Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [106]
The chain saw stopped buzzing, and Farley’s tractor puttered back down the road toward his house. Cici brushed some of the dirt off her hands as she came up the steps, and Lindsay, standing on a chair, made a final tuck in the satin banner over the doorway and stapled it. “Okay,” Cici said, “I guess we might as well get cleaned up, and then see what we can do to help Bridget in the kitchen.”
Lindsay stepped off the chair and pushed it aside. She glanced around. “There’s not much more we can do,” she admitted.
“Not without an army.” They heard a car turn into the driveway. “That’s got to be the photographer.”
But it wasn’t. As the car drew closer their looks of curiosity turned to astonishment, then to joy. Lindsay called through the screen door, “Paul!”
The car stopped in front of the steps and the two women grinned at each other as the driver got out.
“Derrick!” Cici called happily. “What are you doing here?”
“Friend of the bride.” He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a cream-colored invitation, smiling his greeting. The screen door squeaked open, and the smile softened to something else as his eyes went over their shoulders. “Besides,” he added, “I heard a friend of mine needed some help.”
“Well, that depends.” Paul spoke in measured tones, a glue gun in one hand and a cluster of silk flowers in the other. “How are you with a glue gun?”
“Passable.”
Derrick came up the steps, the two embraced, and just then the lights inside the house flickered on.
The bride, wearing a strapless gown and aportrait hat, walked the rose-strewn path to the silken sounds of a chamber quartet playing the wedding march, escorted by her father—looking stiff and hungover but otherwise pleased—and preceded by six bridesmaids in apricot silk. The groom and his attendants were handsome and composed in gray cutaways. When the groom kissed the bride, Cici, Bridget, and Lindsay all reached for tissues—partly because of the tenderness of the moment, but mostly because it was over.
The storm had cooled and cleaned the air to a pleasant seventy degrees, and left behind a perfect summer blue sky decorated with fluffy, lavender-bottomed cumulus clouds that played out a slow-moving shadow show across the mountains and the lawn. The guests talked a lot about the storm that had swept through the night before, but if they noticed any of the alterations it had made to their surroundings, they said nothing. Many of them admired the ingenuity of the rose garden, and declared how clever it was to strip off the original blossoms and replace them with roses in the bride’s own color scheme.
Once the lawn was covered with laughing, drinking guests in party wear, the damage to flower beds, trees, and wedding decorations was difficult to spot. If there weren’t enough tables for everyone to sit down, that only encouraged people to mingle, and no one cared that the buffet was not under a tent once they tasted Bridget’s food.
Lori’s date, Mark, was entertaining and attentive, helping her with her crutches, bringing her food and drink, and being extremely polite to her parents. When Bridget asked Lori to sit behind one of the buffet stations for a few moments, Mark took off his jacket and worked as her assistant. For the first couple of hours all of them worked—carrying food out from the kitchen, making certain there were plenty of napkins and silverware and that the serving dishes were never empty. Derrick rolled up his sleeves and helped Richard open bottles and fill glasses, while Paul, clipboard in hand, kept everything neat, tidy, and on schedule. Noah, who had already made a small fortune parking cars, barely complained at all about bussing the tables and loading the dishwasher and carrying boxes of clean glasses out of the kitchen and dirty glasses