Blue Heart Blessed (21 page)

I
wouldn’t say this is the first time in my life I’ve been speechless. There have been other times. Like when I got the lead role in the fall musical my senior year in high school. And when my mother called me from the hospital and told me my father had died. And when Daniel told me with dry eyes he didn’t want to marry me.

I’ve been surprised beyond words before.

But somehow this is different.

As Marshall Mitchell walks toward me with a polite smile on his face, it’s like someone has pressed the “mute” button for my mouth.

“Hello, Daisy.”

I mutter something like, “Ungh.”

“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

I force my tongue to wake from its comatose state. “No. Not all,” I mumble.

Marshall looks at Ramsey who is standing in front of me dirty and sweaty, and wearing holey jeans. Marshall, by the way, is wearing a charcoal gray suit and a sapphire-blue silk tie. “If you, uh, need to finish with your, uh, customer, I can just wait.”

Before I can answer, my mother comes sailing up to the front, perhaps to rescue me. “Marshall, how are you? How lovely to see you again.”

She grabs Marshall’s attention and his arm, like he came to see her, not me.

“I’m fine, thank you very much, Mrs. Murien.” Marshall’s voice is gracious but he seems taken aback by my mother’s hearty welcome. He casts a glance to me that says, “Is she always like this?”

Ramsey continues to stand there, just looking at me.

“L’Raine, look who’s here!” Mom announces. “It’s Marshall.”

I’m not even sure L’Raine knows who Marshall is. My head is swimming.

“Um, It’s great to see you again,” Marshall says to my mother, and then he turns his head to me. “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee, Daisy? Is this a good time?”

“Oh. Um. Sure. This is a great time,” I lie. “I’ll just go get my purse.”

I don’t look at Ramsey as I head to my office. My face feels hot. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel sick to my stomach.

This is
not
a great time.

But I grab my purse and walk out with my eyes on my feet, wondering if I dare sneak a look at Ramsey. When I get back to the front of the store, I decide I will, but when I lift my head I see that Ramsey is not there. He has left.

“All set?” Marshall is cheerful.

No.

“Yes.”

He smiles, opens the door for me and I walk out of my boutique into the sultry afternoon heat.

“You have a favorite spot for coffee?”

“Um. There’s a
gelateria
just up the street. They serve Italian coffee. It’s very good.”

“Sounds super.” He smiles. I try to. We start to walk up the street.

“How have you been, Daisy?”

I’ve been in an absolute fog.

“Fine. And you?”

“Good. But busy. I’m sorry I didn’t come back to see you sooner. I was out of town. Did you mom tell you I came by a couple weeks ago?”

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

“I hope that’s okay that I did. Kellen said . . .Kellen said you told him that would be all right.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, I told him that.”

Marshall cocks his head and looks over at me. “But you don’t seem like it’s all right.”

I’m actually glad he’s being completely honest with me. Makes it easier for me to be honest with him.

“I’m sorry, Marshall. I’ve just had a very confusing day. It has nothing to do with you, really.”

Well, that’s not entirely true. But I doubt I could explain it.

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Want to talk about it?”

I break into a smile that I’m sure he mistakes for something akin to appreciation for our budding friendship. I am smiling because the thought of telling Marshall Mitchell that I just got an intense thrill touching Ramsey’s sweaty shoulder—in front of his ex-wife—is laughable. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it.”

“Sure I do.”

No, you don’t.

“It’s nothing. I’ll be okay.”

We take a few steps in silence.

“Look, Daisy, I’m sorry if that dinner date thing offended you. When I let Kellen ask if you wanted to join us for dinner, I wasn’t trying to play games. I just wanted you to feel comfortable with saying no.”

I look over at him. He really does seem like a nice guy. “I wasn’t offended, really. I just… I don’t know. I just didn’t want people setting me up on dates anymore. It just seems so superficial.”

“Been on a lot of miserable blind dates, eh?” he says this like he knows what I’m talking about.

“Not miserable,” I answer. “Just empty. Purposeless. I don’t know. It’s just not how I picture a life-long relationship beginning.”

“Oh. So how do you picture a life-long relationship beginning?”

I think back to conversations I’ve had recently with Harriet. “Well, when it begins, you don’t actually know it. It happens when you’re not expecting it.”

When you’re in need of a ride to choir concert.

When you’re busy teaching a science class.

Just now, as we’re walking, it hits me. Hits me hard. I am nearly knocked to the pavement with the force of the revelation. I’m a planner. I plan things. This is how I live my life. And now I realize why my life seems so difficult right now. What I want most in life is something I know I cannot plan nor do I want to. And it’s driving me crazy. The planner in me wants to plan. And she can’t. Not this.

“Daisy?”

I’ve stopped dead in my tracks, a hundred feet from Lorenzo’s.

“Daisy, are you all right?”

“I’m
… I’m fine. Here. This is it right up here.” I walk up to an outdoor table and slide into a chair.

“Can I get you anything?” Marshall is looking down on me, fairly mystified.

“An iced coffee, please?” I say it as kindly as I can.

He goes inside to get our drinks and I just sit there, contemplating my newest revelation and musing on the fact that I’m sitting at the same table where Daniel told me he was getting married.

Marshall comes back a few minutes later with two iced coffees. He seems to have recovered from my odd behavior moments before. He sits down across from me and begins to tell me about himself. Not in a self-centered way. I can tell he’s just letting me know what he’s like as a person.

I listen to him.

But as I listen, I study his face, his hands, his mannerisms. Marshall Mitchell is a very nice man. He’s polite, interested in world affairs and the plight of people in need, and he has a nice sense of humor. He goes to a great church, loves God and his parents, plays golf and doesn’t like to waste time. He’s wealthy. He’s a bit on the heavy side but not unattractive. He’s single.

And yet, I feel no sense that I’m drawn to him. There is no stirring within me. Not event the tiniest twinge of attraction.

Nothing like what I know I felt minutes ago with Ramsey.

When we walk back to Something Blue, I think Marshall can tell that we will never be anything more than casual friends.

He seems a little sad, a little miffed when we say goodbye. He doesn’t seem mad at me, though. He seems peeved at Providence, that he met a pleasant, single Christian girl and yet she’s not the one who was created to complete him.

Oh, how I can relate.

I walk back into my shop knowing a lot more about myself than I did when I left it.

But knowing less about a lot of other things, including what was running through Ramsey’s mind when I touched him.

And what he was going to say to me before Marshall walked through the door.

Dear Harriet,

I have a new maxim for my Rules of Disengagement: There are things that can be planned and therefore unplanned—a wedding, for example. And a party and a vacation and elective surgery. But there are definitely some things that can’t be planned, like when and where you will meet the person who you really are destined to grow old with, assuming the one you had been engaged to wasn’t the one. You just can’t put that date in your day planner. You realize it has happened after it has happened.

Disengaged women—read ‘jilted brides’—understand this once they’ve thought about it. We, more than anyone else, know that you can decide the kind of person you want to spend your life with and you can even plan to marry a person like that, but that’s where your control stops.

I had encounters with two very different men today. Both times I was under the impression I was in control of the situation. I don’t think I was in either case. And yet I feel like I’m now required to take some kind of action, and I’m thoroughly flummoxed. On one hand, we have Marshall. He’s wealthy, polite, obviously interested in me, kind to my mother, perceptive, not movie-star handsome but not unpleasant to look at either, and I’m simply not attracted to him. Makes no sense. Then on the other hand we have Ramsey. Moody, introspective, detached, tender at times, hurting like me, more attractive than Marshall but not exactly interested in me. And thoughts of him rattle me all the livelong day.

When I had my hand on his shoulder today, I could’ve sworn he was feeling what I was feeling, and don’t ask me to define what it was I was feeling, because I’m not exactly sure what it was other than simple desire. Which, believe me, surprised me silly.

I wish I knew what he had been going to say to me before Marshall walked into the store.

I should’ve gone back up to the roof and just asked him. But I couldn’t do it. When I got back from having coffee with Marshall, I just puttered around the store the rest of the afternoon, thinking about going back up there but never actually doing it.

I was afraid to. Let’s face it—Ramsey was either offended or pleasantly surprised. Do you see how knowing which one it is changes everything?

I am watching
Pride and Prejudice,
big screen version and eating Wheat Thins and raisins by the handful. There are no wedding dresses to critique. There should be, but there aren’t.

Dear Daisy,

I know why you felt compelled to touch Ramsey on the shoulder. I know why you banished me from the rooftop so you could do it.

Your Voice of Reason might have tried to talk you out of it but not for the reasons that come first to mind. You suspect I would have told you to mind your own business, but that is not what I would’ve said. You intervened not to stun the Horn Blower but to prevent her from hurting Ramsey any further. Your motive wasn’t to snub Kristen but to protect Ramsey, not because you pity him but because you are drawn to him. What you did was all about Ramsey, and not a thing about his ex-wife. The sooner you admit that to yourself the better off you’ll be. And the more prepared you’ll be when you find out what it was Ramsey was going to say.

There aren’t wedding dresses in
Pride and Prejudice
because it’s not a story about weddings but about what it means to truly love someone, what you are willing to do for that person, and what you are willing to sacrifice.

Harriet

T
he gown in front of me hangs on the dress form like a wad of feedbags unearthed from a time capsule. I’ve never seen a wedding dress in such sorry shape. Wrinkled and crushed beyond recognition. Splashes of crumpled lace at the neck and sleeves give mere hints of former elegance but only if you look close and then shut your eyes and imagine it.

Rosalina is standing next to me in the alterations apartment with her arms across her chest. Maria Andréa is on my other side, mirroring her aunt’s pose.

“This is hopeless.” I lift part of the wrinkled skirt and let it fall away.

Rosalina shakes her head. “No. Not hopeless. It just won’t be easy. We will have to hand steam all these wrinkles out. And the tulle petticoat underneath must be replaced. It is in shreds. That’s half the reason the skirt looks so bad.”

“When I talked to this woman on the phone she said this dress was heirloom quality,” I scoff. “She’s probably had this in her garage crammed in a Hefty bag up against her lawn mower.”

Again Rosalina shakes her head. “No. It smells like cedar. She had it in a safe place, I think. She just never took it out. She kept putting stuff on top of it, no? We can fix it, Daisy. It looks bad now, but underneath all those wrinkles it’s still a beautiful dress.
Verdád, Andréa?”

Maria Andréa shrugs. “If you say so,
Tia
.”

“The hem is in bad shape. But the woman who wore it was tall. We can cut an inch or two off and make a new hem. It will be fine. Andréa, you can take that out while I go to the fabric store. I’m out of tulle here.”

Maria Andréa reaches behind us to our worktable and picks up a blue-handled seam ripper. “You are out of bias tape, too,
Tia
. You told me to remind you.”

“
Si, si. Gracias
. I’ll be back soon.” Rosalina waves goodbye and heads out the door.

I pull out the form that nonlocal sellers fill out when they sell me a dress online. The woman who sent this dress to me filled it out nicely, a surprise considering how bad the dress looks. I smooth out the page and direct my eyes to the part where it says, “Tell me about this dress.” I begin to read:

This was my grandmother’s dress. She was a mail-order bride who left the East Coast at the turn of the century to marry a logger from Seattle whom she had never met. She had been engaged to marry a wealthy New Jersey businessman but he had died of influenza three days before the wedding. This was the dress she had been going to wear. Instead, she wore it three months later when she married my grandfather. They got married in the train station because the church was still being built in
the outpost where my grandfather was living.

My grandmother told me she didn’t love my grandfather when she married him. But sometime near the end of that first year, she woke up one morning next to Grandpa and she realized she did love him, deeply. And she didn’t even know when her feelings for him had changed.

I have no children to pass this dress along to and I’m moving into an assisted care facility. I can’t keep it any longer.

But I feel very strongly that someone should have it.

I never saw two people more in love than my grandparents.

I’m so glad I found your website.

Very sincerely,

Margaret Dearwood.

P.S. My grandmother’s name was Elisabeth Erdahl.

Elisabeth with an “s.” My mind conjures a picture of my long-ago paper doll and her lampshade wedding dress. I glance at the wrinkled gown on the dress form. Maria Andréa is carefully removing the ancient stitches on the hem.

Already, it doesn’t look so bad.

I fold the letter and place in on the worktable as Liam pokes his head in. I cannot keep myself from looking past him to see if Ramsey is with him. But Liam is alone.

“Daisy, my dad wants me to ask you if it’s okay if I hang out here today while he takes my grandpa to the hospital.”

The hospital?

“What’s going on?” I ask. “Is your grandpa okay?”

“They’re doing that radiation thing today. He’ll be there all day. I don’t want to go.”

The last I heard Father Laurent was scheduled for his radiation treatment to begin on Monday, three days from now. “Why today?”

Liam shrugs. “I dunno.”

“Of course you can stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I make my way out of the alterations apartment and up the stairs. Father Laurent is just coming out of his apartment as I reach the third floor. He is telling Ramsey, who is right behind him, that he wants to take the stairs today.

He smiles when he sees me. “Daisy! Hello.”

“Good morning, Father.”

Ramsey doesn’t look at me.

“Liam says you’re going in today for your radiation treatment.” I pretend I don’t notice Ramsey’s silence. “The doctors moved it up?”

“My cardiologist gave me the green light and my oncologist doesn’t want to wait. He’d like to just get started with it. And we thought with Liam leaving tomorrow, he won’t have to see me getting sick, if I do get sick.”

“Oh. But it’s still just an outpatient procedure, right?”

“Yes. We should be home by this evening.” Father Laurent looks behind him to Ramsey. His son has locked the door and is now fiddling with his car keys. Father looks back at me with a puzzled look on his face. He can obviously sense something is up between Ramsey and me. Something unsettling.

Part of me wants to yell, “Yes, it’s true! I touched your son on the shoulder and I liked it! And you know what, I think he liked it, too! And that’s what he’s so mad about!” The other part of me wants to run and hide.

“Ramsey, didn’t you want to ask Daisy something?” Father Laurent says.

“What?” Ramsey glances at me and then turns to his dad.

“About Liam?”

Ramsey swivels his head back around to me. “Is it all right if Liam stays here in the building today while Dad and I are at the hospital?” His voice is toneless.

“Of course.”

He nods wordlessly and then turns to his father. “We’d better get going, Dad.”

Father studies me for a moment then he turns to Ramsey. “You go on down and start the car and get it cooled off. I’ll be right down. I want to talk to Daisy a minute.”

Ramsey brushes past me and his elbow touches mine. “Excuse me,” he says, without meeting my eyes. He heads for the stairs and disappears.

When the sounds of his footsteps have fallen away, Father Laurent turns to me. “Daisy, what’s going on?”

“I think he’s mad at me for something I did,” My eyes feel hot. I refuse to let them be that way.

“What on earth did you do?” Father Laurent clearly can’t believe I could offend anyone. The eyes grow hotter.

It takes less than thirty seconds to tell him about the Horn Blower’s visit, her patronizing comments and my spontaneous gesture of solidarity—the one that took my breath away.

“And before I could ask him if he minded that I did that, Marshall Mitchell came to the store and asked to take me out for coffee!” I lament. “The timing was terrible. I don’t even particularly like Marshall. And Ramsey was going to say something to me before Marshall walked in. I don’t know what it was. He won’t even look at me now.”

Father Laurent looks deeply surprised. “You have feelings for Ramsey?”

I’m entirely unprepared for this question. Oh, these mutinous eyes! They begin to spill their contents. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure. Oh, this is such a mess!”

Father touches my arm. “Messes can be cleaned up, Daisy. Listen to me. If Ramsey was surprised by what you did on the roof, perhaps it was because he has no idea that you can empathize with how he feels. You called it an act of solidarity but he doesn’t know you have also loved someone who chose not to love you back. He also doesn’t know you heard anything that Kristen said to him on the roof. He doesn’t
know
it was an act of solidarity.”

This thought never occurred to me! For heaven’s sake, what must Ramsey be thinking about me?

I shut my eyes in shame.

“I can talk to him, Daisy.”

“No!” I shake my head and my eyes snap open. “No, let me find a way to make this right. I’m the one who made this mess. I have to clean it up. I’ll talk to him.”

Father Laurent is silent for a moment. “Daisy, may I ask a favor of you?”

“Of course,” I blot my eyes with my sleeve.

“Be careful with Ramsey. He’s been wounded in the worse possible way. I know you think you understand how he feels, but what happened between you and Daniel is different than what happened between him and Kristen. So please, my dear, be careful. Seek God’s path for you. And for him. Can I ask that of you?”

I can only blink and nod.

“That’s my girl. I better go.” He squeezes my arm and walks past me.

I finally find my tongue. “Father!” I call out and he turns.

“I’ll be praying for you.”

He winks, turns and is gone.