CHAPTER 3 #2
"You have a list. It's just distributed emotionally. " Wren pulled a receipt pad closer, stopped herself from taking Junie's pencil without asking, and looked up.
Junie handed it over.
Wren wrote quickly, relief moving through her fingers despite herself. "If you want it to feel like Della, keep the palette soft but not sweet. Limestone gray, cream, old rose, a little dusty blue if the ribbons already exist. No blush explosion. Della would hate looking like a cupcake."
"I have been saying that," Paloma murmured.
Cressie looked over her mug. "Odette likes blush."
"Odette is not marrying Ruston," Wren said.
The words snapped out before she could soften them. They left a silence with shelves and ears and a preschool clipboard sitting in plain view like proof that other people managed responsibility without turning every room into a contest.
Paloma's mouth pressed flat, but she did not scold. Junie made herself busy with the register tape. Cressie watched with open interest.
Wren drew a small box on the receipt pad and made herself continue. "Sorry. I mean Della has clear taste, and it should show."
"No apology needed from me," Paloma said. "I have watched Della say the same thing with her eyebrows for six months."
That loosened Wren's shoulders. "I can draft the seating board today. If you have measurements for the vestibule and pasture entry, I can make the signs legible without making them look like roadside warnings. I can hand-letter names if you have the final list."
"Final list. " Paloma laughed once. "Beautiful phrase."
"Then the nearly final list."
"I can get it to you by noon. I need sketches fast, boards by Friday, finished pieces before rehearsal weekend, flower ribbon tags by next Thursday. Can you do that?"
Yes, Wren thought with a force that frightened her. Yes, because competent was the only language she still spoke without stammering. Yes, because paid work in her hand would be better than another hour pretending the numbers in her bank account were temporary.
"I can do it," she said. "I'll help pull the look together."
Paloma studied her half a second too long. "This is paid work."
Wren's face warmed. "I know."
"Real paid work. Not sister duty. Not town favor."
Cressie sipped her coffee. Junie stopped pretending not to listen.
Wren could have smiled and said money was fine, they could sort it out later. That would have been the easy, pretty lie. Pride folded into manners.
But pride had not bought breakfast.
"I need to know the amount," Wren said quietly. "And whether materials come out of my side."
Paloma's expression turned practical, which Wren liked her for immediately. "Sixty in cash this morning as an advance. Another hundred when design proofs are approved. Materials are my cost if you clear them with me first. If I add signs after the list is settled, I pay more."
Sixty dollars.
Wren kept her hand still on the receipt pad.
It did not fix a life. It did not erase maxed cards, lost work, a failed engagement, or a car that sounded like it was swallowing nails.
But it changed the morning's arithmetic.
It bought staples without turning groceries into a dare. It put one rung under her foot.
"That works," she said.
Paloma pulled three twenties from her folder. "Then you're hired."
Junie looked toward the shelves. "And now she can afford the better staples."
"I can afford one better staple," Wren said, taking the bills. "Maybe two if they're small."
Cressie tilted her head. "So Austin didn't make you rich."
There was the pivot. As neat as a boot heel in dust.
Wren slid the money into her wallet behind a gas receipt and a loyalty card she should have thrown away months ago. "Austin was not in charge of that."
"People said you were doing fancy parties."
"Some were fancy."
"And now you're back buying fence staples."
"Fence staples appear to be where the action is."
"Cressie," Junie said, "if you need molasses blocks, get them before noon or take what's left after the ranch hands come through."
It was a dismissal wrapped in inventory. Cressie recognized it. She smiled into her coffee but moved away.
Junie rang up the better staples and wire clips. Wren watched the total blink on the register and paid cash from her old money first, not Paloma's advance, because the work money needed to stay work money until she had earned it. That line mattered, even if no one else could see it.
Junie slid the receipt over. "You need gloves?"
"I have hands."
"Hands bleed."
"Then I have consequences."
"You have old gloves in the donation crate. " Junie pointed with her pencil. "Take a pair that fits."
Wren opened her mouth.
Junie held up a hand. "Before you sharpen that pride at me, they've been sitting there since winter. Nobody is rescued by used gloves with a hole in the thumb."
Paloma made a small agreeing sound. "Take the gloves, Wren."
The town could corner a woman with kindness as effectively as gossip. Wren found a pair stiff at the cuffs, worn soft across the palms. One thumb had a split seam. She could patch it with dental floss if Sudie had any.
"I'll bring them back," she said.
"Bring back finished hands," Junie said.
By the time Wren reached the Calloway kitchen, the staple box sat in the passenger footwell because the trunk latch had decided not to participate in adulthood.
The kitchen was crowded with wedding lists, pie plates, rolls of ribbon, and Della Calloway standing barefoot beside the table with her hair twisted up and a pencil between her teeth.
"Please tell me you are real," Della said around the pencil.
"I'm a stress hallucination with fence supplies."
Della pulled the pencil free and pointed at a chair. "Sit. No, wait. Hug me first. Then sit."
The hug was tight and smelled like laundry soap, coffee, and lemon oil on old cabinets. Wren had held herself in order through Junie's store, through Cressie, through Paloma's practical mercy. Della's arms made order more difficult.
"I missed you," Della said.
Wren let her eyelids fall for one beat. "I missed you too."
"I am happy you're here."
"That sounds like there is a second sentence."
Della pulled back. Her eyes were bright but dry. "There are twelve second sentences. I am choosing the least mean."
"Efficient."
"Stand with me at the chapel."
For a moment the kitchen thinned around the edges. The lists, the ribbon, the heat outside the window, all of it stepped back.
"Della."
"I mean it. Up front. You're my sister."
Wren's first instinct was to name the problem before tenderness could find a place to land. "Odette will have thoughts."
"Odette has never suffered from a shortage."
"You already have attendants."
"I have room."
"People will talk."
"People have been talking since Ruston proposed in a feed room because he thought the rain was romantic and I thought tetanus was imminent. They can survive one more topic."
Wren laughed, startled because it was real. "I cannot believe he proposed in a feed room."
"There were string lights."
"Were they on?"
"Eventually."
Della smiled, then the smile bent under the weight of what she had not said yet. "I need my wedding to be my wedding. I know that sounds selfish."
"It doesn't."
"It might by the time I finish. " Della set the pencil on the table.
"I love that you're here. I also cannot have this week turn into a referendum on you and Colt and whether the town forgives anybody for anything.
Ruston needs Colt for the reception pasture.
The fencing, the parking, the trailer route, all of it.
Colt is doing early work before ranch chores when he can, and Ruston is trying not to ask too much because Colt has Beau and cattle and a water gap acting ugly after this dry spell. "
Wren pressed her palm to the back of a chair. "I didn't know Colt was helping with that."
"Quietly, because that is how he does everything except bleed. " Della's gaze softened. "And because he would never leave Ruston stuck when cattle gates and wedding guests are about to occupy the same pasture."
Wren could picture it too clearly. Colt looking over a field and seeing tire ruts, gates, stock tanks, low places where a heel could turn, animals that needed moving before a hundred and twenty people arrived wearing church shoes. He had always seen what would break before it broke.
"What do you need from me?" Wren asked.
"Smooth things with him before the wedding weekend."
There it was, spoken plainly.
Wren looked toward the window. Somewhere beyond town, Colt would be making decisions with wire, cattle, and time, while she stood in a kitchen with ribbon curling around her wrist like a question.
"Della, we have not spoken in eight years."
"You spoke yesterday."
"That was more like two old injuries recognizing each other at a fence line."
Della's face barely changed; Wren still saw the hurt flash. A sister's ache at years of silence she could not mend for them.
"I am not asking you to fix eight years before Sunday," Della said. "I am asking you to make it so my wedding does not have two people I love bleeding quietly into the punch bowl."
"Graphic."
"Memorable."
Wren rubbed one thumb along the chair back, catching a ridge where varnish had worn away. "What did he say?"
"Colt?"
"About me being here."
Della leaned against the counter. "Ruston said Colt only said you looked tired."
The sentence opened something Wren had been holding shut. Colt had seen through the blouse, the city shoes, the smile polished in Austin and packed carefully for use back home. He had seen the one thing she had hoped to hide and given it to Ruston like a fact he would not dress up.
"I am tired," she said before she could stop herself.
Della's attention sharpened. "Wren."
"I'm fine."
"That is a door you close when I'm standing on the porch."
Wren touched the ribbon by her wrist. Old rose satin, expensive enough to make her fingers careful. "I picked up paid work from Paloma."
"Good. What work?"