Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [31]
Cici hesitated. “Don’t you think that’s a little ... informal?”
Lindsay’s face fell—first into disappointment, then into resignation. “Well, of course I do.” She sank into the ivory silk chair and balled up the fabric. “I mean, it’s not like I didn’t try to sell her on dusky rose satin table covers with white gardenia votives floating in crystal bowls at each place setting, or ivory satin and champagne glasses filled with sweetheart roses—I mean, that’s simple, isn’t it? That’s understated. But the girl is obsessed with a theme wedding. ‘Country chic,’ she says. ‘Farm natural,’ she says.”
“Ceramic cows and burlap?” suggested Cici.
Lindsay returned a brief scowl. “Very helpful.”
“So, where are you going to put these ten tables seating four people each—which by the way is only forty people, you know. We’re in it for fifty.”
Lindsay waved that away. “So, ten people sit at the head table with the bride and groom. And I measured—if we use the entire porch, we can get ten tables with four chairs around each one. So.” Now her expression became hopeful again. “A tiny favor?”
Cici let her head fall back against the back of the desk chair. “Just as long as I don’t have to put my initials on anything.”
“Could you build two or three mock-ups—they don’t have to be sturdy enough to hold food, just something that won’t tip over when you touch it—so that I can stage the porch for the weekend?”
The phone rang. Bridget shouted from downstairs, “Got it!”
And in a moment, her voice muffled and her warmth sounding forced, they heard her say, “Oh, hi, Traci.”
Cici sighed, as her gaze wandered to the view from the window. “Remember when all we had to do before lunch was weed the carrot patch and pick strawberries?”
Lindsay’s gaze followed hers briefly wistfully, but did not linger. “It will be worth it,” she said firmly. Then, with a beseeching smile, “So, what do you say? A little scrap lumber, an hour or two?”
Cici looked at the fabric, at the contract that lay waiting in the fax machine tray, and at the view of the pear tree, dappled with spring green and ruffled white blossoms, outside the window. She stood, tucked in the trailing hem of her shirt, and declared, “If it will get me out of this office and away from the wonders of modern technology, I’ll build you a blessed gazebo. I’m going into town for a jigsaw blade and some quarter-inch plywood. Just have the measurements for me when I get back. I guess I might as well order the materials for the dance floor while I’m there. And,” she added, “I’m keeping the receipt for the bride.”
“Plus ten percent labor!” Lindsay called after her, and Cici gave her a grinning thumbs-up as she left.
Bridget sat at the kitchen table, intently studying the yellowing pages of Emily Blackwell’s cookbook. “There’s got to be something in here that’s as elegant as shrimp Newburg but without the shrimp. And more folksy. And more local.”
Ida Mae gave her a withering look as she carried a potted geranium to the sink for water. “I don’t know what you’re looking in that book for if you want wedding food for city folks. You need that French woman.”
Bridget looked up, puzzled.
“You know, that movie star.”
“Julia Child?”
“If that’s the one that’s all the time slopping wine all over everything.”
Bridget sighed. “I don’t know, Ida Mae, you might be right. French cooking with a Shenandoah Valley local Mediterranean country flair might be exactly what they’re looking for.”
The potted geranium dripped a trail of water across the floor as Ida Mae carried it, two handed, from the sink to return it to the plant stand in front of the window. Bridget quickly sprang up to help. “Here let me take that.”
But as Bridget reached for the plant Ida Mae angrily snatched it