Cydney brushed her teeth and went to bed, slept like a log and woke up with an aching bladder—Pepsi after 10
P.M.
— and raced into the bathroom. Then she washed her hands and her face and brushed her teeth—avoiding the mirror for fear the sight of her hair would crack it—and stuck her head under the shower spray to wash her hair.
She'd just finished drying it and digging her last pair of jeans and her last sweatshirt out of her suitcase when someone knocked on her bedroom door. Gwen, she thought, her heart jumping. At least she had her underwear on. Cydney laid her towel on the bed and drew a breath.
“Come in,” she called.
Bebe stepped into her room, shut the door and leaned against it.
“Did you really throw a pizza in my mother's face?” she asked.
“Yes, I did and I'm sorry. I plan to apologize, but—”
“Oh Aunt Cydney!” Bebe threw her arms around her and burst into tears. “Gramma said you did it because Mother laughed at the decorations I picked. You didn't laugh. You
never
laughed, even when I came back with that dopey Halloween stuff. Everything looks so pretty, I was so proud and she
laughed.
I wanted to die. Why did I want her here?”
“Whoa, Bebe, whoa.” Cydney backed her out of her arms and sat her down on the blanket box, picked up her towel from the end of the bed and wiped Bebe's tears. “Your mother has very different taste—”
“Bullshit!” Bebe snatched the towel and glared. “Mother doesn't care about me or my wedding. She just wants to look good in
Voguel”
“You
are
a lot smarter than you've been letting on.”
“I wish I wasn't. I wish I was dumb, stupid little Bebe. Poor Aldo thought it was a compliment when she laughed!”
She buried her face in the towel and sobbed. Cydney tugged the desk chair over and sat in front of her till Bebe dried her tears.
“What am I gonna do, Aunt Cydney?” “It's your wedding, Bebe. What do you want to do?” “I love everything just the way it is. I don't want to change so much as a single bow. It's perfect, just the way I imagined it.”
“Do you want your wedding pictures in
Vogue
?” “No!” Bebe balled the towel and threw it at the wall. “I want my wedding pictures in a nice little album I can put on the coffee table in our house so Aldo and I can look at them whenever we want and—and remember the
happiest day of ourlivesV
She wailed and buried her face in her hands. Cydney went into the bathroom for a cool facecloth. She brought it back to the bed, made Bebe lie down and pressed it over her swollen red eyes. She sat on the edge of the mattress and smoothed her forehead until the sob eased out of her breath. Then she got up and got dressed. She'd just tied on her Keds when Bebe took off the cloth and sat up, came to her where she sat in the desk chair and went down on her knees. Looped her arms around her waist and laid her head on her breast.
“I love you, Aunt Cydney. I wish you were my mother.” “Oh Bebe.” Cydney cupped Bebe's head in her hands, her eyes full of tears, and kissed her hair. Bebe straightened and they hugged, rocking from side to side. “Your mother will come around.”
“I want you to take my wedding pictures. I want somebody who loves me on the other end of the camera.”
“I'd planned to take the pictures all along, whether Gwen likes it or not, so don't worry about that, okay?” Cydney smoothed Bebe's hair back and her niece nodded, her mouth trembling. “I wasn't there, but I can't believe your mother meant to hurt you. And she does love you.”
“She called it
country frump
Right in front of Louella and Mamie and Sarah and Cloris and her sisters. After they'd worked so hard to help, and we were all so happy with how
everything looked. You didn't see their faces, Aunt Cydney.” Bebe's voice spiraled toward shrill. “Such good, sweet women and I already felt guilty because I hadn't helped as much as I should and then my mother—”
“Stop, Bebe.” Cydney gripped her shoulders. “Louella was concerned about you, not Gwen's tacky comment. It's over and you have to calm down. The ladies will be here this morning to bake the wedding cake. Your mother can't keep them away. Gus won't let her.”
“Okay. Okay.” Bebe rocked back on her heels, sniffling, but trying to smile. “What a cool wedding cake this is gonna be. All the different layers and different icings. Can I help?”
“You bet. Let's go grab some chow before they get here.”
Cydney expected to find Georgette in the throes of making breakfast, but the kitchen was empty. She'd left a note:
Every man for himself this morning. Fresh fruit, juice and bagels in the fridge. Herbert is taking Fletch and the French bimbo and Gwen and her Prince and me to Springfield for breakfast and a little shopping. Don't worry about dinner. We'll bring it. Luck with the cake.
—G
“Hmmm,” Cydney said. “This is very strange.”
“Exceedingly,” Bebe said. “Gramma never does a little shopping.”
“All six of them stuffed into Herb's Cadillac,” Gus said behind them. “Oh to be a sardine in somebody's pocket.”
Cydney laughed and glanced at him over her shoulder, swinging onto a stool at the island with a grin on his face, and Aldo, looking like a shorn but very handsome sheep, beside him.
“Why, Aldo, you cut your hair. It looks great. Very becoming.”
He swiped a hand at his bangs and flushed. “Thanks, Uncle Cyd.”
Louella and Mamie and Sarah and Cloris and her sisters arrived in time for bagels and coffee. Hesitantly, when Gus
greeted them at the door, then with sighs of relief when he said Gwen wasn't there.
“Kicked her out on 'er fancy butt, eh, Gussie?” Mamie grinned, then frowned when he said she was only gone for the day.
While Mamie and Cloris and her sisters took charge of the cake, Louella and Sarah drafted Gus and Aldo to help clean house.
“I just paid a fortune to have this place cleaned,” Gus argued, until Louella wiped a finger across one of the living room tables and it came up gray with dust. “How'd that get so dirty so quick?”
“Clean is a magnet for dirt,” Louella said. “No one knows how or why. It's one of the great mysteries of the universe, Gus.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands. “Point me to a broom.”
Louella pointed him to the vacuum cleaner and the carpeted staircases, the runner in the gallery hall and Aunt Phoebe's rug in the dining room. Most of the pizza stain was gone. What remained, Mamie said, would never be noticed from the back of a galloping horse.
Aldo mopped and waxed floors. Louella and Sarah tackled the bedrooms, changed sheets and towels, shook rugs and wiped floors. When Bebe went to help, Gus clutched his chest and faked a stagger. Cydney frowned, but her eyes twinkled.
By two o'clock, Tall Pines was spotless. Fresh beds and gleaming bathrooms upstairs. Sparkling glass, polished furniture and shiny waxed floors downstairs. They cleaned the R&R room, and made a final sweep of the great room, which Gus hadn't seen.
“Lovely,” he said to Bebe, making good on his vow to be nice to her. Liking her would take a while. “If it makes you feel any better, I like it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Munroe. So do Aldo and I. The great room stays exactly the way it is.” She pulled the pocket doors shut with a firm click and Scotch-taped a sign to them that said: “To Whom It May Concern: Touch one thing in this room and die. Love—The Bride and Groom.”
By three all the cake layers, a combination of yellow, white and chocolate, were baked and cool and ready to go into the freezer overnight. The butter-cream frosting roses and leaves and the tubs of different icings Cloris and her sisters made went in the fridge.
“We're clearin' out now, Gussie.” Mamie offered him her cheek to kiss. “Before the witch that starts with a
b
shows up.”
“Now, Mamie,” Louella chided. “We'll come after lunch tomorrow, Cydney, put the cake together and do up the hors d'oeuvres.”
“Thank you so much.” Cydney hugged each one of them. “We couldn't have done all this without your help. You are wonderful.”
“It's our joy to help,” Cloris said in her chirpy little voice. “Weddings are so beautiful and special and—oh, just
so
happy.”
She and her sisters dabbed their tiny noses with hankies. Louella and Cydney and Sarah sighed. Mamie dragged a sleeve over her eyes.
“If you're all so damn happy, why are you crying?” Gus asked, bewildered. “I don't get this.”
“You're a man, Gussie, is why you don't get it,” Mamie said.
“What does being a man have to do with it?” he asked Cydney, after he'd seen the ladies out to their cars and gone back into the kitchen.
“I don't know.” She shrugged and wiped cake crumbs and icing drips off the island with a sponge. “You tell me.”
I can't, damn it, Gus thought, not till your loony family clears out of here. He didn't like the look on her face. She seemed distracted.
“What's bothering you, Uncle Cyd?”
She shook her head, dumped the crumbs in her cupped hand in the sink and rinsed the sponge. “Nothing really. I just feel jumpy.”
Gus went to her and slid his arms around her. She leaned the back of her head against his chest. He kissed her temple and she sighed.
“Will you drive me into Branson tomorrow? In the morning, since we'll be busy after lunch? I have to rent a car so I can get home.”
“You don't have to leave on my account.”
“I have to leave on
my
account.” She turned and looped her arms around his waist. “I have clients, and a book to write, and so do you.”
Don't leave. Stay. Marry me. All those things popped into Gus' head, but her nutball family could come through the door any second, so he didn't say them, just kissed a dab of icing off her nose.
“I could come see you sometime,” he said. “Would you like that?”
“I'd love that.” She smiled, but her heart wasn't in it. He could hear it in her voice, see it in the shadow in her eyes.
She didn't realize his heart was in it. That was the problem.
“If you think you can find Tall Pines on your own, you can come see me, you know.”
“Signs!” She smacked her forehead and wheeled away from him. “I have got to make those signs!”
“What signs?” Gus followed her through the swinging door.
“Road signs—Bebe!” she hollered as she passed by the bar.
“Yes, Aunt Cydney?” Bebe and Aldo popped out of the R&R room.
“Where's the poster board and pens you found in Aldo's room?”
“Still there. I'll get 'em,” Aldo said. “What are we doing?”
“Making road signs so the wedding guests can find Tall Pines,” she said, and turned to face Gus. “If we make them now, you and I can stake them along the road on our way to Branson tomorrow.”
So they made signs, in the R&R room on the Ping-Pong table. Most of them legit, but the funny ones Cydney came up with, “Leave a Trail of Bread Crumbs,” and “Ignore the Buzzards Circling Overhead,” had Gus and Aldo and Bebe laughing. He went to the garage for flat, plywood tomato
stakes and a staple gun and put the signs together as Cydney lettered them and drew hearts and flowers, nosegays and little brides and grooms and a couple of vultures in the corners. Bebe and Aldo tied them with ribbons. Gus had just punched the last staple into the last sign when they heard the front door sweep open.
“Hey, Bebe-cakes!” Gwen called. “Where are you, sweetie?”
“Drowning myself in the lake,” Bebe muttered.
“C'mon, Beebs.” Aldo smacked a kiss on her mouth. “It'll be okay.”
He took her hand and all but dragged her into the living room.
Gwen didn't so much as glance at Cydney when she stepped into the living room with Gus. She stood in front of the couch by the gallery stairs, her I'm-a-star-and-you're-not smile on her face, a long, blue silk bag with a zipper down the front thrown over the back of the sofa.
Cydney caught her mother's eye across the living room. She sat on the edge of the hearth between Herb and her father, an unhappy frown on her face. Cydney glanced at the dais, where Domino and the Prince stood with their heads together, murmuring in French, then back at her mother. Georgette shook her head no.
“I bought you a present.” Gwen said to Bebe, sweeping her arm toward the blue silk bag. “Want to see?”
“That looks like a dress bag, Mother. What did you do?”
Gwen blinked. Thrown off stride, Cydney guessed, by the new, direct and perceptive Bebe. “I bought you a wedding gown.”
“I already have my dress. Gramma bought it and I love it.”
“I'm offering you a compromise, Bebe. I'm willing to let you keep your country cutesy theme if you'll wear this gown.”
Gwen unzipped the bag and swept a long, ivory column of shimmering silk over her arm. Pointed over the wrist sleeves, high neckline, plunging back. Gorgeous, but it wasn't Bebe.
“I don't like it,” she said. “I'm not wearing it.”
“Yes you will.” Gwen flung the gown on the sofa. “You'll
wear it long enough for me to take the photographs for
Vogue.”
“You aren't taking any photos, Mother. I asked Aunt Cydney to take my wedding pictures and she said she would. There won't be any pictures in
Vogue,
either. Not of
my
wedding.”
“I made a commitment, Bebe.”
“With
Vogue,
Mother, not with me. Never with me. You've always been too busy. You remember me now and then and call or send presents. That's not what I call being a mother. C'mon, Aldo. We're going for a walk.”
Bebe held her hand out to Aldo. He slipped his fingers into hers and they walked away, up the steps toward the front door. Gwen spun after them, hands on her hips. Almost, but not quite, stamping her foot.
“Come back here, Beatrice. This is
not
settled!”
“Yes it is.” Bebe turned around in the foyer. She had tears in her eyes and her mouth trembled, but she kept it together. “It was settled when you left me in Kansas City with Gramma George and Aunt Cydney. I didn't realize it until you swept in here and laughed at me. And Aldo and everyone else and everything we've done. Go be famous. I have two mothers. Gramma George and Aunt Cydney. I don't need you.”