I opened my mouth again, but not for chocolate this time. Rather for a heaping dose of humble pie. I was determined to swallow, no matter how bad it tasted. Hopefully, she’d go easy on me. “I know you don’t have to be here.” I walked over and put my hands on her shoulders, careful not to touch her skin in case some lye from earlier might have snuck under my fingernails. I’d gone to scratch my back after a batch once and almost killed myself.
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me the past few months. You’re always here for everybody. Me. Tracey. Jericho. Tracey’s wedding totally rocked and it wouldn’t even have happened if not for you. Shoot, Tracey probably would have forgotten to show up. But you made it possible, because that’s what you do—look out for people and it’s okay for you to look out for yourself, too. I guess I’m—well, I guess I’m just a little left out, you know?”
Rochelle nodded. “Yeah. We’ve all done everything together for a long time. It feels real weird that Tracey isn’t here today. Opening this shop…”
I laughed. “Yeah. I knew there was too many fries for some reason.”
“You two are some eating fools.” She shook her head. “But I know what you mean about feeling left out. Right now, my son has locked me out of his life while he waits for his ‘Dad’ to arrive. Tracey has moved on…and you—”
Me? “What? I’m still the same. Nothing’s changed.”
Rochelle swallowed hard and looked up at the chandelier, then around at the slowly filling shelves. “Everything’s changed, baby girl. You just don’t know it yet.”
The grand opening wasn’t exactly grand, probably because I was comparing Wonderfully Made’s one little, two little, three little customers with the line of giggling women spilling onto Adrian’s sidewalk. I did manage to snag a few browsers who wanted to buy everything in the store—at a discount.
Brides. Mothers-of-the-Bride. Wedding planners. Even a few grooms. They’d come in small but steady numbers looking for favors for their weddings. I could just imagine the possible impetus of this phenomenon—Renee waving one of my baskets and comparing the prices with her latest Fingerhut catalog.
“Can I get this in lavender? This salt scrub?”
I gritted my teeth at the silver-haired matriarch, so much like my mother would have been. “No. That’s the bottle for the Plumeria products. The lavender is a much lighter shade. If you’d—”
“This is lavender. That’s lilac. Brook’s wedding colors are not lilac. Can’t you just pour that into some of these bottles and put her name on this cute label?”
Oh, fun. “I’m really not set up to do personalized favors. My printer—”
“I’ll pay extra and we’ll take all that you have here for the spa party with the bridesmaids.” She fumbled with a large Mount Blanc pen. “What do you say?”
What could I say? To have any hope of paying Rochelle back, I needed to sell as much as possible. “Sold. Let’s step over here to work out the details. Can you spell Brook’s last name here…”
The morning continued like that, bargains struck and checks written, all for projects I hadn’t planned on. As much as I appreciated the business, the glee and glow of the soon-to-be-wed, and their uptight family members, was doing damage to my nerves. Could anybody be that happy? And for how long? Tracey had smiled like that, too.
Days turned in my devotional Bible, each one dotted with little sleep and much stress as the exacting wedding planners and haggling mothers-in-law flooded my shelves.
As much as I wanted to go berserk over Jordan and confront Rochelle, I didn’t have time. I’d seen her at church last Wednesday night, tripping up the step in a new pair of shoes—lime green. Her guilty color. Though she waved and ran on, I figured Rochelle had probably seen Jordan and didn’t want to feel bad because he still hadn’t bothered to contact me. Her contrition was thoughtful, but unnecessary. My brother and I hadn’t been close. Though I’d prayed for this time to be different, there was no use breaking the rules now.
Adrian had been a curiosity, too, working hard outselling me, and spending the rest of his time trying to hook up with me and talk business. Though I knew we needed to be getting together, strategizing, I knew that neither of us would be thinking of marketing if we were within a foot of each other. What I didn’t know