On Saturday morning I watched as a steady stream of customers went in and out of Fleur. It was June, after all, still bridal season. When I saw Austin’s green delivery van pull up to the curb at two that afternoon, I locked up the studio and strolled over to the florist’s shop.
He was wearing navy cargo shorts and a green and white Fleur Flower Arts logo shirt, and he was picking up the phone when I walked in.
Austin glanced up, blew me a kiss, then started writing things down on an order pad. The shop was a mess, the concrete floor littered with bits of white satin ribbon, lace, leaves, stems, and fallen petals, and the aisles were jammed with flowers; buckets of freesias, orange blossoms, stocks, hydrangeas, lilies, roses, daisies, and exotics whose names I didn’t know. Their perfume swirled around me. It was a happy, busy, exciting place, and a sharp aching wave of sorrow hit me so hard it almost knocked me back out the door.
He hung up the phone. “What?” he asked, a look of concern on his face. “What’s the matter, Keeley?”
No good trying to make a happy face. “All this wedding shit. It’s silly, I know, but it makes me feel so sad. I keep thinking about how my wedding day should have been…”
Austin took me by the shoulders and marched me over to the wooden bench behind the counter. “You sit here, little missy,” he ordered.
He reached around to the walk-in cooler behind him and fumbled around in one of the tall galvanized buckets until he came up with two cans of Diet Coke. He popped one and handed it to me.
He popped his own, took a drink, and let out a satisfied sigh.
“Do you want to talk wedding shit?” he asked. “Let me tell you about Betsey Forst’s wedding. That’s where I’ve been all morning, over at the rectory at First Presbyterian. I finally just told her mama to give me a call when the child’s medication kicks in. I had to get out of there before I threw my own hissy fit.”
“That bad?”
He shuddered. “Tell me something, Keeley Rae. What is it about a wedding that makes a perfectly agreeable girl turn into a raving, shrieking, lunatic bitch?”
“Betsey Forst was shrieking? That little mouse? I’ve never even heard her talk above a whisper.”
“She was Bridezilla,” Austin said. “I kept expecting her head to swivel all the way around on her neck. You know, she actually pelted me with her bouquet? Said the color of the Tineke roses I had shipped in from Ecuador made her physically ill. Do you know I had to get up at five this morning and drive to the Atlanta airport to pick the things up and bring them back here and get them conditioned in time to make up that bouquet?”
“The little ingrate,” I said. “So you just had one wedding today?”
“Three! Three nightmare weddings,” Austin said, swigging more Diet Coke. “The second one wasn’t so bad. Lindsey Winzeler is a doll. But Carolyn Shoemaker. I swear, you don’t want to get me started on that one. I told her a bouquet made entirely of fruit was a bad idea. But she absolutely insisted. So it’s her own damn fault she sprained her ankle. Where do they get these ideas?”
“Martha Stewart,” I said helpfully. “It’s all Martha’s fault. That damn magazine ought to be outlawed. My clients read it too. And they clip out the pictures and want me to find them a chair just like the one in Martha’s house in Connecticut. Which is always some one-of-a-kind eighteenth-century hand-carved Jacobean job that costs more than my parents’ first house.”
Austin nodded agreement.
“You never mentioned how Carolyn Shoemaker sprained her ankle,” I pointed out.
He rolled his eyes. “Champagne grapes. They were supposed to be little tiny champagne grapes in the bridesmaid’s bouquets. Those are the ones the size of English peas. So what does the mama bring in for me to work with? Big old hulking green grapes. And they weren’t the freshest. That’s what happens when you try to do something on the cheap. But they insisted it would be fine, so I wired them up. What do I know? I’m just a professional floral artist. Anyway, the six bridesmaids go floating down the aisle with their rooty-tooty fresh and frooty bouquets. And invariably some of the grapes fall off. And get mashed on that slippery hardwood floor. The next thing you know, little Miss Shoemaker’s pump hits one of the suckers, and she goes flying ass over teakettle.”
He started to laugh in spite of himself. And then I started to laugh. And pretty soon streams of Diet Coke were shooting out my nostrils. Not so pretty. He had me crying. Only this was good crying.
“I’d love to have seen that,” I said, wiping the tears with my shirt-sleeve.
“Call up Billy Howard,” Austin said. “He was videotaping the whole thing. I hope he didn’t miss the part where the groom reached down to try to help her up and slipped his ownself and screamed FUCK! Right there in front of the entire St. Anne’s congregation.”
After that I had to get up and get some paper towels to mop the tears off my face. I was already feeling better.
“So, what’s up, toots?” Austin asked, sweeping some of the clutter on his workbench into a big trash can.
“I’ve been playing Nancy Drew,” I started.
“No,” Austin said. “This was all my idea. I get to be Nancy. You have to be Bess or George. Take your pick.”
“Bess was plump and George was probably lesbian,” I said. “Not much of a choice, when it comes down to it. Anyway, I talked to Daddy. You know, about Mama.”
He patted my shoulder. “Good for you! What did you find out?”
“He hired a private detective, after she left, but all he managed to come up with was the fact that she’d sold her car in Birmingham, for eight hundred dollars.”
Austin’s face fell. “That’s all? He has no idea where she went, or whether she went off with that man?”
“No. But he did tell me I could look in the old employee files to see if I can find Darvis Kane’s date of birth and Social Security number.”
“It’s a start,” Austin said. “How was he about the whole thing? Was he angry about you stirring all this up?”
“No,” I said. “He says he made peace with the whole thing a long time ago, but he understands why I need answers. But he won’t talk about Darvis Kane. He made that real clear.”
Austin put down his Diet Coke can. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get cracking on those old files.”
“They’re in the basement at Daddy’s house,” I said. “And now would be a good time, since he’s at the lot all day. I was thinking, I could give you the key, and you could look through the files.”
“And what, may I ask, are you going to be doing while I’m knee-deep in silverfish and mildew down in that basement?”
I looked out the plate-glass window of Fleur, toward the square. The big old red brick county courthouse blocked the view, but on the other side of it was another shop, about the same size as this one. The name on the forest green awning said Kathleen’s Antiques now, but if you looked closely, you could see where Charm Shop had been painted out all those years ago.
All week long, I’d been thinking about going in to Kathleen’s, to see Chrys Graham. Now, it seemed, would be a good time to visit my mother’s old friend.