a picture I took this morning of the view from my window at the villa. Am I the luckiest girl in the world or what? Send kitty pix!

  Lori scrolled through her pictures folder for one of the hundreds of photographs of the Tuscan hillside she had taken when she first arrived, made sure it wasn’t one she had already sent, and attached the file to the e-mail. She turned her phone this way and that, searching for the optimal number of bars on the Wi-Fi. The fat man shouted into his cell phone. She felt the teenager’s arm slide down between their bodies, fingers rubbing up against the back of her jeaned thigh. She ignored both until she found the signal and pushed Send.

  Lori dropped the phone into her jacket pocket and zipped it up. She’d learned to keep everything she valued in zippered pockets on her body shortly after she’d arrived. Then she turned to the teenage groper and seized an inch of his skinny bicep between her thumb and forefinger. She twisted until his eyes bulged out and he tried to jerk away. She leaned in and twisted harder. When he cried out and staggered to his feet, the man on the cell phone stopped shouting in her ear and stared at her.

  Lori released the teenager and growled into his face, “You’re lucky all I could reach was your arm.”

  She glared at the sweaty fat man and added fiercely, “You’re next.”

  She strode out of the lobby and into the street, showing the desk clerk her middle finger as she went. He grinned in reply. It had become their routine, and he would miss it when she was gone.

  ~*~

  The office of Ladybug Farm was a repurposed sewing room located on the back side of the house in a space underneath the grand staircase. Cici had built shelves and a nook for the desk, and Lindsay and Bridget had decorated it in bright yellows and reds. Here they accessed the Internet, paid bills, kept the household records, and coordinated all other aspects of Ladybug Farm not related to the winery. But the most important thing they did was video chat, all too infrequently and always too briefly, with Private Noah Wright of the United States Marine Corps.

  Noah had first come into their lives as a fourteen-year-old runaway, the son of an alcoholic father and an absentee mother, who showed up one day to do odd jobs for them and was eventually found to be living in the abandoned folly on the edge of their property. Lindsay, the perennial teacher, had taken him under her wing and discovered that beneath that rough exterior there was not only an astonishingly acute mind, but an unexpected talent for art. After the death of both his parents two years later, Lindsay had officially adopted him, but he was in fact the child of everyone at Ladybug Farm.

  Charcoal sketches of jeeps, guys in desert camo, bleak Middle Eastern landscapes and native children now adorned the walls of the Ladybug Farm office, edging out oil paintings of poppies and framed vacation photos. Noah confessed that he had become popular in his unit mostly because of his ability to send sketches home to wives and girlfriends, a skill he owed in great part to his teacher and his mother, Lindsay. And even though it had broken Lindsay’s heart when he had chosen the military over college, not even she could deny a swell of pride to see the skinny, sullen teenage boy they once had known now transformed into the straight-shouldered, square-jawed young man with buzz cut dark hair whose face filled the computer screen.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” he said a little ruefully, “I don’t think they let you out of the Marines to go home for a wedding.” And he frowned a little, looking more closely into the camera. “What happened to your eye?”

  There was a slight time lag, and when Lindsay waved her hand in front of her face it appeared on camera as a series of jumpy staccato blurs. “Nothing,” she said. “Bridget hit me with a book.”

  “Not on purpose!” Bridget piped up indignantly behind her.

  Cici said, leaning in close to Lindsay’s shoulder to be seen, “We know you can’t come home, Noah. We just want you to know how much we miss you.”

  “And you might get leave,” Lindsay insisted. “Dominic and I would love it if you could stand up for us.”

  He said, “Me too. But you can send me pictures.”

  A flash of panic crossed Lindsay’s face. “Photographer!” She looked at Cici. “How could I have forgotten the photographer?”

  Bridget pushed in front of her for the camera. “How are you eating, Noah? Is the food okay?”

  “Sure,” he replied. “The chow is great.” He wrinkled his nose a little and admitted, “Well, not great. Not as good as yours. Not very good at all, really. But there’s plenty of it. I sure did like those cookies you sent.”

  “I’m mailing more today,” she promised him. “And some cotton socks and paperback books.”

  He looked puzzled. “They give us socks, you know.”

  “I know, but I read on the Internet—”

  “And I’m sending a new drawing pad,” Lindsay said. “Portrait grade like you asked for. And two gum erasers and a charcoal pencil sharpener.”

  “Hey, cool. Thanks. I can’t find them in the PX.”

  “Do you need anything else?” Cici asked. “Blankets or a warm coat or—”

  “Come on, guys.” His smile was both self-conscious and affectionate. “It’s the desert. And I’m a Marine.”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Lindsay began tartly, but Dominic came up behind her just then and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “It means he can take care of himself,” he reminded her. He leaned into the camera and said, “How’s it going, Private?”

  Noah grinned. “Hey. I hear they finally got a rope on you.”

  “That’s what I hear too. I count myself a lucky man.” His fingers massaged Lindsay’s shoulder lightly.

  “Yes, sir. I’d count you right.”

  Lindsay leaned her head back to smile up at Dominic.

  Dominic said, “We sure miss your help around here, son. You get home safe, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

 
Dominic added casually, “Say, who’s guarding the gate over there, anyway?”

  Noah returned forcefully, “The Marines are, sir!”

  Dominic grinned, gave him a two-fingered salute, and straightened up. Cici took his place. “We’re putting another prepaid phone card in the box, too,” she said. “You’ll call when you get it, won’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. As soon as I get to a phone tent.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Listen, my time is about up. How’s that ol’ dog? What do you hear from Jonesie? Do you see Amy much? How’s she looking?”

  They spent the next ten minutes catching him up on all the local news and goings-on around the farm, and when it was time for him to go the ladies all blew kisses, as they always did, and he looked embarrassed, as he always did, but also secretly pleased. When the screen went dark. Lindsay sat back in the chair and everyone was quiet, feeling empty.

  “He looks good,” Dominic said.

  “Did you see those shoulders?” Bridget added.

  “He said he was lifting weights,” Cici reminded her.

  “He’s changed,” said Lindsay, sadly.

  “But in a good way,” Bridget insisted.

  Lindsay said, “He doesn’t need us anymore.” She shifted her gaze upward to Dominic and added, “You were right. I was afraid the Marines would turn him into one of those mean-eyed, robot-brained brutes you see on TV, but you were right. He’s different, but better. Grown up.”

  “The military can ruin some boys,” Dominic admitted, “but others know what to do with it, how to take advantage of what it offers. That kid never had anybody before you ladies who cared enough about him to make him challenge himself. He’s going to be fine. Now.” He caught Lindsay’s fingers and pulled her to her feet. “How about coming down to the office and helping me with some of this bookkeeping? I need to check the irrigation pump, and start netting the vines before the birds eat our crop.”