A Wedding on Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  Cici said, “Do you need any help?”

  “Yeah.” He looked wry. “How about giving that daughter of yours a call and see if she can be here by lunchtime? What this winery needs right about now is another winemaker.”

  Bridget took Lindsay’s place at the computer as she and Dominic left the room and opened up a search page. “Do you suppose there even is a wedding photographer around here?”

  “Try Staunton.”

  “We don’t need anything fancy—none of those sepia still-lives with the bride’s veil floating against a sunset sky—but it would be nice to have a couple of good portraits, especially since who knows when we’ll ever get a chance to wear those dresses again. And of course,” she added, “Lindsay and Dominic will want one to frame.”

  Cici gazed thoughtfully at the door through which the couple had left. “Have you thought about what we’re going to give them for a wedding present?”

  “Well,” said Bridget, typing, “we’re giving them a wedding.”

  “I know, but Lindsay’s paying for it, and if we can’t figure out a way to trim that guest list without having half the county mad at us—not to mention Dominic—”

  “And Paul.”

  “—it won’t be much of a wedding.” Cici tapped a finger against her lips thoughtfully. “It should be something they both can enjoy. And it should be nice.”

  Bridget stopped typing and glanced up at her. “What do you have in mind?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Cici said, her tone still thoughtful as she left the room. “But I might have an idea. I’ll let you know.”

  ~*~

  Cici found Ida Mae sweeping off the back porch, which she liked to do every morning. The porch didn’t really need sweeping, and it took Ida Mae four times as long to do it as it would have taken any one of the younger women, but it was her routine and they had all learned not to argue with Ida Mae’s routine. Cici came out from the kitchen, careful to cushion the screen door with her hand so that it wouldn’t slam behind her. Ida Mae hated it when they let the screen door slam.

  “Ida Mae,” she said, “didn’t you say that that room next to Lori’s old room, the one we’re using as a guest room—didn’t you say that used to be Miss Emily Blackwell’s old room?”

  Ida Mae grunted in reply, not bothering to look up from her work.

  “Because I couldn’t help noticing it’s a lot smaller than the other rooms on that side of the hall, and so is Lori’s. It seems to me that the owner of the house would have had a bigger room. Is that where she slept when she was married, too?”

  Ida Mae looked at her, scowling. “Now how in blazes would I know that? How old do you think I am, anyhow?”

  Cici tactfully refrained from answering that. Ida Mae’s exact age was a mystery on par with how the pyramids were built. She said instead, “What I mean is that you said there was a lot of remodeling done during the sixties, and I wondered why they didn’t make that room bigger.”

  “Because they just got done making it smaller, I reckon.” Ida Mae swept a speck of imaginary dust over the edge of the porch and into the bushes with an expression of satisfaction, and started on the steps.

  “I knew it!” Cici’s eyes lit with triumph. “Lori’s room and the guest room used to be one big room, didn’t they? That’s why there’s a fireplace in the guest room and none in Lori’s room, and why there’s only one bathroom between them.”

  She lifted one shoulder expressively. “Could be. All I know is they changed a lot of rooms around during the war, when all them women lived here.”

  The house, built at the turn of the nineteenth century as a grand mansion with all of the latest amenities—electrical wiring, indoor plumbing, dumbwaiters, marble floors, and imported chandeliers— had undergone many incarnations in its life, one of which was as a rooming house for war brides during the nineteen forties. It made sense that some of the large rooms might have been subdivided to accommodate more people.

  “Perfect,” Cici murmured, eyes shining. “Thanks, Ida Mae!”

  She hurried down the steps, practically skipping as she crossed the yard to the tool shed. There was absolutely nothing that made Cici happier than a project.

  Twenty minutes later the grind of a saw and the clatter of falling wood sent Bridget rushing up the stairs. She found Cici in the guest room, power saw in hand, smiling proudly at the six-inch hole she had just cut in the wall. The floor was covered in a plastic drop cloth and the furniture had all been moved to the other side of the room. Crowbars, sledgehammers, and an assortment of power tools were scattered at her feet, and a forty-gallon trashcan awaited filling. She pushed back her safety glasses and grinned at Bridget. “Look!” she invited.

  Bridget looked, her expression a cross between astonishment and horror. “There’s a hole in our wall!”

  “It’s just a pilot hole,” Cici explained, “so that I could make sure there were no electrical wires or pipes in the way.”

  “But …” Bridget stepped carefully into the room, her dismay growing as she looked around. “We’re having a wedding! This is our guest room!”

  “Wrong,” replied Cici with a grin. “This is our wedding present to Dominic and Lindsay.”

  Bridget stared at her. “A hole in the wall?”

  Cici spread her hands expansively. “A master suite.”

  Cici put down the saw and knocked her fist against the wall with the hole in it. “I always suspected this was a dummy wall,” she said. “The way these two rooms at the end of the hall are so oddly shaped, with the big windows and the little doors. That’s because they used to be one great big room—and they will be again as soon as we knock down this wall.” Bridget’s eyes went big and Cici corrected quickly, “I. I knock down the wall. It’s going to be fabulous,” she went on before Bridget could speak. “A master retreat away from everyone else, two closets, that marvelous big bathroom, the view, plenty of room for a king-sized bed and any furniture Dominic might want to bring … I figured I could do the construction work and you could do the painting and decorating. It’ll be just like one of those makeover shows on TV! Don’t you see?” she insisted. “Telling Dominic he’s welcome here is one thing, but showing him—and Lindsay—is another.” She gave a final, decisive nod of satisfaction. “It’s the perfect wedding gift.”

  Bridget’s expression went from alarmed to thoughtful as Cici spoke. She gazed around the room. She went into the hallway and to the room next door, looking through the hole in the wall. She returned to Cici. “You know,” she said, “you’re right.”

  Cici grinned.

  “I’d put a nice big overstuffed chair there in front of the fireplace, and that darling little secretaire from Lindsay’s room underneath the window. And …” Her eyes lit up. “That tea table in the attic that I’ve been dying to find a use for! A few bookshelves …”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have time for bookshelves,” Cici objected.

  “That oriental rug of Lindsay’s we’ve been using in the sunroom, a few candles, some art …” And then she looked at Cici sharply. “If you’re sure that wall will come down—without bringing the roof with it.”

  Cici gave her a patient look. “Of course I’m sure. Do you think I would have cut the hole if I wasn’t? We can take it down with a sledgehammer in an afternoon.”

  “There you go with ‘we’ again.”

  “I might have to get Farley to help me take down the frame,” she admitted. “But two days tops.”

  “It’s not going to be easy to keep a secret like that from Lindsay for two days,” Bridget pointed out.

  Cici frowned. “Oh, I don’t think we can keep it a secret from Lindsay. Maybe from Dominic. But we should at least ask Lindsay what color she wants the walls painted.”

  Bridget looked around the room dubiously. “That means all this wallpaper will have to come off.”

  “Not all of it,” Cici pointed out. “Just three walls.”

  “Six. There are two rooms, six walls.”
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br />   “It’s as crisp as parchment,” said Cici, peeling back a strip near the hole she had cut. “It should come off like wrapping paper.”

  Bridget’s expression grew speculative as she peeled back a longer strip. “You know,” she said, “I might be able to use this in the invitations. Or the place cards. It’s too pretty to waste. ”

  “It’s not garnet or rose,” Cici pointed out.

  “Maybe I’ll leave one wall as a feature wall.”

  “Or two. Then you only have to paint four walls.”

  They had been dimly aware of the border collie’s attack-mode barking for some time now, but they had become so accustomed to the unpredictable nature of his moods that they barely noticed anymore. It wasn’t until they heard Ida Mae shouting up the stairs, “Comp’ny!” that they registered their surprise.

  “What in the world?” Bridget went to the window, and let out an exclamation of delight. “It’s Kevin!” she cried.

  “Kevin?” Cici went to the window to see for herself. Bridget’s son, though he only lived a few hours away, wasn’t in the habit of dropping in unannounced. “Were you expecting him?”

  Bridget shook her head, looking both puzzled and pleased as she turned toward the door. “It’s not like him to be impulsive, is it?” She hesitated, her expression slowly settling into suspicion as she added, “Something must be wrong.”

  ~*~

  There was a list that every young man carried around in his head of things he never wanted to tell his mom, and not as many of them had to do with sex as the average mother might think. At the top of that list, no matter who you were or what you had done, were two simple words: I failed. Conversely, there was no time in a man’s life that he needed his mother more than in the midst of a devastating failure.

  Kevin Tyndale had no intention of telling his mother the truth. He just really, really needed to see her.

  Kevin had been skeptical—maybe more than skeptical—when his mother had announced her plan to sell everything she owned and buy an old mansion in the middle of nowhere with her two best friends. It wasn’t that he had anything against Lindsay and Cici; they were practically family, after all, and there was no one to whom he would have trusted his mother’s welfare more than the two of them. But the whole scheme had sounded crazy—still sounded crazy, if he were perfectly honest—and he had to admit that a large portion of his disapproval centered around the fact that she had made such a major decision without consulting him. But all that was before he had seen the life the three women had created here, and how happy it made his mother. Now he envied them all.

  Kevin was a good-looking young man with wavy chestnut hair and a square jawline, complemented by black-framed designer glasses that made him look both intellectual and disarmingly rakish. He had been in the highly competitive world of a top DC law firm, with its eighty-hour work weeks, cutthroat colleagues, and ever-increasing demands for billable hours for six years last January. An unrelenting dedication to his job and a willingness to cross any line had earned him a six-figure salary, a stock portfolio, and a condo overlooking the river that he hardly ever saw because most nights he worked so late it didn’t make sense to go home. When he had time off, he did the clubs or one of those glamour trips to Telluride or Belize, usually with people he didn’t know and didn’t much like. He had been raised better than that.

  He drove a red Maserati—for a few more weeks, anyway—and the minute he pulled up, that crazy border collie came charging from somewhere in back of the house, tail whirling, teeth bared, snarling and barking like it planned to take down the car and driver single-handedly. Kevin wasn’t afraid of the dog, exactly, but the last time he had been here it had taken a chunk out of his favorite pair of Dockers. He’d discovered the best course of action was to stay put until someone with more control over the beast than he had appeared to take charge.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Just as the dog launched an attack upon his tires, the screen door burst open and the old woman, Ida Mae, appeared with a broom in her hand. He never knew quite what to make of her and it seemed to Kevin that she always regarded him with an air of suspicion, but she was hell on wheels with that broom.

  “Hey, you filthy animal! Get on outta here!”

  Kevin assumed she was talking to the dog, so he kept his place behind the wheel.

  “Scat!” For a woman her age, she had a voice that could raise thunder. “Scat, I tell you!” She stomped down the steps in a faded print dress and army boots, swinging the broom like a machete, and the dog finally took notice. With one last resentful bark and a warning stare at the tires, he spun on two legs and took off in the direction from which he’d come, leaving nothing but a blur in his wake.

  Ida Mae, shouldering the broom, glared at Kevin through the windshield. “Well?” she demanded. “You getting out, or not?”

  And before he could respond or even reach for the door handle, she turned and boomed over her shoulder, “Comp’ny!”

  Kevin reached for the bouquet of flowers he had brought—which was rather like taking coals to Newcastle considering the riotous bloom of late-summer color that filled the flower gardens around the house—and opened the door. In another moment his mother pushed open the screen door, followed closely by Cici. “Kevin!” Bridget cried, running down the steps with arms open. “Sweetie, what are you doing here?”

  “Kevin, what a treat!” added Cici, following. “We didn’t know you were coming!”

  There was the usual jubilation of hugs and greetings. Lindsay came up from the winery with Dominic and all the excitement and questions started over again. Bridget put the flowers in a vase and Cici brought a pitcher of iced tea and a plate of cookies out to the round wicker table on the porch. There were always cookies at Ladybug Farm. Kevin supposed that was why, whenever he came there, it felt so much like home.

  “Not that we’re not wild about seeing you,” Bridget said, fussing over him as she poured the tea and made sure he had a napkin and urged the cookie platter on him, “but what on earth brings you all the way out here in the middle of the week? Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?”

  Before she stepped away from his chair to fill the other glasses, she paused to smooth back a lock of his hair in an unconscious motherly gesture, and it made him smile. “I just thought I’d surprise you,” he said. “Can’t a guy visit his mother every now and then?”

  “More than every now and then would be even better,” Bridget replied. She pulled out a chair and sat next to him, her expression pleasant but curious. Lindsay and Cici looked at him in the same way—welcoming, but puzzled.

  Dominic took a couple of cookies and saluted Kevin with them. “Well, it’s nice seeing you, Kevin, but I need to get back to the vines. Come out to the winery later and I’ll give you a tour.”

  “Sounds great. I’d like that.”

  Kevin lived in DC, which was an easy enough drive for any occasion, but it embarrassed him to realize he had not been to visit his mother more than half a dozen times in the four years she had been here. There was no excuse for it. He always planned to visit more, and every time he left, the good country cooking and quiet shadowed evenings would linger in his memory, making him promise to return the following weekend. But when the weekend came he usually had to work, or there was a party he wanted to go to, or a client invited him on his boat, or he had a date. He tried to get down to visit sometime during the Christmas season, and for his mom’s birthday, and once he’d even made it for Mother’s Day, but usually he just sent flowers. He had not, he realized, been a very good son.

  “Congratulations,” he told Lindsay, hoping to take their focus off himself. “Mom e-mailed you’ve set the date.”

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling. “You’ll be getting your invitation next week.”

  “But only if you promise to come,” Bridget pointed out. “Otherwise we’re taking you off the guest list.”

  He hesitated. “Actually, I have news.”

  Bridget’s eyes lit up.
“Kevin! Are you getting married? But who? How? That’s why you drove out here in the middle of the week!”

  “Wait, no!” He held up a hand in self-defense, looking mildly horrified. “That’s not it.”

  Cici said, “You’ll have to forgive her. We’re wedding-obsessed around here.”

  “Well, all I can say is thank goodness,” Lindsay said, while Bridget looked a little disappointed. “I don’t think we could stand another wedding in the works. What’s your news, Kevin?”

  He glanced around the table, picked up his glass, and took a sip of sweet tea. The pause might have appeared to be for dramatic effect, but in fact he needed the time to find just the right words to introduce the subject, just the right tone to make it sound like a good thing. “I’ve been thinking about changing jobs,” he said. “I have an opportunity. In Rome.”

  “Rome!” Cici exclaimed.

  And Lindsay echoed, “Rome, Italy?”

  Kevin said, “Well, actually …”

  “But,” Bridget said, looking stunned, “you have a job!”

  She had been so proud when he decided to go into law, and even prouder when he landed a job at the big Washington firm. So proud.

  Lindsay elbowed Bridget in the arm. “For heaven’s sake, Bridge, this one is in Rome!”

  “But,” Cici said, “don’t you have to have a special license to practice law overseas?”

  He said, floundering, “Um, it’s more corporate.”

  Bridget sank back in her chair, the astonished expression in her eyes giving way to wonder. “Oh, my goodness,” she breathed, “my little boy, working in the international marketplace.” She pressed her hands to her cheeks, and abruptly her eyes flashed bright with tears. “Oh, Kevin, your dad would be so proud!”

  He looked around desperately, feeling trapped. “Really, Mom, it’s not that big a deal. I might not even get it.”