Chapter 5 #2
Before Wren could respond, Lily flounced into the room, grinning ear to ear and pointing. “I can smell the bonfires already. We have to get into town! I don’t want to miss anything. You ready, Mom?”
Wren gave Ivy a look that meant this conversation wasn’t over, not yet. But Ivy was already headed for the closet to search for her extra-warm coat. It was supposed to drop down to twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit tonight. It wasn’t nothing. As a Maine girl, she knew to be prepared.
Within a half hour, Lily, Wren, Ivy, Celia, and Juliet were headed for the Autumn Festival, dressed in puffy coats and listing out all the autumnal snacks and drinks they wanted to taste.
“I can’t believe I’m back at a Bluebell Autumn Festival,” Juliet breathed.
“It isn’t exactly a fashion show in Paris, or whatever you’re usually used to,” Wren teased.
Juliet laughed. “I’m grateful for that, actually. I’ve met the most heinous characters in the world at functions like that. Give me a gruff, Maine coastal character any day of the week.”
“Someone like Dad?” Ivy asked, surprising herself.
Her sisters and her daughter blinked at her, then laughed good-naturedly.
“Dad was certainly a gruff character,” Celia agreed.
“The gruffest,” Juliet said.
“He should have managed a lighthouse or something,” Lily said, trying to get in on the sisters’ jokes.
Celia cackled and touched Lily’s shoulder. “Ivy, I never knew how hilarious your daughter is! She cracks me up.”
Lily beamed. Again, Ivy thought back to her years with Daniel, how little they’d ever laughed together.
But then, miraculously, she recalled that afternoon at the Bluebell Cove Inn, when she’d been standing behind the counter, nine months pregnant and changed, cackling about something inane with Elliot Rhodes.
It was as though her body had immediately relaxed around him.
Why was that? She’d never been able to make sense of it.
Was that why she’d kept herself away from him all these years?
Was she afraid of what that had felt like?
They reached the festival: lines and lines of food trucks, beer and wine stands, and festival games. A local band called The Grand Slam played covers from a stage in front of city hall, and people Ivy had known her entire life milled past, saying hello to “the Harper girls!”
“So nice to see you all together!”
After things settled a little, Celia clapped her hands and looked at each of the other Harper girls. “Who wants a glass of wine? I’m buying.” She smiled at Lily and said, “Not you, of course, sweetie. But I’ll get you something. A soda?”
Lily agreed on a soda, and Celia, Juliet, and Wren got in line to buy. This left Ivy and Lily behind them, standing in the glare of a surprisingly warm sun. A few feet away was a flickering bonfire and a few children and their parents, crisping marshmallows for s’mores.
“Did you hear me say that Madeline and Maggie are in town?” Lily asked.
“I did.” Ivy remembered the three girls upstairs in Lily’s bedroom, whispering secrets over the span of what felt like a thousand sleepovers. She hoped they weren’t yet at the festival, as she wanted to steal some time with her daughter before they ripped her away.
“How do they like being away from home?” Ivy asked. “Are they all right?”
“Oh, they’re fine! They’re great!” Lily laughed. “Maggie broke up with Rowan, but I think we all knew that was coming, like three years ago. She already has a new boyfriend. He’s from Rhode Island, I think? And Madeline’s dating around.”
Ivy tried not to betray her fear that Lily would leave Bluebell Cove just to go date some random college guy. “College isn’t supposed to be about dating, is it?” She tried to laugh. “Shouldn’t they be figuring out their careers?”
Lily gave her a look that meant duh, Mom.
“It’s more than that,” Lily said. “They’re trying to figure out who they are in the world.”
Ivy felt as though Lily was parroting exactly what her Aunt Celia had said.
Before she could come up with a response, however, Celia was back with her wine and Lily’s soda.
They clinked glasses and said, “To Bluebell!” Ivy tried to match her sisters’ smiles.
She tried to get on board with their joy as they hurried to the festival game down the road, the one where you spin a wheel of fortune.
She hugged Lily when Lily won herself a massive teddy bear.
She forced herself not to start crying when Celia said, “Are you really going to take that teddy bear to college with you?”
Lily said, “Of course! He’s my beloved.” She hugged him tighter.
“You’ll get a college boyfriend and forget all about him,” Wren said.
Ivy tried not to cast a monstrous look at her little sister. But Wren caught it anyway. As Lily, Juliet, and Celia walked up ahead, Wren sidled up to Ivy and asked, “Are you really not going to let her go to college?”
Ivy was floored at the accusation, if only because she’d never verbally said that. “What? No.”
Wren was quiet for a moment, her eyes reflecting the thousands of orange, yellow, and red plastic flowers that gazed down at them from all the floats and stands.
Ivy wondered what her sister would say if she told her about the pile of bills at the flower shop.
But Wren didn’t have the kind of money to help her.
She didn’t have the business wherewithal to get her through.
Did any of them? Ivy had always assumed that she was the business wiz. That felt laughable, now.
One day, she’d woken up at the flower shop in her life, and realized she was drowning.
“Just remember that Lily has to live her own life,” Wren said gently.
And then, just when Ivy felt on the brink of going crazy, she heard her name.
“Ivy?” She spun around to find Elliot Rhodes behind her, dressed in a bulky Carhartt coat with a red flannel and a pair of jeans beneath.
Her heart pumped in her chest. He was holding a salted-caramel whipped-cream pie, an autumnal dessert.
And his eyes told her that he didn’t see anyone at the festival save for her.
“Hi,” Ivy said, her voice wavering. She stopped short, as though her legs couldn’t bring her a step forward.
Wren waved at Elliot, either immune to how Elliot was looking at Ivy or hoping to help Ivy, who was obviously clueless when it came to matters of the heart.
“How’s your festival going?” Wren asked.
Elliot stepped closer and raised his dessert. “It just got a whole lot better. I have a massive sweet tooth, unfortunately. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to escape it.”
“Sweets are a reason to keep going.” Wren grinned.
Elliot smiled back, proof—Ivy now understood—that he should date her sister instead of her. Wren was in town, with no sign of leaving Bluebell Cove any time soon. But suddenly, his eyes flickered back to Ivy, and her heart dropped into her stomach.
“I’m going to catch up with Lily,” Wren said, waving again as she backed away.
Ivy understood that she needed to stay put.
She wasn’t sure why she agreed to do this, why she allowed herself.
But then, Elliot put his fork in her hand and urged her to take a bite of his dessert.
“You have to try it,” he said. “Honestly, it’s better than it’s ever been.
And I know you’ve been to as many Autumn Festivals as I have. ”
“I feel like I invented them,” Ivy said, rolling her eyes into a smile.
Elliot laughed and gestured again with his dessert until she took a bite and closed her eyes.
The cream was sensational, fragrant, the exact right texture, and the caramel was divine, sweet but not too sweet, the sort of thing her mother used to make on the stovetop when they were girls.
Ivy used to like to watch the caramel bubble and thicken under her mother’s spoon.
It was the kind of dessert that transported Ivy through time.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Elliot beaming down at her. “Did I lose you there for a second?”
Ivy laughed despite herself. “You shouldn’t have shared it. I want to inhale the rest.”
“They have more,” he told her. “We can buy all of them!”
Ivy wanted to make a joke about them “going right to her hips” now that she was forty, but she kept it to herself.
“How is everything?” Elliot asked. “I haven’t seen you since the opening party.”
Ivy thought again of the bills, the wrinkly flowers that she ended up throwing away because she’d ordered too many for the limited number of bouquets.
“Everything’s great,” she said. “Busy.”
Elliot furrowed his brow. “You know, I was working at a house not far from your flower shop the other day. I walked by to see if you were there, but it was closed up.”
“Oh! Yeah. Maybe I had an appointment or something,” Ivy lied. “That’s a perk of owning my own business. I can come and go whenever!” But he knew what that was like. He was a carpenter, for goodness’ sake.
“I couldn’t help but notice that it needs some repairs,” he said. “The roof and the door and maybe the window as well. You should have told me!”
Ivy was shocked at the very idea of getting in greater debt with the likes of Elliot Rhodes—the only man her body had responded to in decades. Not that he liked her back.
“Oh, I don’t think it’s so bad,” she said, suddenly anxious. She hated the way he was looking at her, as though he wanted to take care of her. She didn’t need it.
“Well, maybe we can work something out,” he continued.
“My sister’s getting married next year, and she’s trying to keep costs lower than low.
It’s her second wedding, and she doesn’t want to get carried away.
My suggestion? I do a little bit of handiwork for you, and you do the flowers at my sister’s wedding. ”
Ivy filled her lungs with air and tried to come up with an excuse to get out of this, to reject his friendly assistance, to refute yet another offer of help.
But before she could, her phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway, grateful to get away from Elliot’s prying eyes.
“Mrs. Elbert?”
Ivy hated hearing her husband’s last name. But more than that, she hated how formal the man’s voice was. She knew something was off.
“This is she.”
“Mrs. Elbert, my name is Officer Baxter. I have your son, Tyler, here at the police station in downtown Bluebell,” he said. “I need you to come down immediately and pick him up.”
Ivy closed her eyes. Oh, Tyler. What had he gotten himself into?