Cara arched one eyebrow. She"d done enough Facebook stalking of her own to know how this worked.
"You"re telling me you don"t check his status?"
"Not in a relationship," Brooke said, her voice barely a whisper. "Anyway, what else do we need to discuss? About the wedding? Patricia texts me every day, asking for a status report. She"s making me nuts."
"Right. Okay. Did you get a chance to look at the photoraphers" websites that I sent you? Any preferences?"
"Yeah, but I thought Patricia already hired some photographer."
"Meredith. She only does portraits. This photographer is for the actual wedding."
"Geez. Does everything have to be so complicated? Anyway, yeah, I liked them both. Mom really liked the woman-what"s her name?"
"Rita McCall. I think Rita really has a nice way with candids and black-and-white. And she"s so good at capturing the mood of the event."
"Fine. Then let"s go with Rita McCall," Brooke said. "What else? I"ve only got a few more minutes."
"Hmm. We really need to discuss table markers and favors. I"ve some ideas. Since the Strayhorns are in shipping, I thought we could do these miniature shipping containers, stencil your name and Harris"s on one side..."
"Great."
"I"ve got a great artisa.n.a.l chocolatier in town, he"ll come up with a signature chocolate filling for us-do you like milk chocolate or dark chocolate?"
"Dark, I guess. I don"t actually eat a lot of sweets."
Not surprising, Cara thought, looking at the bride"s picked-over salad.
"I thought we could do maybe six or eight pieces of chocolate in each container."
"Okay."
"Now," Cara said, taking a deep breath. "The seating chart. It"s going to get complicated, it always is when there"s been a divorce in the family. You"ve got the list of people who"ve already responded, so if you would, maybe give me your thoughts on who should be seated where."
"My thoughts?" Brooke shook her head impatiently. "I look at the list, and I don"t know most of these people. Maybe Harris does, but I don"t. Here"s all I want, Cara. Just don"t put Patricia anywhere near me. Or my mom. Or actually, if you could just not put her in the same room with us, that would be good."
"Be real, please Brooke," Cara said sharply. She scrolled back over to the seating chart she"d made up-circles and rectangles drawn to scale and arrayed around the ballroom at Cabin Creek. "Just take a look, please, this is important, if not to you, to your parents and the Strayhorns...."
Brooke frowned, but bent her head and studied the chart. A shadow fell over the iPad and they both looked up. Pete Haynes cleared his throat, as though he were about to make a speech.
"Listen, Brooke. I"ve got to get on the road if I"m going to make the afternoon ferry from St. Marys over to c.u.mberland." He handed her a sc.r.a.p of paper. "That"s my email. Cell-phone service on the island is pretty c.r.a.ppy. And I don"t get up to Savannah that much because of the project I"m working on. With the wild horses. But if you"re coming down there anytime, I was thinking it"d be great to get together...."
Brooke looked at the slip of paper, then placed it on the tabletop. She looked over at Cara. "Pete, this is Cara Kryzik."
"Hi," he said, shaking Cara"s hand politely. "I"m an old friend of Brooke"s. Pete Haynes. Sorry to interrupt your lunch."
"Not at all," Cara murmured.
"The thing is, Pete, Cara"s my wedding planner. I"m getting married next month."
"July the sixth," Cara said helpfully.
If he was stunned, he didn"t show it. "You"re engaged?"
Brooke held up her left hand, where Harris Strayhorn"s diamond solitaire twinkled from her slender ring finger. "I am."
"Oh." He shifted from one foot to the other as the news sunk in. "That"s great. Good for you. Congratulations."
"Thanks," Brooke said. She gave him a bright smile. "How about you? Is there a wife down there on c.u.mberland Island?"
"No," he said, pressing his lips together. "Nothing like that. Anyway, I gotta get going. It was nice to see you again, Brooke. And uh, good luck with the wedding and everything. I hope you"ll, uh, be very happy."
"I"m sure we will be," Brooke said. Cara watched Brooke watching him weave his way through the crowded tables to the dining room exit. The waitress came over, and dropped the leatherette folder with the bill on the table, but Brooke picked it up before Cara could.
"My treat," Brooke said. She tucked some bills in the envelope. They both stood to leave.
"You"ll go over the seating chart?" Cara prompted.
"I swear. Email it to me again, and I"ll let you know," Brooke promised.
"Today?"
"Absolutely."
Cara stood and took her pocketbook from the back of the chair. She couldn"t help but notice that the slip of paper with Pete Haynes"s email address was right where Brooke had left it.
41.
Cara was headed back to the shop when her cell phone rang.
"Hi Brooke. Did you have a chance to look at the seating chart this quickly?"
"Sorry, not yet. Cara?"
"Yes?"
"About what I said. Earlier, in the restaurant. About me and Pete. You probably think I"m awful. A total s.l.u.t."
"I don"t think that," Cara said. "Anyway, it was a long time ago. You said yourself, until today you hadn"t seen the guy in years."
"It"s been five years. I"m not trying to excuse what I did, but you have to understand. That summer? Before I moved to Atlanta and started law school, it was like I was in this little bubble, and the only reality was me and Pete. I still can"t explain it. I loved Harris, and I knew we would get married eventually. But he was in Atlanta, and I was in DC. And Pete was right there. And we had so much fun together, it was like we were kids back in high school again."
"Brooke. Why are you telling me all this? I"m not judging you."
"I know," Brooke said, sighing. "Maybe I"m trying to explain it to myself. The thing is, at the time, it didn"t seem wrong. As long as Harris didn"t know about Pete, and Pete didn"t know about Harris, I thought n.o.body could get hurt. And they didn"t. It was just that one summer."
"Five years ago," Cara said.
"And it"s over," Brooke said. "Okay. This was weird. Forget I called. Forget I told you any of it."
"Any of what?"
"Thanks, Cara," Brooke said.
42.
The bride leaned across Cara"s desk and stabbed a long pearly pink fingernail at page 72 of the March 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings. The page was dog-eared, and the rest of the magazine bristled with pink Post-it notes.
"This one. This is the exact bouquet I want. I"ve saved this magazine since I was eighteen years old. I picked out my wedding dress because I knew it would go with this bouquet."
Cara groaned inwardly. How well she knew this particular wedding bouquet. She was sure it was the most-pinned item on every single bride"s Pinterest page in the universe. She wanted to rip page 72 out of this magazine, ball it up, and burn it.
Instead, she did what she always did. She picked up a pencil and pointed it at each flower in the bouquet.
"Heather, these flowers here? They are Casablanca lilies. They wholesale at thirty dollars a stem. I count five stems in this bouquet-so that"s a hundred and fifty dollars right there. These pretty ruffly flowers? Like overblown roses? These are premium peonies. This size bunch wholesales at about seventy-five dollars."
"What?" Heather drew back as though she"d been slapped. "Thirty dollars for one lily?"
"Yes. Although one stem will have multiple blossoms. They"re imported." Cara pointed at the pet.i.te bell-shaped flowers edging the infamous Martha Stewart bouquet. "Now these-these are the budget killers."
"Yes. Lilies of the valley," Heather said eagerly. "Kate Middleton"s whole bouquet was made of them."
"Yes," Cara said. "I"m aware." Which was the understatement of the year. Ever since the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, she"d been besieged with brides insisting upon having lilies of the valley.
"Here"s the thing, Heather. Lilies of the valley are so tiny, you need a lot of them to make any impact at all. One tiny bunch, which is ten skinny stems, is ninety dollars. I"d say there are at least six bunches in this bouquet. That"s three hundred and sixty dollars."
Heather"s mother had been sitting beside the bride, frowning. But now the MOB"s eyes bugged out. "That must be a mistake. We didn"t spend three hundred and sixty dollars for her older sister"s whole flower budget."
Heather rolled her eyes. "Mama, Jessica got married eight years ago! She only had one bridesmaid, and we had the reception at your house."
"It was still a lovely wedding," the mother insisted. "And I can tell you right now, your daddy is not going to pay three hundred and sixty dollars for some itty-bitty flowers just because some English princess had them."
"Also? Besides being expensive, Lilies of the valley are extremely fragile. Your wedding is in August. In summer months, our suppliers won"t even guarantee what kind of condition they"ll be in when they arrive here." Cara gave the MOB an apologetic shrug.
"No lilies," the mother shot back.
Cara reached over and gently closed the March 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings. "Heather, the bouquet you"re looking at costs roughly twelve hundred dollars."
"No way," Heather breathed.
"Way. And what did you say your flower budget was for this wedding? With, what? Six bridesmaids?"
Heather looked at her mother for guidance. "Two thousand. And not a penny more."
"Okay," Cara said. Heather looked like a sweet girl. And her mother, as far as MOBs went, seemed nice, too. But with their budget, they could not afford a full-scale Bloom wedding. And with Cara"s current cash-flow situation, she couldn"t afford to take them on pro bono.
"Let"s do this. Let"s think about a nice, simple bouquet for you, Heather. I can make you up something very pretty, with white hydrangeas, tea roses, and white hyperic.u.m berries, for around a hundred and fifty. It won"t be anywhere as big or showy as the bouquet in your magazine, but it will still be lovely with your dress."
Heather"s nose wrinkled. "Hydrangeas? Like my meemaw grows in her yard?"
"Yes. Hydrangeas." Cara shoved Heather"s magazine aside and snapped open her iPad. She scrolled through the photos of weddings she"d done until she came to what she privately called "Bargain Bas.e.m.e.nt Bouquet."
"We can get these in all white, in a pale green, shades of pinks, blues, creams, and purples," Cara said.
"That"s beautiful." Heather"s mother nodded emphatically.
"It is kind of pretty," the bride begrudgingly admitted. "What do we do about the bridesmaids" bouquets?"
"You go minimalist," Cara said. "One or two stems of hydrangeas, and you do a ruffle of hydrangea leaves to fill it out."
"Wait. Are you saying you want me to make the bridesmaids" bouquets?"
"If you do them, you can get away with spending around fifteen dollars apiece, and that includes a pretty white satin ribbon binding, which you can buy at Michael"s. You can find lots of tutorials online that show you how to make a simple bouquet. If I do them, I have to charge markup and labor, and that"s going to bring the price of each of those bouquets to sixty dollars," Cara explained.
"I never heard of such a thing," the MOB said. "Anyway, we still need flowers for the church and the reception. Who"s going to do them?"
Heather"s eyes were pleading. Her mother was glaring at both of them.
"All right," Cara relented. "I"ll do your bouquet and the church flowers, for two thousand dollars. But the altar flowers will also have to be carried over to your church parlor for the reception. You"ll need to deputize one of your bridesmaids or girlfriends to be in charge of that."
"I"ll ask Jessica to do it," Heather said.
"Two thousand is a really tight budget," Cara warned. "I need you to understand that you won"t have exotic or imported flowers. We can do a lot with hydrangeas and carnations and glads and spray roses and local foliage. Do you have any friends with pretty gardens? We can use hosta leaves and ivy and ferns for greenery and that will save you a lot of money."
"My sister is in a garden club," Heather"s mom said. "She"ll let us cut whatever we need."
"Wonderful," Cara said. She stood up, as a signal that their meeting was over. "One more thing? The way this works is, you pay me half today, and the other half is due two weeks before the wedding."
"A thousand dollars? Today?" The MOB clutched her pocketbook to her chest, as though Cara might make a lunge for it at any moment.
"Yes," Cara said firmly. Some things were not negotiable.
"Mama?" Heather put an arm around her mother"s shoulders. "We agreed, right? Two thousand for flowers."
"But I thought we"d just look at pictures, and discuss," the mother said.
Cara felt her patience wearing thin. In reality, her patience was flat gone. She gave the two women a bright smile. "You"re welcome to check around with other florists, but this is standard in our business. I really can"t give you any more of a consultation without receiving a deposit check. Today."