Chapter Twenty-Four
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘Yoohoo! Marla, honey!’
The distinctive squawk assaulted Marla’s ears across the crowded arrivals hall. She held her arms out and her mother tumbled into them, all suntanned wrinkles and expensive jewellery that jangled every time she moved.
‘Let me look at you.’ She gripped Marla hard by the upper arms and leaned backwards.
‘Still too pale.’ She clucked her tongue then reached up and pinched a cheek. ‘Are you using that juicer I sent you?’
Marla laughed. It had taken all of forty seconds for her mother to find fault. She just couldn’t help herself. Moments later she noticed the short man a few steps behind her mother, locked in a battle with two trolleys piled high with coordinated luggage.
‘Honey, this is my fiancé, Brynn. Brynn, meet Marla. Isn’t she every bit as gorgeous as I said she was?’
Brynn shuffled forward, a vision in crumpled cream linen and an ivory fedora. Marla shook his outstretched hand and tried not to wonder where a taxidermist’s hand might spend the majority of its time.
And fiancé? Was it her mother’s life mission to reach double figures?
‘Good to meet you, Marla. Cecilia has told me so much about you.’
He had a thin voice, and when he fixed her with his gimlet eyes, Marla got the alarming feeling that she was being sized up for a glass display case.
She forced a smile, but her heart had well and truly sunk at the thought of her serene cottage being invaded by her mother, the lover and their luggage. She eyed the trolleys to double-check Brynn hadn’t smuggled any dead foxes or suchlike through customs, before leading them outside to her car.
Neither of her passengers offered to help as Marla loaded the cases into the boot. Nor when she took them all out again because they wouldn’t fit. She heaved the largest case onto the back seat next to Brynn, and then shoehorned the rest into the boot space.
‘Have you been to the UK before, Brynn?’
‘Only on a one-night stopover a couple of years back en route to the Austrian taxidermy championships.’
‘Oh.’ Great. He was a conversation killer as well as an animal stuffer.
Marla steered the car through the busy airport traffic onto the motorway and attempted to get the conversation with Brynn back on track.
‘So. How long are you visiting for?’
‘Oh, not long for me I’m afraid. I’m a keynote speaker at the London taxidermy exhibition, and then it’s on to Russia.’
‘Another lecture?’
‘No. I’m collecting a dead zebra from Moscow Zoo.’
Marla met his gaze in the rearview mirror and couldn’t decide whether or not he was joking. Terrific. Trust her mother to bring Hannibal bloody Lecter to visit.
‘Please Jonny! You owe me.’
Jonny pouted as Marla clutched his checked shirtsleeve in desperation.
‘How many more times are you going to use that line before we’re done?’
‘Oh, a lot more yet. You nearly closed us down. It’s a big debt.’ She gestured with her hands to demonstrate the size. ‘Huge.’
‘What do you want from me, little lady? Blood?’ He held his upturned wrists out to her, and she shook her head.
‘Cane?’ He turned around and presented her with his jeans-clad backside with an exaggerated sigh.
‘Not even close. Say you’ll come to dinner with my mother.’
Jonny put his head on one side, considering. ‘Will Prince-not-very-Charming be there too?’
‘Actually, Rupert can be very charming if you’d just give him a chance,’ Marla said.
‘I’ll have to take your word for it, toots, because I’m not seeing it. From where I’m standing he’s a long streak of hair, teeth and … and not much else.’ He drew his forked fingers sideways across his eyes. ‘Dead behind the eyes,’ he whispered, calling on his best am-dram skills.
‘That’s incredibly rude,’ Marla chided, not rising to his bait. ‘Come to dinner. He might just surprise you.’
‘Oh, go on then,’ Jonny grumbled. ‘But only because I don’t happen to have made other plans.’
He hummed ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ as he spun on his block-heeled cowboy boots and line-danced off down the aisle. They were preparing the chapel for a country and western themed wedding, and short of live horses to lasso, they were more or less on track.
Marla grinned at his retreating back. He was a true friend, and would have come on Saturday evening just because she needed him there, but she knew he was dying to meet her mother. Actually Brynn, to be precise. He’d howled with laughter when she’d relayed the conversation from the car, but all the same he couldn’t possibly have accepted her invitation outright. That would have been far too straightforward for Jonny.
Marla counted up the dinner guests in her head. Jonny, Emily and Tom, Rupert and herself, and of course her mother and Brynn. Seven ought to be enough to dilute the effect her mother had. Cecilia had insisted on a swish dinner at Franco’s, but the last thing Marla felt like was a cosy double date with her mother, Brynn and Rupert. The two men would have absolutely no common ground, and Lord knows Brynn could be relied on to stop a conversation in its tracks with a random comment about a female hippopotamus’ enormous lady bits. He appeared to specialise in huge animals, and after two days under the same roof, Marla knew far more than she ever wanted to about the anatomical complexities of lions and tigers and bears.
What was her mother thinking? There was every possibility that she would end her days stuffed, mounted and on display in Brynn’s travelling freak show, probably wedged somewhere between a giant panda and a Palomino.
Maybe he was rich. But then that wasn’t something that usually turned her mother’s head; Cecilia had enough independent wealth to not need to lean on anyone else.
Oh, God. A hideous thought crept into her mind.
Maybe he was awesome in the sack .
Marla fought to keep her lunch down at the idea and tried to banish it from her head. There had to be something though, and she was going to make it her business to find out what it was.
The chapel doors creaked open and Emily appeared, her arms loaded with red and white gingham. Marla started to laugh as she noticed what her friend was wearing.
‘Yeah, well. You try finding a country outfit for pregnant women,’ Emily grouched, dumping the gingham on the nearest bale of hay that had been delivered that morning from a local farm. They’d also contributed an old-fashioned wooden cart for the day, which now stood decorated in pride of place on the chapel lawns, ready for photographs after the ceremony.
Emily’s floor-sweeping scarlet dress fell in deep, lace-trimmed tiers, and she wore red ribbons in her short pig-tails.
‘I like it,’ Marla ventured. ‘It’s kinda cowgirl-boho.’
Emily rolled her eyes. ‘I’d rather be Daisy Duke.’
Jonny reappeared carrying two huge buckets of sunflowers and huge daisies. ‘Ruth dropped these off.’ He eyed Emily’s dress with sartorial alarm. ‘Whoa! Does Dora know you stole her curtains?’
Emily planted her hands on her hips and looked him up and down slowly as he placed the buckets down. Checked shirt shot through with threads of glitter. Chaps over his snug-fitting Levi’s. A huge gold and rhinestone-studded belt buckle bearing an American eagle. Stack-heeled cowboy boots. And crowning it all, a huge Stetson.
‘You come dressed as Howard Keel and you dare to criticise me?’
Jonny whistled. ‘Showing your age there, Sue-Ellen,’ he murmured, and then leaned into Marla and muttered, ‘hide the whisky,’ behind his hand. Both women rolled their eyes as Jonny cackled and rocked back on his heels to look out of the window at the funeral parlour. ‘And we needn’t look far for the poison dwarf,’ he said, then coughed, ‘Melanie,’ under his breath. ‘Ooh! Let’s cast Gabriel as Bobby!’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘I always had a thing for those dark curls.’
Emily sorted through the flowers as Jonny warmed to his theme. ‘Who shall we cast as JR?’
They all looked up as the door creaked open, and Rupert walked in. Jonny cracked up instantly and Marla swallowed hard and painted a newsreader’s smile on her face.
‘Rupert, you’re just in time.’
‘If rather underdressed,’ he murmured, taking in their various outfits. Marla had opted for a denim and lace dress that somehow still looked classy, probably because of the woman wearing it. ‘Not to worry,’ he said, looking relieved. ‘I can’t stay, I’m just dropping Stuart over to shoot the wedding for the paper.’
Marla smiled warmly. Rupert really was doing his best to promote the chapel in the press, playing to his strengths to help their campaign. She was thankful for his help, and told him as much as she led him from the chapel and away from prying ears.
‘I’ll see you at the restaurant later,’ he murmured, running his hand possessively down her backside. ‘I might just have a surprise for you.’ The look in his eyes should have served as a warning, but she was too wrapped up in the wedding to let it permeate. She pecked him on the cheek and wriggled out of his reach.
‘Don’t be late. And don’t believe a word my mother tells you.’
She stood on the pavement to wave him off, and just as she went to turn back inside the chapel, Gabe appeared from his doorway with a box in his arms. Marla swallowed the usual knot of apprehension that accompanied an encounter with Gabe and raised a casual hand in greeting. Bluey’s funeral had proved to be something of a turning point; it was hard not to be civil to him after he’d been so kind and gentle with her fur-boy. She tried not to dwell on the fact that her heartbeat had picked up for the wrong man in the last two minutes.
‘These came for you just after you left yesterday,’ he said, drawing near enough for Marla to be able to see the collection of horseshoes inside the cardboard box.
‘Ah, thanks. I wondered where they’d got to.’ Emily had sourced them from a local farrier to wrap with ribbons and give to the wedding guests as keepsakes. She held her arms out to take the box from him.
‘I’ll bring them in,’ Gabe said. ‘It weighs a ton.’
Marla bit back the urge to refuse. ‘Thank you.’
She led him up the chapel path and paused by the door. ‘Just there’ll be fine,’ she said casually, not wanting him inside the chapel because Jonny and Emily would prolong his visit. The only way she could maintain their tenuous truce was to keep contact between them as brief as possible. As it was, she could already smell the scent of him as he straightened up beside her after depositing the box by the door.
She smiled brightly. Too brightly, and felt his soft laugh all the way to her bones.
‘You make a cute cowgirl,’ he said, and then touched his fingertips to his forehead and left her there sniffing the air to catch the last traces of him before she went back inside.
A couple of hours later and the country and western saloon bar wedding had turned into a full-scale hoedown. The guests sat on hay bales and upturned barrels, and Jonny stood proud and central at the lectern, the bride before him in white lace hotpants and the groom in a black velvet tux and silver wingtips. The chapel lent itself perfectly to the theme, transformed for the day into a hayloft dressed in rustic gingham and Ruth’s sunflowers and giant daisies.
Marla and Emily stood together at the back, arm in arm, best friends watching all of their hard work come to beautiful, unique fruition before their eyes. It might not be conventional romance, but the bride and groom’s love ran clear and beautiful through the proceedings and informed the whole wedding with its own uniquely intrinsic, magical element that made the wedding flow and work.
It was a thread common with the vast majority of the weddings that they organised at the chapel; they brought to life a vision that wouldn’t sit easily in your average church or wedding venue, but that was no less heartfelt or honest, in fact, in many cases it was more so.
‘Joey junior, do you take this little lady to be your wife?’ Jonny cried, his faux-Texan drawl bang on.
‘I do.’ Tears coursed down Joey junior’s cheeks. ‘I sure do, my darlin’,’ he said, his over-bright eyes fixed on his bride.
‘And you, sugar-buns?’ Jonny twirled his fake gun like a pro. ‘Do you take this sharp shootin’ outlaw to be your lawfully wedded husband?’
‘Aw, Joey, ma big daft cowboy,’ Joey junior’s bride said, her Liverpudlian accent clear behind her terrible deep-south drawl. ‘I most certainly do.’
The crowd yee-hawed as the bride and groom kissed, and Jonny threw his arms to the skies and praised the good Lord until silence reigned. All eyes on him, he broke into a full-bellowed rendition of ‘Stand by your Man’ to thunderous applause as Joey junior and his bride clung to each other for their first impromptu dance as husband and wife. Little by little the congregation moved into the aisle to dance; the jeans and leather vest-clad bridesmaid and the bandana’ed best man, the mother of the bride with the leather-trousered grandpa of the groom.
Marla clapped, happy tears on her cheeks. The chapel had woven its magic once again. For a little while she let herself forget all of her worries and enjoyed the moment of celebration. There would be plenty of time later to dwell on her problems. Her effervescent mother, her macabre new stepfather to be, her overcrowded cottage, her tangled emotions. Not to mention the small matter of dinner at Franco’s that evening, fraught with the potential for disaster.