Caramel Crush

by Jenn McKinlay

  She approached Angie warily, waiting to see if her friend was going to have another episode or not. It was a lot like approaching a strange dog. She wondered if she should hold out her hand and let Angie sniff it, but thought that the joke might not be appreciated by the woman sitting in a wad of tulle-stiffened crinolines in front of her.

  “I just want it to be the best wedding,” Angie sighed.

  “It will be,” Mel said. She sank onto the raised dais beside her friend. “Because it’s you and Tate, getting married and pledging your lives to each other. Everything else is extra.”

  “Extra? How can you say that? Do you have any idea how critical the wedding is? I’ve read article after article that states if a bride is unhappy with her wedding, she will end up divorced in five years.”

  Mel suspected that the source for that information was sketchy. Sort of like those wedding vendors who tried to squeeze every dime out of brides and grooms by telling them that this was the most important day of their life and that they were only getting married once when statistically everyone knew that wasn’t true. She didn’t think now was the moment to point this out to Angie, however.

  “Angie, what is the worst thing that can happen?” Mel asked.

  Her idea was simple: Go through Angie’s list of worries one at a time and talk her out of them. Clearly, her friend was suffering wedding anxiety and the only way to talk her down was to address each phobia as it came up. It seemed like a simple solution. She should have known better.

  When Angie fixated on a problem, she was like a heat-seeking missile locked on a target. Nothing would get her off course until, well, kaboom.

  “What if the food gives everyone food poisoning and we all end up in the emergency room?” she asked.

  “You’re having the reception at a five-star resort,” Mel said. “A world-renowned chef, Tessa Duchamp, is cooking. It’s going to be amazing.”

  “What if I set fire to the church during the lighting of the unity candle?”

  “Tate will throw himself on the flame and save us all.”

  “What if he dies in the fire?” Angie wailed.

  “He won’t,” Mel said. “I’m your maid of honor, I’ll carry a fire extinguisher.”

  “It will clash with your dress,” Angie said. Her agitation was rising and Mel was running out of ideas for how to talk her down.

  “My dress is blue,” Mel said. “Nothing clashes with blue.”

  “Go try it on,” Angie said. “I won’t feel better until I see it.”

  “We just did the fitting last week,” Mel said. “I’m sure Kim hasn’t had time to finish it yet.”

  “Please,” Angie begged. “For me, please. I need to see us together to be sure I like the dress.”

  “Ange,” Mel said. “Your wedding is a little over three months away. You can’t change the dress. It’s perfect.”

  “I need to see it,” Angie insisted.

  Mel stared at her friend. Her pretty heart-shaped face was set in stubborn lines and Mel knew she wasn’t going to get out of this bridal salon without putting on the dress. She closed her eyes, praying for patience, and thought about Marty and Oz telling her she was being a bad friend. When she got back to the bakery, she fully intended to kick both of them in the derriere.

  “Okay, I’ll go ask Kim if she’s willing,” she said. “But you are not allowed to change your mind. I like this dress—heck, I picked the dress. You have me and four other bridesmaids who’ve already paid for our dresses; you are not changing it.”

  Angie clapped her hands, giddy that she was going to get her way.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Huh,” Mel grunted and stood up. Casting her friend a dark look, she left the main fitting room to go find Kim in the back. She wasn’t sure if she hoped Kim would go along with the idea or not.

  “I am really sorry,” she said. She figured it was best to lead with an apology at this juncture. “But I need a favor.”

  She found Kim stabbing her pins into a small bride doll that, while it looked like it was a pin cushion, also resembled a chubby voodoo doll.

  Kim glanced up at Mel over the top edge of her black-framed reading glasses. Her dark hair was twisted up into a stylish knot on top of her head, while random chunks hung down over her face in what could have been artful disarray or the product of a woman who had been about to rip her hair out.

  “What favor?” she asked. Her cherry-red lipstick did not turn up in a smile but rather stayed in a flat line of suspicion.

  “Angie wants me to try on my bridesmaid dress again,” Mel said.

  The cherry-red lips now turned down at the corners in an out-and-out frown.

  “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask but she’s going round the bend with anxiety,” Mel said.

  “Is she going to make me redo the bridesmaid dresses?” Kim asked. Her voice was now a low growl.

  “No!” Mel said. “In fact, I think if she sees the dress and her gown together, I can reassure her that they are perfect and get her out of your hair.”

  “Fine, follow me,” Kim said. “But do try to calm her down because Angie is rapidly becoming my most high-maintenance client and I really thought that title was going to stay with Diane Earnest for a lot longer.”

  “Diane Earnest?” Mel asked. “She bought her gown here?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Kim asked.

  Mel nodded. Madame Amour was the place where everyone said yes to the dress.

  “And all of her bridesmaids’ dresses,” Kim said. She led Mel to the dressing rooms in back. “Wait here.”

  She returned in minutes with a garment bag draped over her forearm. She handed it to Mel as she gently shoved her into the curtained fitting room.

  “So how do you know Diane?” Kim asked.

  Mel hesitated. She wasn’t sure why. But she thought Kim might share more if she thought Mel was more a passing acquaintance of Diane’s rather than her former roommate.

  “She used to date my boyfriend,” Mel said.

  “Joe?” Kim asked. “Really? I can’t see him with someone like her.”

  Mel felt her feelings for the dressmaker become warm and fuzzy, and if they weren’t separated by the thick cloth curtain she would have hugged her.

  “Well, I don’t think it was ever serious,” Mel said.

  Kim was quiet and Mel could picture her nodding in understanding. Mel quickly stripped down and pulled the pretty blue dress over her head. It still had some pins in it but was perfect in a fit-and-flare look that flattered every figure and made Mel feel ridiculously feminine.

  “That makes sense,” Kim said. “You know, I don’t particularly like her but you have to feel sorry for a woman like that.”

  “For Diane? Why?” Mel asked. Diane had caused Mel to feel many things over the years but pity had not been one of them.

  “Well, I don’t like to gossip but since she canceled her wedding and is trying to stick me with the cost of all of her dresses, I am less inclined to be as professional as usual. Plus, she tried to hook your Joe; that gives you a vested interest.”

  “Okay, so what’s the dish?” Mel asked as she pulled the curtain back and stepped out.

  Kim looked her over and adjusted the fabric around her waist with a gentle tug.

  “Well.” Kim paused for dramatic effect. “Rumor has it—and by rumor I mean we heard it from the woman herself—that Diane’s fiancé was having a smoking-hot affair with one of her bridesmaids.”

  Ten

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  “That’s horrible,” Mel said. “Who was it?”

  “Nicole Butterfield. She straight-up told one of my seamstresses that she had her eye on Mike and was fully intending to bag him and stop Diane’s wedding. She said his party supply business looked to be making a nice profit and after he
r last two divorces, she needed someone bankable.”

  Mel gaped at her and Kim looked at her knowingly.

  “I know. Pretty ballsy, right?”

  “It’s not that—well, it is that—but also I know Nicole,” Mel said.

  “Oh, no,” Kim groaned. “Please do not tell me she dated Joe, too.”

  “No!” Mel said a bit more vehemently than she meant to, but the idea of Joe and Nicole horrified, like walking through a cobweb and doing the skeeved-out jitterbug of horror.

  “Yeah, she’s awful,” Kim said. “Joe would’ve had to have suffered a severe head trauma to date a woman like that. The other bridesmaids were all nice enough. I sort of got the feeling they were doing the bridesmaid thing more out of a sense of obligation than any real affection for Diane—not a big surprise.”

  Abruptly, Mel felt a sudden need to run into the other room and hug the fluffernutter out of Angie. Having a bestie, a true girl’s girlfriend, the sort who would hold your hair out of the toilet when you puked; punch an overly grabby admirer in the throat when he needed it; who would show up with several pints of gelato when it was required, such as a hideous breakup, bad career decision, or mean reading on the bathroom scale—well, women like that were quite simply priceless.

  Nicole Butterfield was not one of those women. Quite the opposite. She had gone to college with Mel and Diane but she had been there more to acquire her MRS degree than to actually study for a career.

  She had resided on the same floor as Mel and Diane during their first years together. Like them, she had also majored in marketing, but where Diane had clearly been born to the field and Mel had worked her butt off to try and fit in, Nicole had been much more invested in her sorority and all the socializing and background checking of the pedigrees of frat boys that went with it. As far as Mel knew, Diane had never liked Nicole. How had it come to pass that Nicole was in Diane’s wedding? It boggled, truly.

  Nicole had been very pretty and well connected. Last Mel heard, she had just gotten divorced from husband number two. What would have possessed Diane to have her in her wedding? And if Nicole was telling the truth and she was making a play for Mike, did Diane find out? Was that why she was really calling off the wedding? How angry would Diane be if Mike cheated on her?

  Mel shivered. She didn’t like knowing this information. She didn’t want to have to ask Diane about it and she didn’t want to have to tell Uncle Stan. But then she thought about Mike. He’d been murdered, his skull crushed in. If Diane found out about Mike and Nicole, how far would she go to stop it?

  Diane was tough. There was no other word for it. Even when Mel had lived with her, it was clear that Diane had a vision about how life was supposed to be and that was it. There was no wiggle room, no deviating from the plan, no excuses, and failure was never an option.

  “Wow,” Mel said. “I guess you just never know what people are truly capable of.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Kim asked. “Now, come on, let’s go show Angie your dress before she has another episode.”

  By the time Mel and Angie left Madame Amour’s, Angie and Kim had made up and Angie was once again in love with her wedding dress.

  Mel wished this was her only problem. Unfortunately, in the time they were with Kim, her phone started to blow up and it soon became apparent that whatever had happened at the police station had not gone well for Diane and she was now being held as the person of interest in the investigation into the murder of Mike Bordow.

  Mel wanted to go back to the bakery and pretend that her phone had died and she hadn’t received the haboob of texts and voice mails by an increasingly panicked Diane. She wanted to bake something gooey and yummy and calorically satisfying. Instead, after she and Angie walked back to the bakery, she checked on Marty and Oz, who were fine, and then looked up the address for Nicole Butterfield.

  As Diane kept pointing out, Mel owed her one, and Mel figured if she could get Nicole to admit to her affair with Mike Bordow, she might be able to throw another suspect in the police’s direction, taking the heat off of Diane and making things square between them once and for all. After all, wouldn’t Nicole be a suspect if Mike had rejected her and foiled her plan to land a bankable man?

  Surely, visiting the mean girl from her college days couldn’t be as bad as all that, right? They’d all matured and grown up. Perhaps it would be a lovely social call and Mel had nothing to worry about.

  The festering pit in the bottom of her stomach begged to differ, but Mel tuned it out by scarfing a Coconut Cupcake on her way out the door. There really was nothing that a good Coconut Cupcake couldn’t cure, even facing down the woman who had made her cry, repeatedly, her first year in the dorms.

  Nicole Butterfield lived in a gated community north of 24th Street and Camelback Road. The guard at the gate had to call Nicole’s house to give Mel permission to enter and Mel was more than a little surprised that Nicole gave the okay.

  She drove her Mini Cooper through the decorative orange trees that lined both sides of the road. Their trunks had been painted bright white to keep the bark from being sunburned and their canopies of bright leaves were clipped into lush mushrooms of greenery. Mel was sure it was supposed to be soothing with its very precise aesthetics, but she found it stifling. She enjoyed a little wildness in her vegetation and this was a bit too militaristic for her liking.

  She followed the directions on her phone’s GPS until she reached Nicole’s house. It looked exactly like every other house on the street. The exact same types of desert bushes on the gravel front yard, each maintained with the same precision as the trees on the main drive. Was it supposed to feel like a prison? she wondered, because it sure had that vibe.

  She parked in the short driveway in front of the garage and walked around the side, following the cobblestone path to the front door. The large wooden door with massive iron hinges looked as if it had been designed to intimidate—or maybe that was just Mel having second thoughts about the whole situation.

  The last time she had seen Nicole, the other woman had just dropped out of school to go and marry the son of a Greek shipping tycoon. She had been throwing out all of her clothes, tossing them to anyone in the dorm who wanted the designer duds, because her man had promised to buy her an all new haute couture wardrobe as befitting her new station as his wife.

  When Mel had stopped by her room to wish her well, Nicole had shrieked with laughter.

  “Oh, Mel, surely you don’t think I have anything that would fit you, do you?” Nicole had chortled. The posse of friends she had in her room all howled with laughter as well. It had been devastating.

  This had been during one of Mel’s plus-size stages, and the shame she had felt at Nicole’s scorn had made her pale skin turn fiery red and she’d hid her face behind her much longer hair, pulling it over her face as if she could hide the extra seventy-five pounds she was carrying around with a hank of hair.

  “No,” Mel said. “I just wanted to wish you well.”

  The words had about choked her and she had turned and fled from Nicole’s room, wishing not for the first time that she could just curl up and blow away like an autumn leaf on the wind.

  She had gotten halfway down the hallway, when Nicole caught up to her. She had grabbed Mel by the arm and spun her around. Tears had been coursing down Mel’s cheeks and she kept her head down, refusing to let Nicole have the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

  “Hey,” Nicole said. “I was just kidding, okay? Don’t be so sensitive.”

  Mel hadn’t been able to form words around the lump in her throat, so she shrugged, just wanting Nicole to let her go and leave her alone.

  “This is for you,” Nicole said. “It’s like the only thing I have that might fit you, so don’t say I never gave you anything.”

  With that she grabbed Mel’s hand and pressed a silver cuff bracelet into it. Mel wanted to refuse it, to shove it
back at her, or, even better, throw it at her and hit her square in the face. Instead, she just stood there, saying nothing. Nicole ran back to her room and Mel never saw her again.

  Ironically, the bracelet became a talisman for Mel. She used it to motivate herself into working out like a demon. She was determined to never again be the butt, or have the butt, of anyone’s cruel weight jokes ever again.

  It had been an unhealthy anger-induced diet that had helped her to lose the pounds but didn’t really teach her to love her body or value her health. Changing careers to go to culinary school and studying cooking in Paris, where there was a healthy love of food, did that. Still, it had been the first time Mel had successfully put something, rage, ahead of eating and she supposed in some crazy way, she owed Nicole for that.

  She approached the door, trying to pull together her frayed bits of courage. It was like trying to weave a blanket out of panic and she was breathing hard by the time she lifted her fist up to knock.

  A second before her knuckles connected, the door was yanked open and there stood Nicole Butterfield, looking just as curvy and seductive as she had ten years ago as an undergrad.

  Nicole wore her thick brown hair in a half-up-half-down hairdo that made her neck look longer. Her makeup was thick, as if she spackled it on while trying to achieve that contouring thing that was all the rage. She had long, thick false eyelashes and eye makeup that Mel assumed was supposed to make her look like a cat but really made her look narrow-eyed and squinty.

  Her top was a bright turquoise halter that thrust the girls out front and center, her pants were a leopard-spotted yoga pant sort of thing, and she wore turquoise Manolo Blahnik sandals that made her almost as tall as Mel. Her jewelry flashed from her wrists, earlobes, and ankles, winking at Mel as only true diamonds can. Divorce number two had clearly been good to her.

  “May I help you?” Nicole asked. She looked past Mel as if she was looking for someone else.

  “It’s me, Nicole. Melanie Cooper,” Mel said. “I don’t know if you remember me—”