The Secret's in the Sauce (2 page)
He looked so happy. I vowed to look happy too. Besides, in recent weeks, Evangeline had seemed to soften toward me. So, I was going to try, really try, to soften toward her.
Just as I turned to join the other bridesmaids, two faces seemed to pop out of the crowded pews.
Both David Harris, fresh from Los Angeles, and Wade Gage, my old high school sweetheart, were staring at me as if I were an angel. The thought struck me so funny that I had to stifle a giggle.
Though I tried to keep my mirth under control, I caught Wade with one of his lopsided grins spreading across his face. He looked both amused and smitten, and I had to hold my breath so I wouldn’t laugh out loud. I was saved by the abrupt organ prelude to the “Bridal Chorus.”
When the music sounded, it was as if God himself had flipped a switch inside of me. My giggles stopped, and a heavy soberness engulfed me.
The crowd stood and turned as Miss Evangeline Benson, in her Grace Kelly wedding gown, floated toward the altar.
Everyone turned, except David. He was still staring moon-eyed at me. He jumped as his date shot him in the ribs with an elbow jab.
This might have struck me as funny if the jabber hadn’t been my long-lost baby sister, Velvet James. She was clad in white as if she were a bride herself. I’m no fashion expert, but I know tacky. Velvet flamed me with her eyes as she twined David’s arm into hers.
Her little performance seemed right out of grade school.
The music crescendoed, and I shifted my eyes to Evangeline. She looked lovely as she blushed under the intense gaze of my father. Sweet. And she’d better stay that way. Otherwise, my niceness might crumble and she’d have to deal with the real me, the me I saved for passing out tickets to speeding tourists.
But what was I thinking? This was her wedding day, and I’d pledged to be on my best behavior.
Later, at the dinner reception, after my duties at the head table had been fulfilled, relief swept over me. I sat in my chair, nibbling on one of Lisa Leann’s double chocolate brownies and watching how tender my dad was with Evangeline. She smiled at him, and he kissed her cheek.
I found myself smiling too. Maybe having Evie as a stepmother wouldn’t be as bad as I feared. Besides, what was joined together was joined together, and there was not a thing I could do about it.
The DJ hired to play romantic love songs suddenly blasted us with “The Macarena,” a wedding tradition still popular in the high country. I rushed to join a growing crowd of celebrants as we began to coordinate the motions to the song. Suddenly Wade was next to me. We both hopped and swung our hips as we tried to match the hand motions to the music. I at least had the moves down, but Wade’s elbows were flailing at all the wrong angles. I had to stop just so I could double over in laughter.
He laughed too, then took my hand and pulled me into a standing position before kissing me on top of my head. I felt as though I were in a trance as he led me down a hallway and into an empty room, the church nursery. He pulled me into a corner, next to an empty crib.
I felt my heart pound. I wanted to run, but all I could do was stand as if my feet had been super-glued to the gray plaid linoleum.
He took my hands in his, and I held my breath, uncertain what he would say or how I would respond.
His blue eyes were intense under a wisp of blond hair that had slipped off his forehead. “Today, as I watched you, Donna, I couldn’t believe how beautiful you’ve become.”
I tried to laugh off his tenderness. “Yeah, just like I was eighteen again.” I hesitated as the warmth of the moment bled into my voice. “Like we were both eighteen again.”
He caught my chin in his rough, work-worn hand. “It’s like fourteen years of my life have turned to dust. My feelings for you are still alive. They’re deeper than ever.”
It was too late to escape. I felt hot, then cold, then fear, then peace as he closed his eyes and leaned in for a kiss. As our lips touched, I discovered how hungry I was to kiss him back. His arms encircled me, and my knees felt weak as I became lost in his breath, his scent, his touch, his—
A shrill voice rang out, “Wade, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Startled, Wade let go and stood ramrod straight before turning to face the doorway.
“Mom!”
And there, silhouetted in shadow, stood the littlest, biggest reason why any girl should run away from Wade Gage: one Mrs. Fay Gage.
Mrs. Gage was wearing a lavender knit dress with a matching crocheted sweater studded with shiny black beads. Her graying curls were gently brushed into a rounded orb of hair, carefully sprayed so stiff that no breeze would dare interfere. Her naturally wrinkled face was crafted into a scowl that reminded me of the movie poster for the latest horror flick playing down at the theater.
One hand was on her rather wide hip and the other wagged an index finger through the air. “Wade, did you forget you drove your sister and me to the wedding?” She shot me a glare and nodded. “Donna. Can’t say that it’s nice to see you.”
I tried to wipe the evidence of the kiss from my lips, as if I could. “Same here.”
She stared at me without blinking as she spoke to her son. “Wade, why don’t you go and meet us at the front door of the fellowship hall. I’m ready to go home now.”
Wade stepped away from me, a move I noticed and noted. “Yes, Mom.”
He nodded at me, as his mother had. “Donna.”
Then he was gone.
Mrs. Gage took two steps toward me and folded her arms across her middle. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Excuse me?”
“What do you think you are doing with my son?”
“Well, I . . .”
She put both hands on her hips. “I will not have you interfering with Wade again. Do you know what my family has been through because of you?”
I tried to tighten the satin shrug that covered my shoulders. “But . . .”
“We just got Wade cleaned up, dear. He’s sober now. I’ll not have you messing him up again. Is that clear?”
Suddenly Kat Cage Martin, Wade’s sister, appeared at the door. She was a tall, dark-headed woman, with chin-length hair. She was dressed in deep purple with a fuchsia scarf tied around her neck. She was in her early thirties and about sixty pounds overweight with sort of a linebacker look. I wasn’t so sure, even with my years of police training, if I could wrestle her down in a dark alley. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to. “Is everything all right, Mom? Wade said he’s bringing the truck around.”
Mrs. Gage gave me a hard look. “It is now, dear. Isn’t that right, Deputy?”
I had no reply.
Kat looked at me with disdain. “Oh.” Then with total disregard, “Come with me, Mother.”
Mrs. Gage turned to leave and slid her arm through the crook of her daughter’s elbow. “Yes, dear, it’s time we left this woman behind us.”
Then, they were gone.
I blinked. Wade had left me for his mother.
I was still fuming a few days later when I got the call to come to Lisa Leann’s meeting.
I mean, it wasn’t that Wade and I hadn’t talked. We had.
“What I don’t understand,” I’d told him on the phone as I leaned back against my kitchen counter, “is why you deserted me like you did.” I hugged my gray sweatshirt with my free arm. “Didn’t you know your mom would get her claws into me as soon as you turned your back?”
“I don’t know what came over me,” Wade said. “I guess I just felt like we were in high school again, and she’d just caught us making out on that old sofa in the garage.”
I had to laugh at the memory. “Don’t remind me. That was the most embarrassing day of my life. Especially when she noticed my shirt was inside out.”
“She grounded me for a month, you know.”
“Well, she just did it again.”
“What do you mean?”
I ran my fingers through my short, blonde curls. “Didn’t you hear? After you left, she forbade me from seeing you.”
Wade let out a sigh. “No wonder you’re upset.”
I turned and stared at the sunlit peak outside my window and poured myself a cup of coffee. “Yeah, well, you’re still afraid of her, and that makes me wonder if we really belong together.”
“Donna, wait. We can work this out. I know we can.”
“What’s to work out? Either you stand up to your mom or you can kiss me good-bye.”
Wade laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“After our hello kiss, there’s no way I’m kissing you good-bye.”
That comment softened my disposition. “Well, then, what are you going to do, Wade? What?”
“Let me talk to her, maybe I can even get us an invitation for one of her famous chicken parmesan dinners.”
“If you can do that, then we can talk.”
“Uh, I’m interested in more than talk.”
This was a subject I wanted to avoid. My voice iced. “I’m not a bad girl anymore. I’ll tell you that up front.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean—”
“Call me when you’ve patched things up with your mom.”
I clicked out of the conversation, not even giving him a chance to reply, and slammed my almost empty mug next to the sink. This whole thing was nothing but a disaster. One I wasn’t sure I could weather.
So, when Lisa Leann, one of the members of the Potluck Club prayer group I belonged to, called and told me “her Potluck catering business plan,” as she called it, and about the meeting scheduled at her wedding shop the next evening, I knew this was the distraction I needed.
By the time Evie came out of her honeymoon daze, her little Potluck Club world, of which she was president, would be changed. But as she and Dad were so sweet on each other, I thought she’d hardly notice, much less mind.
Maybe, this would lead to a new Evie, an Evie I could get along with.
Only time would tell.
The defining moment of my life came the day of Evie’s wedding, the very first wedding I’d ever planned and implemented as a professional wedding consultant.
It was too bad I almost missed it.
I had more urgent matters to attend to. When I got the call from Deputy Donna and her (ahem) friend Wade Gage that my sweet daughter Mandy had gone into labor, my world rocked. Suddenly, the last-minute details of putting on the biggest show Summit View had ever seen were no longer important to me. Without even waving good-bye, I tossed off my pink apron with the words “Lisa Leann’s High Country Weddings” embroidered across the bib, jumped into my Lincoln, and sped toward the hospital.
Thank heavens I’d left detailed wedding plans that my dear friends, whom I like to refer to as the Potluckers, could implement without me. Otherwise, poor Evie might still be a Miss instead of a Mrs.
When I arrived in the hospital parking lot, ahead of Deputy Donna, I didn’t know what to think. Donna had told me they were already en route. Had something gone wrong?
Just as I’d decided to drive to the house, Donna’s Bronco with its siren blazing pulled to a stop in front of the emergency room entrance. I rushed to the truck and got the shock of my life. There my daughter sat in the back seat, holding my newly born grandson. So help me, I’m afraid I screamed.
As I recovered my composure, Wade ran inside and grabbed a gurney, then he and Donna helped Mandy climb on board. That’s when I experienced my life-defining moment—the moment I took my grandbaby into my arms. If the baby hadn’t still been attached to Mandy, I might have burst into song, twirling my grandson through the hospital’s parking lot, you know, like Julie Andrews did in that high Alps meadow in The Sound of Music.
For there, nestled in my arms, was red-faced Kyle Christopher, wrapped in one of my pale pink bath towels. His little eyes squeezed shut against the bright sunshine.
How precious.
One look into that little face and I went from a woman in her late forties whose main concern was how to fight wrinkles, to Grandmother5Extraordinaire.
I may never recover from the shock of seeing my baby with a baby of her own. And I know I will never recover from the shock of having to put both my babies on a 737 headed to Houston’s Bush International Airport.
I’d known that my time with Mandy was short. And it was only by luck, really, that she’d been with me in Colorado for Kyle’s birth. She’d traveled to see “the folks,” as she calls her dad and me, over the Thanksgiving holiday, two months earlier. We’d been having a grand visit when she collapsed in my kitchen with the pangs of early labor.
With Mandy confined to bed rest, and Ray, her husband, having to return to Texas, Mandy had been left entirely in my care. It would have been heavenly if she’d not grieved so about missing Ray. “Mom, of course I appreciate what you and Dad are doing for me,” she’d say, flopping her strawberry curls against my velvety mauve sofa. “But I’m so homesick.”
I’d sit next to her and pull her into my arms. “Of course you are,” I’d coo, patting her shoulder. “Just consider this time with us as God’s gift. It is, you know, at least from my point of view.”
Her little chin would quiver and she’d dab her eyes with a tissue. “Mom, you keep reminding me, but I miss my Ray!”
Then the sobs would start in earnest, and all I could do was hold her. After her tears, I’d comfort her with a slice of my famous chocolate cheesecake, which I always keep in the back of my freezer for emergencies. (Chocolate cheesecake has special power to heal any heartbroken woman, I say.)
But now that the baby was born, it took no time for Ray to come to Summit View to collect his little family. Can’t say that I blame him, after all, and I’m happy Mandy has a husband who loves her.
But here’s my complaint: Ray made it to Summit View faster than a dignitary on the Concorde, ready to pack my Mandy’s suitcase and whisk her and the baby back to Texas. Even then I had to put my foot down to convince him to stay a week after Kyle was born. “It’s too soon for Mandy to travel,” I’d scolded. “Honestly, is this any way to take care of your wife?”
“But she says she’s more than ready,” he argued.
Then from the bedroom down the hall, I could hear Mandy’s voice sing out, “And willing.”
I walked down to her room, where she sat in my rocking chair nursing the baby. She looked so sweet in her pale coral buttondown gown that I couldn’t be angry.