Chapter 9
“I have total confidence that it will be perfect.” I paused, and cleared my throat. “I just need to figure out what I’m doing a little.”
“Holy—”
“Sophie, don’t start!” I barked at her. “You know what a good job I did with Addie’s. It was beautiful.” It hadn’t been quite what I’d envisioned, but that was due to Addie and Granger disregarding some of the good advice I’d given them. If they had fallen in line, things would have gone even better.
“You weren’t her planner,” my sister reminded me. “We all worked on it, and Addie had tons of time. Both she and her husband were hands-on and they did a lot themselves.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“I’m saying that it’s going to be much harder this time around,” Sophie explained, her voice rising in pitch and volume.
“Yes, it will be harder if Juliet and Beckett butt in and get in my way.”
“It’s their wedding!” she exclaimed. “They can butt in all they want.”
“But they should be focusing on other things, like how he’s…” I trailed off, thinking of when I’d met with them both to hear about what they wanted for their big day. Beckett had been resting on the couch and Juliet had clearly been so worried about him that she looked sick herself. It had been stressful and awful.
Sophie also got upset. “He’s going to be fine. They’re listening to the doctors and doing everything right. It’s going to be fine,” she repeated. She checked her phone and read something which I assumed was an adoring message from her own husband because she got a gooey expression, smiling a little and then flushing as she wrote back. She put her hand over her lower stomach where their baby was growing.
That kind of behavior was a little sickening. “Did you have something specific that you wanted to discuss right now, or are you just wanting to complain that I might mess up sometime in the future?” I asked her. “I understand that this is a big job, ok?” Obviously, I knew that it took a lot to get a wedding squared away in a month, which was the time frame that Juliet had set forth when she’d hired me as her wedding planner. I’d agreed to do it the night that the gallery had burned down, and I’d been nose-to-the-grindstone ever since.
“You need a job and I’ll pay you for it,” she’d written as I played with Campbell’s hair. It was so soft, and he’d sighed so contentedly…
“Brenna Amy, are you listening?” Sophie demanded now.
That was correct: my middle name was Amy. That made my initials BAC, Blood Alcohol Content. It was so charming, and my parents were so—
“Brenna!” she exclaimed. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes, but I wish that I hadn’t,” I told her. “You’re saying that I’m going to ruin JuJu’s wedding.” I felt enough doubt in myself right now that I didn’t need to hear it from my sister, too.
“No, I’ve moved on from that.” She shook her head and frowned. “I said, Nicola is worried about you and that guy. I promised her that I’d try to get some more information.”
“She’s totally wrong about me being in love with Dion,” I said. “It’s ridiculous.”
“You know darn well that we’re not talking about your former coworker,” my big sister warned, but I was already heading for her front door because this was a topic I liked even less.
“We have an appointment with Juliet to get her wedding dress. Are you coming or what?” I demanded. Fortunately, we were taking separate cars so she wouldn’t be able to harangue me on the road, and I hoped that the setting of the bridal salon in Grosse Pointe and the focus on our other sister would head off any more of this discussion. For my part, I had absolutely nothing to say.
Nothing to say to them, I meant. “I’m going to the dress appointment. Meet you at the rink,” I quickly typed before I backed out of Sophie’s driveway, and I waited a moment to see if there would be a reply. Then my sister honked her horn and held up her hands as she looked at me in her rearview mirror, so I actually left.
We had to get a dress today, without question. The ceremony and reception venue was already taken care of: Beckett’s palatial, ancestral home. The flowers? Yes, I was working on those, and Nicola had taken it upon herself to personally invite all the intended guests (and probably bully them until she got the answer she wanted to hear) so that we wouldn’t have to worry about waiting for RSVPs. Cake tasting would be tomorrow, and by paying more money than most people spent on a year’s rent, my sister and her fiancé would get their dream dessert. Table and tent rental, catering, the band…oh, sugar. There were still a lot of details to hammer down. I opened the window to let in some fresh air because I seemed to be overheating, although the beginning of May wasn’t anything like hot in Detroit today.
“I love a June wedding!” Our mother had clasped her hands together in happiness when Juliet had made her announcement at our last family dinner (family minus one, my dad). “I couldn’t feel more…” But then she had stopped explaining how she felt as her eyes had filled with tears. She’d dropped her head so that they dripped onto her plate.
“Mom,” Nicola had cautioned, but I hadn’t been very cautious myself.
“Knock it off,” I’d stated. “This is about Juliet and her happiness, not your own mess of a marriage.”
And then I’d heard a big chorus of “brat” from many people at the table, but I had been correct. Juliet had thanked me later instead of getting mad at me like the rest of our siblings, even though out of all of us, she was usually the first person to defend our mother. It was because my sister was barely holding things together herself, and she just couldn’t stand Mom’s histrionics right now. The wedding was on, suddenly and with so much urgency, because Beckett had taken a turn for the worse. For legal reasons as well as emotional ones, he wanted to get married ASAP, but he also wanted Juliet to have a beautiful day. He wanted her to have a happy one, too.
“I don’t care what anything costs,” he’d told me quietly, when she couldn’t hear. “Please get this done for her. She trusts that you can do it.”
“I can,” I swore, and we’d shook on it. I had felt how thin his hand was…
Ok, I wasn’t going to get emotional either. I was going to get my sister a wedding gown, and I was going to get us all into bridesmaid dresses, and this was going to be wonderful. It would be perfect!
A while later, I perched on the edge of an overly tufted chair covered in unattractive polyester velvet, and I felt even more doubt. “Ugh, I can’t even look at that.” I held up my hand to block the view. “Please take it away.”
The saleswoman glanced at the gown she was displaying and then at me, and her frustration was clear. “There just aren’t many choices. We only have this dress because another wedding was called off,” she said.
“I wonder what happened,” I heard Sophie mutter.
“Maybe the groom saw that gown and realized that he couldn’t marry anyone with such terrible taste,” I suggested.
“Brenna!” Nicola snapped, and Addie said that whatever the reason, someone’s feelings must have been hurt. Grace mentioned that she didn’t plan to get married because wedding dresses looked itchy.
“Put on your shoes,” Patrick ordered her. He looked harassed. “I think I’m only here to keep you in line.”
He was correct about why he’d been invited; no one really cared about his opinion of our dresses. Still, it was good to have a place in the family, and I’d told him he’d better show up for his twin, Juliet.
“There’s a very, very limited selection,” the boutique owner reiterated, also frowning in my direction. “I’m sorry to say that you’ll have to compromise a little, due to your haste.”
I had seen Juliet’s face fall when she spotted the ugly dress approaching and she only looked sadder at this statement about compromise. “No, we won’t be doing that,” I told the owner and her minion. “I’ll need to go into your back room and see for myself.”
The owner’s head was moving in a negative, back-and-forth motion before I’d finished speaking. “I’m very sorry, but that’s not—”
“Let’s go, JuJu,” I said, and led the way. My sisters followed and when the six Curran women were on the march like that, no one could stop us. No one was going to stop me from finding the best dress for my sister.
“Don’t leave me in suspense,” Campbell said a few hours later. “Did you get one?”
“This is so tight that my toes are going numb,” I said, and held up my right leg where he’d tied the skate extremely forcefully.
“I think you’ll do better—I think you’ll feel more comfortable if your foot has more support in the boot,” he told me, but he did kneel to adjust it. “How about that? You have to be able to flex your ankle.”
I tried, and now I could. “Better,” I agreed.
“Ok, so what happened with her dress?”
I knew that his own day had been filled with meetings with his lawyers and a very tense lunch with his sister, father, and their legal representatives. He couldn’t have actually cared about these wedding problems, but I supposed that it was kind of a vacation for his mind to hear this kind of stuff. “Well, it was touch and go, because we found a good option but the people at the salon said that it wasn’t for sale and that it couldn’t be altered to fit her, anyway. But I pulled the owner aside and we had a little discussion.”
“Then you got thrown out?”
“No!” I answered, annoyed at his question. “No, I told her that my sister’s fiancé was very sick and I also said the magic words, which were that money was no object, and we would pay whatever it took. And we did pay a whole heck of a lot. Beckett did,” I corrected myself.
“So you bought one.” He held out his hands and helped me to my feet. I stood and wobbled even though I was on a rubber floor instead of the ice.
“Yes, we found a beautiful dress,” I agreed. “It’s amazing on Juliet and I’ll do the alterations myself so we won’t have to wait for the hot dog-fingered seamstresses that the bridal salon recommended.”
“Hot dogs?” he asked.
“Well, they’re actually really good at their jobs,” I admitted. “I saw some of their work, but they won’t have the time to get it done before the wedding. There’s a lot to do on that dress and there’s hardly any time at all. Juliet also wants a veil to match, so I’ll make that. I have to order the lace. Will she want a French bustle? There’s so much.”
“Woah,” Campbell said, and squeezed my fingers. “Take a breath. You just turned very pale.”
Maybe he would have to flirt with me to make me blush? I looked up expectantly.
“Let’s head out there and get your blood pumping,” he suggested.
Sure, we could do that instead. I let him lead me to the half-door that opened onto the ice and then waited for him to hold out his hands and skate backwards, but he shook his head. “You go next to me this time,” he said.
“I like the other way.”
“But now you can do it without me pulling you around. Come on and try.” He did offer one hand.
Gingerly, I took it. “If I fall and yank your shoulder out of its socket, you’ll have only yourself to blame.” I stepped onto the slick surface and wobbled again.
“You’re good,” he assured me. “Let’s go.”
I took a tentative step and stopped.
“Push with your back leg. All right, we’re skating—whoops! Here we are,” he said, and picked me up from off my butt.
“I don’t like this,” I informed him.
“You’re doing great. Whoops!” Only his grip on my hand kept me from hitting the ice again. “What about your dress? The bridesmaid stuff?”
Nicola must have forced Juliet to accept me, or maybe she’d felt obligated to throw me into the wedding party due to the fact that I was planning the event. In any case, I did need a dress, too—we all did. “I found something that will work,” I said, concentrating too hard on staying upright to share a lot more information. If I’d had time, I would have designed and sewn all these dresses, but even if I pulled all-nighters up until the event, I probably couldn’t have gotten it done. Not in my little apartment, for sure, since I still couldn’t use my atelier. The leak there was only worse. “We ordered them and I hope Sophie and Addie don’t get too fat,” I mentioned.
“You mean because they’re pregnant?”
“Whatever—oh!”
“Here we are,” he said soothingly. “You’re doing great.”
That was an out and out lie, but at least I was moving mostly under my own power. I was keeping my eyes forward, gliding, and—
“Whoops!” Campbell picked me up. He usually held me for an extra moment to make sure that I was steady on my feet and I clung to him as he did. Maybe I felt a little shaky and I needed that extra moment, or maybe I just liked the closeness. “That was a hard one,” he said.
I was thinking the same thing as I gripped his arms. They were both so hard, such beautiful muscles. “I’m ok,” I finally said, and forced my fingers to release.
“Here we go.” We started again. “So you checked off everything that you wanted to accomplish. Nice,” he complimented.
“My checklist is out of control,” I had to admit. “I have a lot of work ahead of me and I don’t…oh, I just thought of something. I bet she’ll want a garter to match the veil and it has to have something blue. And Beckett never got back to me about his tie. What about his tie?”
“I could get that information for you,” he mentioned. “I’m having lunch with Beckett tomorrow.”
“What? About your…” I glanced around.
“No, not about the criminal investigation. Not directly,” he answered. “I’m putting out feelers for a new job and he knows people. He has a good reputation.”
He didn’t say, “Unlike me,” but I knew what he was thinking. “Your reputation is fine,” I said sternly. “If people have questions about it, they’re stupid. I’ll tell them so.”
“You already told the woman at the grocery store to mind her own business or take it out to the parking lot to discuss it with you there,” he reminded me.
“I didn’t like how she was staring at you. When she mentioned that she knew your father and how he was always, um…” She’d said in a loud voice that she’d always known that something was off about Ghregg Bates, ever since they’d worked on fundraising together for their sons’ hockey team. I’d told her to move along, and that had worked after I also said that I’d be happy to talk to her out of the range of any surveillance cameras. She’d understood my hint. Campbell and I been forced into grocery shopping because although he’d gotten a delivery, he had forgotten a few things for the dinner we were going to cook. He was staying in, alone, for more of his days than was healthy. That was why I kept saying “yes” to meeting him at the rink. He needed to leave and experience human contact, didn’t he? Sure, that was one reason, but it was also fun to spend time together.
But that made me wonder.
“Where are your other friends?” I asked.
“Do you want their exact locations?”
“I mean, why haven’t they shown up for you? Why aren’t they wanting to go skate instead of me?”
“You don’t have to come with me,” he said.
“I want to be here,” I quickly told him. “But why don’t they?”
Campbell kept gliding and I looked up at his face to—
“Whoops! That was a bad one.” He knelt down on the ice, where I’d fallen forward onto my knees, hands, and elbows before ending up flat on my chest. “Are you all right?”
I nodded.
“Did you hit your head? Can you move everything ok?” he asked, and I nodded again. Very carefully, he helped me sit up. “What happened?”
“I was watching you instead of where I was going, because I thought that I’d made you upset by talking about the friends who had abandoned you.”
He shook his head slightly. “I’m not upset because my friends have abandoned me. A lot of them have reached out to see how I’m doing and to say that they have faith in me. I feel bad that I haven’t answered most of their messages. It’s the same reason that I’m worried about meeting Beckett for lunch at a restaurant tomorrow. I don’t want to talk about it, not about any of it.”
“But—”
“Even if you say, ‘It’s not your fault,’ it was,” he told me. “I should have seen something. I was too stupid and blind, and look where it got us.”
I shook my head, but he nodded again.
“You’re getting cold,” he pointed out, and helped me all the way up.
“I want to sit out for a minute, but you should skate by yourself a little,” I suggested. I thought that his time on the ice was like when I talked to Cleo and got something off my chest. It was his outlet. The rink was pretty empty today, since the weather had turned warmer and other people were switching from winter to spring/summer mental modes. I stepped onto the rubber floor and he set off, faster than I’d ever seen him go, skating forward and backward, flying over the ice. When he came to the boards where I waited, he was out of breath.
“Do you want to come out again?” he asked.
I was stiff and achy from that last fall. “No, but I’ll wait more if you want to keep at it.”
“I think I got it all out,” Campbell told me. “Let’s go see what we can do in your atelier.”
Reluctantly, I nodded. I had gotten to the point that I hated to be there. The leak had only worsened, and the smell of mildew or mold (or whatever it was that made the walls and ceiling so discolored) made me sick. I certainly couldn’t bring over fabric or the new machine I’d bought, not to a place where they could get ruined by dampness and stench. It was a huge, unhappy waste that made me furious, which I’d let the landlord know about. Many times. None of my complaints had made a difference.
But today, Campbell had said that he was going up on the roof to see what he could do about the problem. We drove to the building and hiked to the top of the stairs, where a broken door allowed roof access. Then I waited and watched anxiously as he walked over the guano-encrusted, trash-scattered tiles.
“This is…” He shook his head as he glanced back at me. “It’s a mess. There should be flashing all around here…look at the size of this puddle! When was the last time we had a big storm?” He stepped carefully, looking at everything and reporting on it, and it didn’t sound like the problems were getting better as he approached the area over my atelier. “There’s an actual hole here,” he called. He suggested some ideas for a temporary fix and he kept moving, poking at things, and scaring me until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Please come back here. Campbell, please. Just stop,” I said. “I’m so afraid that you’re going to fall through into the floor below us!”
“I’m ok,” he said, but he did start coming back toward me and the stairs, still stepping cautiously. Obviously, no one was going to fix the whole roof. Much like Chic and Alecta had let the gallery building turn to crap, the same thing had happened here, and I had been stupid enough to rent a unit at the top floor of this rotten place. Once I saw that he was safe, I turned and started to walk down to my unit. More like, I started to stomp back down.
“Hey,” he said, and I paused because I remembered my first pair of Schone boots. Losing those hadn’t been his fault, and the building’s lack of upkeep wasn’t, either.
“I’m not mad at you, I’m just really upset,” I said. “I’m upset about the roof and about my bad decision to rent here. I wanted to get my new sewing machine and I got all caught up in the idea of having a place of my own to work…I kept calling it my ‘atelier’ and really, it’s only a dark, dank little room with a hole in the ceiling and mold growing in the wall. I’m angry at the landlord but mostly I’m angry at myself for making this dumb mistake.”
“Yeah, I could see how you’d feel like that.” He caught up to where I stood, halfway down the flight of stairs toward my floor. “But you’re the one who keeps telling me that what happened at my company wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t have seen it coming. Without going out to walk around the roof, you wouldn’t have known about the hole, either.”
“But I shouldn’t have rented a place in bad part of town,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have worked for the man who once told me that I could blame my mother for my lack of intelligence, because he had set me up perfectly with the Y chromosome that he’d contributed.”
“Your father said that? Why is he so mean?”
Campbell shrugged. “Are we going to your place for dinner?” he asked me, and I nodded. He was driving his other car, the SUV. It was almost as nice as the one that had been stolen so I was sure that he wouldn’t spend the night. The media trucks had moved away from his house and there was no reason to seek my bed. There was no reason at all.
But I could make a good dinner, even if I had just one burner and a microwave that only heated things a little. While we cooked together (even in my tiny kitchen, I did have more than one knife), we talked a lot about wedding stuff but I also got him to open up about the lunch date he’d had with his father, sister, and all their attorneys.
“It was…” He thought for a moment. “I think the best word is ‘guarded.’ No one wanted to say too much, but I kept trying. Once, my lawyer told me to shut up. In a more erudite way,” he qualified.
I tried to imagine a conversation like that with my sisters. “You and Carrington had talked about the situation before.”
“Not for a while. She’s not answering me anymore and neither is my mom. Anything we say could be used against us, right? It makes sense.”
Maybe it made legal sense, but when I turned to look at him, I saw that his expression didn’t match his words. Those had been calm and pragmatic, but he looked sad. “You must miss them,” I said.
“I don’t think that we ever had the same relationship that you do with your family.”
It definitely made sense that he wouldn’t have been close to the father who seemed to have berated and belittled him, and that he wouldn’t have had a lot of cozy feelings toward the mother who had picked on his sister to the point that she’d developed an eating disorder. And the one time I’d seen him with Carrington, she’d acted about as nice as a striking rattlesnake.
“Still,” I said. “Still, it sucks that you’re only speaking through attorneys. Did you get anything worked out?”
“Not really.” He hesitated. “I think my dad is up to something else. Once, when I was in high school, he paid off a ref at a hockey tournament so that my team would advance to the semifinals. I didn’t find out until years later, but when he told me about it, I remembered how he’d been acting back then. He was so pleased with himself, strutting around the rink like he was very proud. I knew he wasn’t proud of me, because I wasn’t playing well at all. I never seemed to rise to the occasion like he wanted me to.”
“He paid off a ref at a children’s sports tournament?” I asked.
“We were teenagers, but yes.”
Given the recent indictment, it shouldn’t have surprised me.
“He seemed just as pleased at lunch today,” Campbell continued. “He was trying to hide it, but it was there. I could tell.”
“You’re observant like that. You knew he was up to something at your company, too. No, I mean that you suspected it,” I corrected myself. “You didn’t know anything for sure.” If anyone happened to be listening in on our conversation, I wanted to make that clear. “Can you guess what he’s planning now?”
He shook his head. “All I can think is that he’s going to run. I don’t know why he hasn’t done it already, actually.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to leave you and your sister with the mess he made all by himself. All by himself,” I said again, a little louder. “Dinner’s ready.”
We split the tray and sat on the couch together to eat, and he changed the subject. “I have an idea about your atelier.”
“I don’t want to call it that anymore,” I said. “It’s a leaky, moldy money pit.”
“I have a basement. It has windows, kind of small ones and far up in the walls, but they bring in a lot of sun.”
“Ok,” I said. “So?”
“There’s also plenty of overhead lighting,” he continued. “It has a high ceiling for a lower level and lots of open space. It’s totally dry, carpeted and finished.”
I waited.
“Why couldn’t you work there?” he asked me.
“In your house? Well, it’s your house, and I’m paying to use the other place.”
“But you can’t,” he told me. “It’s in bad shape, Brenna. We were just talking about the checklist you have for Juliet…ok, take a breath. You can get it done.” He patted my shoulder and left his hand there for a moment. “You could have a safe, clean, dry place to get it done at my house.”
“Like, as a temporary thing, as I argue the landlord into submission,” I suggested, and Campbell nodded. “I could give you rent.”
“No, no,” he said, now shaking his head. “I’d like to have you there. It’s weird for me, not having a schedule and things to do every day. I could help you.”
“You could help me sew?”
“I could be the guy who holds the water bottle to squirt it into your mouth, or to pat your forehead with a towel,” he said. “I could answer the thousands of messages that come in on your phone.”
“It’s a lot about the wedding right now,” I said, and sighed as I looked at it. Fifty-eight notifications, and I had cleared everything before I’d started cooking. “And now there’s stuff from Dion, too.” I had checked in on him a few times, because I had been worried that whoever had firebombed us at the gallery might have made another attempt to rid the world of his presence. “He says he’s been hiding at a friend’s house temporarily but he needs another place to live. If he doesn’t mind the floor squelching and breathing spores into his lungs, then he could stay in my former atelier, since I don’t need it.”
“Does that mean you’re going to accept my offer?”
“It really won’t bother you to have me there?” I asked him. “I grate on people, you know.”
“We get along,” he said, and that was only true because he was so easy-going and pleasant. But I knew that I would only feel more stress and pressure as the wedding date approached, speeding toward me, and there were so many things left to accomplish…
“Take another breath.” Now he put both hands on my shoulders. “Look into my eyes.”
I did. They were a beautiful brown color, carob. “Are you trying to put me into a trance?”
“I’m willing you to say yes,” Campbell told me. “Why not?”