Dress Me in Wildflowers (5 page)

Farrin remembered a time when she’d have given just about anything to be able to afford a dress at the Dillard’s department store in Knoxville. Those days seemed so far away and yet fresh and real at the same time.

She caught the expression on Tammie’s face, one that showed an inferiority complex about her attire. Farrin stepped forward and touched Tammie’s shoulder. “Turn around.”

Tammie did as told and revealed a nice scooped back that might prove too cool later in the evening. “Red has always been your color.”

“I seem to remember you also carrying it off pretty well.”

“It’s okay, but you’d be hard pressed to find many red pieces in my closet.”

Tammie turned and gave a half-hearted smile. “You probably don’t have a single store-bought dress in there. And they probably all have specialized color names like lemon rind and autumn sunset.”

Farrin examined Tammie’s expression. Was she being sarcastic? Maybe Tammie had just had a tiring day. After all, she had a lot of responsibilities that put daily stressors in her life — marriage to her college sweetheart Kurt, two children and their zillions of activities, and a thriving catering business. They needed to sit down and talk, catch up, just the two of them. Alleviate the hesitance and awkwardness time and distance had cultivated. After this stupid reunion was over.

“So, is Kurt coming tonight?”

“Yeah. He just pulled into the driveway. You should have brought a date. Are you seeing anyone?”

“No.” Even if they’d still been seeing each other and he hadn’t been in Spain, Farrin wouldn’t have invited Mark into this part of her life.

“Too bad. But you’ll know lots of people there, and I’m sure everyone will want to know about your work and what living in New York is like.”

Farrin was covering that in her speech in what she hoped was an interesting presentation, one she planned to use tonight and at the meeting in the morning. Beyond that, she hoped there wasn’t much more to the encounters than some hellos and idle chitchat. Hopefully none of those situations where classmates look back on their high school years with fond memories.

When they reached the living room, Kurt gave Tammie a kiss and then hugged Farrin. “I’m going to be the envy of every guy there tonight,” he said as he looked at both of them. “How have you been, Farrin?”

“Good. You?”

“Better than I deserve.”

Farrin laughed at Kurt’s signature phrase. She noticed a bit of gray had crept into the black hair at his temples, but he still had the trim build of the runner he’d always been. She remembered how Tammie had dragged her to college track meets to watch Kurt run without being obvious about her admiration.

After saying goodbye to Faye, the three of them headed out. And that’s when Farrin’s stomach really decided to revolt. This wasn’t a normal case of butterflies. These were full-fledged moths.

Everything that could possibly go wrong flitted through her mind, keeping her busy trying to quell the doubts and worries. She would be fine. How many people in the building tonight could claim to have been on the cover of a national magazine or interviewed on primetime television?

If she was to make it through the evening with any amount of cool intact, she had to forget the irrational fear that when all those eyes stared up at her tonight all they would see was a girl in out-of-date clothes walking from the school bus down the dusty length of Iggy Bottom Road to a trailer that shook when the least thunderstorm blew through.

When Kurt made the turn into the high school, only the idea of the resulting embarrassment kept her from keeling over. Through her veil of anxiety, she noticed a few things had changed. The bear that served as the school’s mascot had been painted recently, and there was a new circle drive out front where the solid sea of grass had been.

After Kurt parked, she stepped from the car and took a deep, fortifying breath. By this time tomorrow, she’d be at home and back at work. She just had to survive the next twenty-four hours.

She followed Tammie and Kurt toward the gym, where the evening’s festivities were being held, and thanked Kurt when he opened the door for her. He really was a nice guy. When Tammie had seen him run by their dorm, she’d fallen head over heels at first sight. When Tammie had finally met him, Farrin had been forced to pinch her friend to keep her from passing out.

Farrin had been jealous, happy and grateful in turns. Jealous that she’d never found that kind of love. Happy that her friend had. And finally grateful that she didn’t have to worry about having a serious relationship or marriage, which would have likely kept her from achieving her dream. Not to mention that marriages didn’t always turn out as wonderfully as Tammie and Kurt’s. Or the ones in the dozens of romance novels she’d read throughout high school and college for escape from her grueling schedule of classes and waitressing to make enough money to buy necessities financial aid didn’t cover.

As she neared the door from the lobby into the gym, the lyrics of Hanson’s “MMMBop” floated out to her. Ah, full-effect flashback.

She’d barely stepped inside when two of her former classmates, who’d been talking inside the doorway, greeted her with an enthusiastic hello.

“Farrin, it’s been ages since I’ve seen you,” said Andrea Wallace, with whom she’d had a pleasant if not close relationship during high school. One of those acquaintances that was fine at the time but that you don’t miss when you move away and never talk to the person again. Andrea had gained several pounds and wore a conservative black two-piece suit. Farrin would have thought she’d overdressed had not Keely Rainer stood next to Andrea in what looked like a long, straight, emerald prom dress.

“Where are you living these days?” asked Keely, who looked a few years older but was still stick thin and wearing too much eye makeup.

“Do you even read?” Andrea asked Keely. “She lives in New York.”

Keely shrugged and smiled. Farrin figured Andrea had hit the nail on the proverbial head — Keely probably didn’t read a lot. She’d been a bit on the ditzy side in high school, and evidently the intervening years hadn’t helped in that respect. If you looked in the dictionary beside “dumb blonde”, you’d likely see Keely’s picture and hear her squeaky little laugh. How many times had Farrin and Tammie rolled their eyes at the sound of that laugh?

As they moved farther into the crowd, Tammie leaned toward Farrin. “I used to think that laugh of Keely’s was an act, but it’s honest to God real. And would you believe she and her husband own the drugstore now? Only it’s not a drugstore anymore, not since the CVS came in a few years ago.”

“What is it now?”

“Still a soda fountain and gift shop. Just the pharmacy is gone. It actually got written up in
Southern Living
a year or so ago.”

Farrin knew the monthly magazine was filled with snippets of small town life and sites, but it still seemed odd that anything would attract the writers to Oak Valley. Sure, she had fond memories of the heaping ice cream cones when she was a kid, but weren’t there lots of those little flashback to the ‘50s soda fountains scattered throughout the South?

“Maybe we can go have a cone tomorrow before you leave,” Tammie said with a hint of wistfulness in her voice.

“Sure.” She was already in town, mingling with people she thought she’d never see again. Judging by the stares turned her direction, the news that she was back in Oak Valley had likely already spread to every nook and cranny in the county. So what were a few more minutes to have an ice cream cone with an old friend? More time to make amends for not keeping in touch.

“Let’s grab some seats,” Kurt said, then led the way toward a table near the front podium.

Farrin noted the balloons floating next to the ceiling, the white tablecloths, the orange and yellow autumn centerpieces complete with votive candles. And people she didn’t recognize anymore. Why did weaving among the tables feel like walking toward the guillotine?

Farrin would have much rather sat in the back, but then maybe having some friendly faces at the front would help her get through her speech. At least she hadn’t spotted the truly vile classmates — Janie Carlisle, Brittany Stevens, Amber Jamison and the rest of the “we’re too cool for you” crowd. She’d be hard pressed not to slap a couple of them just to make all right with the world.

She chatted with the other occupants of their table — Marcus Freeman, who had been, along with his twin sister, Portia, the only African-Americans in her class; Keely and her husband, a tall, dark-bearded man named Jack from Avery County just over the state line in North Carolina; and a petite, red-headed woman named Dana whom Farrin quite honestly didn’t remember. How could you have a class of one hundred and three and forget someone?

The music lowered and then stopped as salads and then plates of chicken, rice and steamed vegetables arrived at the tables. Wait staff in black pants and white shirts refilled tea and water glasses.

Farrin leaned toward Tammie. “I’m surprised we’re not eating Bud’s Barbecue on paper plates.”

“The class had some funds left over when we graduated, and it’s been drawing interest all these years.”

Too soon, the salad and main course were over, and Marcus, who had been the class president, went to the podium to announce that everyone could take a few minutes to digest before dessert was served and enjoy the keynote address. The cold, visceral need to run out the door swamped Farrin. That thought shocked her. She’d fled this room once before, and she wasn’t about to make that kind of spectacle of herself again.

Tammie got up to introduce her, and for a moment Farrin feared what she might say. Would it be, “Well, Farrin Taylor used to be my friend, but now she’s such a big hotshot that she can’t find time in her busy schedule to even call me.”

She needn’t have worried. Tammie’s introduction was kind, friendly and thankfully not too over the top in praise. Farrin hated it when she was introduced by someone who viewed it as her duty to be so effusive that
Roget’s
was in danger of running out of adjectives.

Farrin felt as if she were walking through molasses as she rose from her chair and approached the podium. Everything seemed magnified and yet dulled at the same time. But the sense of being watched intensified, as if the number of pairs of eyes pointed toward her multiplied with each step.

Only eighty or ninety people, including spouses, filled the room. Some classmates hadn’t made it back for the reunion. A few barely made it past graduation, so they probably didn’t want to venture back for fear the school officials might have changed their minds and be waiting at the door to reclaim their diplomas.

Through her occasional talks with Tammie, she’d learned that poor Tim Fanning had died during a spring break from college when he fell from a boat while deep sea fishing with his family. And Dusty Carmichael was serving thirty to life for knifing a guy outside a bar in Chattanooga. Knowing how Dusty had been in high school, he’d probably been too drunk to remember it but had opened his smart mouth one too many times and gotten himself sent to the state prison in Nashville. The drunken part, ironically, might have saved him from death row.

Farrin’s mental roll call of her former classmates came to an abrupt halt when she realized she’d reached the podium and everyone who had made it to the reunion was watching her, waiting for her to say something interesting. Her stomach rolled when she spotted Brittany Stevens and Amber Jamison at a table to her right. She didn’t see Janie Carlisle, but two out of three was bad enough.

Why was she letting the sight of them bother her? She wasn’t sixteen anymore, and they weren’t worth the effort it took to wonder what was going through their pea brains.

Farrin placed her hands on the edges of the podium and began. “Graduation seems like it was yesterday, and yet it seems like it was eons ago.”

Despite her painfully knotted stomach, the indentations she was digging into her palms with her freshly manicured fingernails, and the sweat dampening her upper lip and beneath the lower edge of her bra, she somehow made it through the speech. All the time leading up to the trip back to Oak Valley and to this night, this speech, had been worse than torture. She’d much rather have been forced to live on bread and water in one-hundred-and-fifteen-degree heat than have come back here.

But it hadn’t been as bad as she’d feared. Once all the waiting was over and she began, the speech she’d practiced over and over on her flight and subsequent drive went smoothly. The audience laughed at the right places, nodded at the appropriate points and even gave her a standing ovation at the end. She stood there dumbfounded, wondering who the people facing her were and what they’d done with the classmates with whom she’d walked through this gym to the strands of “Pomp and Circumstance” fifteen years before.

The trip back to the front table didn’t require the passage through molasses, though Farrin dropped into her chair with such a sense of relief she was afraid she might melt right into a puddle on the floor. She stared down at that waxed surface and wondered how they’d gotten the gym on a Friday night in October. The basketball team must be playing an away game, which she guessed could account for more of the classmate absences. After all, this was the same class that had canceled its five-year reunion for lack of interest because it had been scheduled the night before the opening of deer season.