A Wedding on Primrose Street (Life In Icicle Falls Book 7) (28 page)

“Tilda’s special. She just needs a man as special as her.”

Dot’s only reply to that was a cynical harrumph.

“I do believe there’s someone for everyone. Life is so much sweeter when it’s shared.”

Dot gave her champagne glass a tipsy inspection before downing its contents. “I miss Duncan.”

Muriel sighed and stared at her empty glass. “I miss my husbands, too. Sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock, have one more day with each of them. They were both such wonderful men.”

“Duncan was a good man, too.” Dot scowled at her empty glass. “I wish I could say the same for that piece of garbage I married the first time.”

“I’m sorry your first marriage had to end so...sadly,” Muriel said diplomatically. There’d always been rumors about Dot’s first marriage. She’d tried not to listen to them. Yes, Dot could affect a tough exterior when she wanted to—it wasn’t hard to see where Tilda got her tough-cookie facade—but Muriel couldn’t imagine her really killing her first husband.

“No loss,” Dot said. “Duncan more than made up for it.” She shook her head. “Although he did get a case of cold feet right before we said ‘I do.’”

“Some men get a little nervous about commitment.”

Dot frowned. “This was more than that.”

Muriel blinked, unsure what to say.

Dot shrugged. “I may as well tell you.” She pointed a finger at Muriel. “But you’re the only person I’m telling. If you ever tell another living soul, Muriel, I swear I’ll pull that dyed brown hair of yours out by the roots.”

“I don’t gossip,” Muriel said, as offended by the insinuation as she was by the reference to her dyed locks.

“I need more champagne,” Dot said. “You might, too. Gosh,” she said as she poured them each some, “once in a while I look back at those days and wonder if I’m the same woman who lived that life. If Duncan hadn’t come along, who knows what kind of bitter old broad I might’ve become.”

“Ah, but he did. Come along, I mean.”

Dot sighed. “Yes, he did. I had a flat tire on Highway 2 and he pulled over to help me. Told him I could handle it just fine on my own but he insisted. He said...”

Dot and Duncan Morrison

“A pretty woman shouldn’t have to get all dirty changing a tire.”

Dot eyed her rescuer with a cynical eye. His red hair and freckles and sloped nose made her think of Howdy Doody. With that boyish face he looked as though he was all of twenty, and his physique—or rather, lack thereof—had her wondering if he could even lift a grocery bag, let alone jack up a car. But he set to work proving that he did indeed have some muscle.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she noted as she lit a cigarette.

“Nope. Well, not yet, anyway. I just bought a place in Icicle Falls. I’m going up to sign the papers.”

“Yeah? I live in Icicle Falls.”

He grinned at her in a way that would’ve been positively lecherous if he hadn’t looked like Howdy Doody. “You do?”

She pointed a finger at him. “Don’t get any ideas, bub. You’re too young for me.”

“I doubt that.” He bent down to remove the lug nuts. “How old are you?”

“You never ask a woman her age. That shows how young and wet behind the ears you are.”

“Okay, then, let’s try this. I’m thirty-five. Does that make me too young?”

Dot was thirty-two. It made him just right. But she wasn’t sure he was her type. She preferred her men bigger, more manly. More muscled.

Wait a minute. She’d described her first husband. And what a poor excuse for a husband he’d been, the rotten, drunken bully. Of course, when she’d first met Corey with his hot rod and his pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt, she’d thought he was the coolest thing this side of James Dean.

Oh, yeah. He’d been cool, all right. Too cool to keep any job for longer than six months. Too cool to take her anywhere but the tavern for a beer and some pool. And once his friends showed up, she was always relegated to watching.

None of that had bothered her, though. No, what did bother her was how mean he got after a few drinks. Heck, how mean he got even cold sober whenever she didn’t agree with him or do what he wanted. And when she insisted they pay bills instead of blowing money on football bets and booze and old beaters to fix up, well, then he got
really
mean. The day she lost the baby and he said “Just as well. We can’t afford a kid” was the day she stopped loving him. The day she told him she wanted a divorce and he slapped her and told her not on her life was the day she vowed she’d leave him. But first she’d make him pay.

“Have you ever hit a woman?” she asked Mr. Scrawny Duncan Morrison.

He gaped at her. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Of course not. Nobody who’s a real man hits women.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not what my first husband thought.”

“Your first husband sounds like a winner.”

“Yeah, well. He’s gone now.”

Duncan nodded approvingly and pulled off the tire. “Moved away?”

“Permanently. He’s dead.”

For a moment Duncan stood there with the tire in his hands as if trying to take in her story. “Gosh, what happened? Car accident?”

“Camping accident.”

“Wow, that’s...”

“What he deserved.”

He looked a little shocked by that, but then he nodded as if he’d somehow sorted it out in his mind. “So, you’ve been a widow for how long?”

“Three years. I came back here after the dust settled and bought a restaurant in town.”

Duncan smiled at that. “Really?”

The way he was looking at her, he probably figured she’d bought something spectacular. “It’s more a café, a breakfast place. I call it Pancake Haus.”

“Sounds good. I might have breakfast there tomorrow.”

“I’ll give you breakfast on the house,” she said. “As a thank-you,” she added, nodding at the tire. After all, she didn’t want him to think she was interested.

Except when he came in the next day and they got to talking, she found she was, just a little. He was the sort of nice guy she’d turned her nose up at when she was young. He didn’t dress like James Dean. He didn’t even smoke. And he sure didn’t drive any souped-up muscle car, just a simple Plymouth Savoy.

“It gets me where I want to go. That’s all I care about,” he said.

She poured him a cup of coffee. “Where do you want to go?”

“Not far from here. This looks like the kind of place where I could raise a family, do a little fishing, have a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. I like what they’ve done with the town. There’s a lot of potential for growth, new houses going up. A good place for a guy in real estate.”

“Is that what you do?”

He took a sip of coffee and nodded. “Your real-estate office here in town is taking me on as a broker.”

Suddenly, and she wasn’t quite sure why, Dot was glad this man was going to stick around. Maybe it was his smile. Or the fact that he wanted to be a family man. Or maybe just the fact that he didn’t hit women.

She’d found plenty to like about Duncan, and discovered more once he left Seattle behind and put down stakes in Icicle Falls. He was sweet and he loved funny movies and picnics by the river. Mostly, he loved being with Dot, and she loved being with him. When the holidays came, he jumped right in, helping the town’s movers and shakers string lights on the giant Christmas tree in the center of town and playing Santa Claus at the grade school’s PTA Christmas pageant.

The night before Christmas Eve he proposed to her. “Marry me, Dottie. Let’s ring in the New Year planning our wedding.”

A wedding, maybe even in a church instead of at a girlfriend’s house. With a fancy wedding cake and her sister as her maid of honor. And her stepsister...hopefully out of town. And a real honeymoon instead of two nights at a dumpy hotel out on Highway 99.

They went to Seattle on Christmas Eve and met his family, a normal happy family like on
The Donna Reed Show
. His parents had been happily married for forty-two years and he had two older brothers, also happily married with a passel of children. Not a smoker in the crowd. Would anyone care if she had a cigarette?

As if reading her mind, her future mother-in-law brought out an ashtray. “Duncan tells me you smoke. Please, feel free.”

Okay, she really liked this family.

“They’re all so nice,” she said once she and Duncan were in the car.

“Why are you surprised by that?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it’s because I’m not used to normal. I hope my family doesn’t scare you off.”

“What, do they have satanic rites and drink the blood of goats?”

She made a face at him. “No. They’re okay. They’re just not like your family.” She thought of her hard-faced fairy-tale-worthy stepmother and her bratty younger stepsister. What her father had ever seen in Eunice was beyond Dot. She’d come with a daughter in tow, who was a spoiled brat. Dad never noticed. Dad never noticed much of anything that went on in his house. Or if he did, he didn’t care. So their stepmother indulged the little beast, and if either Dot or her sister, Joyce, did anything to make Ronnie cry they were in big trouble with Mom. They’d grown to strongly dislike Ronnie, which made her even more of a brat. Now that they were all grown women nothing had changed, really.

Dad seemed glad enough to see Dottie engaged. “Well, look at that. You found another live one,” he joked, pumping Duncan’s hand.

Next to him Eunice smiled, happy enough to see Dot find someone and maybe hoping she’d attach herself to her new family and stay out of their hair.

Her uncles were too busy loading up on the spiked eggnog to do much more than wave hello. Her grandfather was busy yelling at one of her nephews, but Grandma was quick to give Duncan a hug and so was Dot’s sister.

Ronnie, single after a messy divorce, sidled up to Duncan and sized him up while taking a drag on her Lucky Strike. “And where did you two meet?” she asked and blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

Dot always felt pretty good about how she looked—until she was around Ronnie. Ronnie was stacked and she had a pouty little mouth that she kept ripely red with Revlon lipstick. Ronnie was also a tramp and Dot hadn’t been at all surprised when her marriage broke up. Flirting with men was like a drug to her. Which was, of course, what she was doing now. She wasn’t interested in Duncan with his red hair and freckles and skinny body, just interested in making him want her.

“We met on Highway 2,” Duncan said. “Dot had a flat and I stopped to fix it.”

“Oh, now that’s truly romantic. You’re quite the knight in shining armor.”

Duncan, bless him, didn’t even realize what Ronnie was up to. He simply blushed and said, “Just thought it would be nice to help.”

“What if I had a flat tire? Would you help me?”

“Not if he knew what a spider you are,” Dot said shortly. “Don’t you need some eggnog or something?”

Ronnie frowned at her. “Cute, Dot.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’ve found another man to marry you.”

“And I can’t believe you found any,” Dot retorted, making Ronnie toss her ponytail and stomp off. Duncan was looking confused. “Don’t mind her,” Dot told him. “Every family has a brat and she’s ours. She’s still mad because her first boyfriend followed me around like a puppy when we were in high school.”

“Well,” Duncan said, and apparently that was all he could think of to say.

* * *

“I thought you said he got cold feet,” Muriel said. “It sounds to me like he was pretty determined to marry you in spite of your family.”

“Oh, he didn’t care about them. What unnerved him was what Ronnie told him.” Dot shook her head. “Ronnie never liked me and I never liked her. I guess I didn’t help matters when I didn’t ask her to become a bridesmaid. She came to the wedding ready to sabotage me.”

* * *

A church in Seattle had been reserved and the rehearsal dinner was held at Rose’s Diner—a popular family-style restaurant outside the city that was famous for its fabulous chicken dinners—in one of the large rooms reserved for parties. Her dad claimed he was too broke to pay for it, so Duncan footed the bill.

It was a June night, unseasonably hot. The men had shed their jackets and the women had given up on powdering their noses. In spite of the warm temperatures outside and the still-warmer temperatures inside, in spite of the fan the owner had going, people were enjoying themselves, standing around chatting before dinner. Dot had slipped away to use the ladies’ room. She returned to find her stepsister in earnest conversation with Duncan. Duncan’s face was ghost white, his freckles in stark relief.

“Duncan, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said, but she could hear panic at the back of his voice.

Dot grabbed her sister by the elbow and marched her to a corner of the room. “What did you say to him?” she hissed.

Ronnie looked at her wide-eyed. “Nothing. I was just telling him about Corey and how he died and how sad it was that so many people thought...” She shrugged eloquently.

“You little bitch,” Dot snarled. “I ought to...”

“What? Push me off a mountain? You don’t have a life insurance policy on me.”

Dot whirled around and returned to where Duncan stood, staring at his Tom Collins.

“She told me you beat him with a baseball bat one night when he was drunk and passed out,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

She should lie, tell him Ronnie was a worthless tramp and he couldn’t believe a word that fell from her trampy mouth. “No, I didn’t.”

Relief flooded his face with color and he raised his face to show her a relieved smile.

“I used a frying pan.”

The smile did a vanishing act. He set his drink on the nearby table. “What?”

“I’d just found out he’d been cheating on me. He’d already broken my jaw.” She shrugged helplessly. “I was only twenty-two.” As if age really had anything to do with it. “But to tell you the truth, I’d do it again. He deserved that. And more.”

“And did he get more, Dottie? Did you push him off the mountain? Your sister said there was a trial.”

“Stepsister,” Dot corrected him. “And there was an inquest. I guess I got away with murder, so you’d better not cheat on me,” she finished. Ha-ha. Except this was nothing to joke or act cynical about. It had been a horrible, terrifying experience. And maybe she would have said as much if Duncan hadn’t been looking at her as if she was some kind of Black Widow.