The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [38]
“Linc said your father’s still alive. Don’t you think he’d want to give you away?”
“My mother will give me away.” Daisy’s voice was so tense that even Chickie caught on and didn’t mention it again.
Wednesday, Julia drove in and stopped at the house. She looked around and approved. “This is great. I’ll have to come back when you’ve got it done.”
“Oh, please do.” Daisy sat down on the bottom stair step and started to cry. “I’ve been so lonely and frazzled and crazed, and everything’s been nuts here, and the three mothers are driving me insane, and I haven’t even had a chance to paint the walls, let alone a canvas and—”
Julia looked confused. “Three mothers?”
“—and the wedding’s tomorrow and that’s when my furniture’s coming, and you’re going to be a bridesmaid and everything’s just a mess.” Daisy sniffed and looked up at Julia. “I thought this was going to make my life easier.”
“Marriage?” Julia shook her head. “You thought wrong. Safer, maybe, more secure, but easier? Nope.”
Daisy scowled at her. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Julia sat down beside her on the stairs. “Because I wanted to be a bridesmaid. Explain the three mothers part to me again.”
They managed to get through the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, the bachelor party, and the shower without losing their minds, and Daisy woke up at six the morning of her wedding day feeling almost relieved. She listened to Linc clatter down their back steps as he went out to run. He would be an organized fitness nut, she thought. Running at the crack of dawn. She had nothing in common with this man.
She rolled over and went back to sleep.
Linc left for the college at nine, and Daisy got up and began to move up to the second floor everything chrome that one person could carry. She filled the right front bedroom with Linc’s lamps and chairs and bookcases from the living room. Since his desk was already in there, the extra furniture made the room into a study for him. She’d already moved his living room end tables into his bedroom to act as bedside tables. The only things she couldn’t move were the awful glass dining room table and the couch. When she was finished, his half of the upstairs was done in black leather and metal. She shuddered and closed the doors.
Then the doorbell rang, and she went to meet the movers.
“The couch goes in here,” she told them, sliding open the pocket door to the living room. They brought in her threadbare flowered couch and three mismatched worn brocade chairs. They carried in her collection of miscellaneous chipped and scratched end tables in all sizes and woods. They set her crated paintings behind the couch and rolled her worn Oriental on the floor. They moved Linc’s couch and table upstairs to her studio and rolled her big round oak table into the dining room, and the sun came in and highlighted the six unmatched pressed-wood chairs she grouped around it. There was just room enough for the little buffet with the cracked top by the door to the kitchen. They carried her brass bed upstairs and put the mattress on it for her. Her unmatched end tables went into place beside it. They brought up her cheval mirror with the tiny crack, her cedar chest, her dented brass-bound trunk, and her bentwood rocker. Liz checked it all out and then went to sleep in the middle of her bed, satisfied that things were getting back to normal. Annie hid underneath and bitched at the movers with a voice that sounded like breaking glass.
When the movers left, Daisy danced through the house, holding Annie and singing. All this room. All this sun. All her lovely furniture.
She put Annie down and went out to buy flowers for her lovely house.
When Daisy got back, the Nazimobile was parked in front. “Linc?” she called as she came through the front door.
He erupted from the living room. “What is this?”
“What?” She stepped back, startled.
“All this old”—he waved his hand around wildly—“junk!”
“What junk? These are antiques.”
“This stuff