The Wedding Pearls Page 21

  Branch dropped a kiss on the top of Frankie’s head. “I signed out when I parked Mollybedamned. If you’ll tell me what y’all did last night to make Avery leave I might stay off the books until tomorrow morning.”

  Ivy shrugged and changed the subject. “Look, Frankie, there’s that pistol-shootin’ thing. I bet you could win one of them big polar bears.”

  “What would we do with the thing if we did win it?” Frankie asked.

  “We could let Branch give it to Maybelle and Earnestine. It would make their day and it would show that cocky little feller hawkin’ about his booth that we might be old but we can still shoot the eyes out of a rattlesnake at twenty yards.”

  Branch chuckled. “Those things are always rigged with bad sights on the guns.”

  “We know that!” Ivy and Frankie said in unison.

  Ten minutes later he carried two big polar bears across the street to give to the ladies sitting in the lawn chairs. He got hugs from both of them and didn’t have the heart to tell them that he hadn’t won the damn things.

  He’d barely made it to the cotton candy booth when Melody came running up from the other side of the lot. “Aunt Ivy, I want to get a henna tattoo. Can I please? Please? Please?”

  “What in the hell is a henna tattoo?” Ivy had a ten-dollar bill in her hand, waving it in the air so that Frankie couldn’t pay for the cotton candy.

  Melody talked so fast that Branch could barely understand her. “It’s one that only lasts a month, and there are no needles involved. And I want a butterfly on my shoulder and it costs twenty dollars and please, please, please.”

  “You pull Blister for me while I eat my warm cotton candy and we’ll go look at them. Frankie, you think me and you should get us a tattoo?” Ivy handed off the first cone to her friend and paid the lady for both of them.

  Frankie bit off a chunk of the spun sugar. “Well, hell, yeah, if there ain’t no needles goin’ to stick me. I’m scared to death of needles or pain but if it’s painted on, why the hell not.”

  “Oh. My. God. Y’all aren’t serious, are you?” Melody dropped Blister’s leash.

  “Hell, yes, we’re serious. If you can get one, then by damn I’m gettin’ one and so is Branch.” Ivy stopped until Melody picked up the leash. “It’s still nice and warm like when we were teenagers. Not all bunched up in a sack and cold as clabber.”

  “I’m not getting a tattoo of any kind,” Branch declared.

  “If you don’t, Melody can’t have her butterfly,” Frankie said.

  “You are shittin’ me,” Branch said.

  “Nope, not one bit.” Frankie grinned.

  Melody danced around him. “Please, Branch. I so want to go back to school with a tat.”

  “It’ll be worn off in three weeks,” he said.

  “I’ll be careful and cover it up when I shower and I’ll take a selfie with it tonight so Jill can show everyone how rad I am and you’ve got to get one so I can have my butterfly.” She put her hands up in a prayerful begging gesture. “And I’ll tattle on both of these old gals about what happened with Avery last night if you’ll get one.”

  “Hey, now,” Ivy protested.

  “I did not promise not to tell,” Melody said loudly. “Please, Branch!”

  “What did I ever do to make you hate me, Frankie Laveau?” he groaned. “I’ve taken care of Mollybedamned and I haven’t billed you for a single hour that I haven’t worked.”

  Frankie raised a shoulder. “It’s your turn to deal with a teenager. Me and Ivy are getting a tattoo. You and Tessa could get matching ones. Matter of fact, you and Tessa both have to get them and they have to match.”

  “Frankie!” Ivy shook her finger.

  “Okay, then.” Frankie’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll rephrase it. You and Tessa have to get one or this child can’t have one. And I still want a snow cone and maybe an Indian taco before I leave this place, so you got until me and Ivy get finished with our tats and the rest of our food to decide. Until then, Melody, you don’t leave his side.”

  “You are wicked,” Branch said.

  Frankie’s finger shot up to an inch from his nose. “And don’t you never forget it.”

  Melody grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the tattoo booth with hundreds of designs plastered all around the outside of the small kiosk. Lola was sitting in the chair and the artist was working on a set of interlocked wedding rings on her left shoulder.

  “What do you think, Mama?” she asked. “Think I should buy a little ivory halter dress to show them off at the wedding?”

  “Sounds like a plan to me. I’m having your name put on one shoulder and Tessa’s on the other,” Frankie said. “And I want them connected with a scrolling line. I’ll wear strapless to the wedding so everyone can see it.”

  “Good God! Are you serious?” Ivy huffed. “We’ve got too much baggy cellulite on our arms to wear anything strapless. Put the damn thing on your ankle. You still got good ankles.”

  “That sounds like a wonderful idea, and I might go barefoot to the wedding so everyone will see my new tattoo.” Frankie held out her foot. “I’m next in line and Ivy is right behind me. What are you gettin’, Ivy?”

  “A bunny on my left ankle and a rose on the other,” she said without hesitation.

  “I like it.” Frankie nodded.

  “Branch?” Melody looked up at him and batted her eyelashes.

  He shook his head and she went to Tessa, laid her head on her shoulder, and asked, “Do you want to know the whole story about last night? If you talk Branch into getting matching tats with you, then I’ll tell you, but if you don’t, you will never know.”

  “That’s blackmail,” Branch said.

  Melody stepped back and stomped her foot. “I’m not telling and neither is anyone else if y’all don’t, like, get a tat so I can have one. And believe me, it’s a real good story that y’all would love, but if you, like, don’t care, then keep your bodies all pure and, like, tat-free forever. But if you do want to hear it, then you’re, like, going to have to step up to the plate.”

  “Why do we have to get one?” Tessa asked.

  “If y’all don’t get one, then Aunt Ivy and Frankie won’t let me have that butterfly right there on my shoulder or on my wrist, either one.” Melody pointed. “And I want it so bad.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Lola, let me see your ankle. I want that happiness sign put on the top of my foot. Branch?”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll get the same one put on my foot. At least I can cover it up with my cowboy boots,” he said.

  “Yes! Yes!” Melody pumped her fist in the air and did a happy dance all around the booth. “This is so exciting. I love this trip. Love it, love it.”

  “What about when we get out in the boonies again and you have no reception?” Branch asked.

  “I’ll still have the pictures of me with, like, a rad tat and it’s going to be, like, so cool because, like, not a one of those cheerleaders will have one,” Melody squealed.

  “If you take the word like out of her vocabulary and cut off her thumbs, she’d go insane,” Ivy said.

  “Maybe but I’d still, like, have, like, the coolest tattoo in the mental institution,” Melody said. “Can I be next?”

  “Nope, not until Branch and Tessa get theirs done so they won’t back out,” Frankie said.

  From the cotton festival to the hotel in Plainview, Melody stayed true to her word and told them the story of Avery and what had happened the night before. The teenager’s version was told with lots of drama, complete with voices mimicking Frankie, Ivy, and Avery.

  Tessa laughed until her face hurt and when the story ended with the part about the single rose, she said, “This tat was so worth it, wasn’t it, Branch? You are all wicked and I love the whole lot of you.”

  Branch’s expression changed from happy to sad in a split second. “Y’all don’t know that woman. She will get even, and it won’t be nice.”

  “She might try, but there’s five
of us,” Frankie said. “And believe me, old age and enough money trumps youth and a pretty face any day of the week. She’d best be careful with her threats or she might find herself working pro bono in a third world country.”

  “Frankie Laveau!” Ivy scolded.

  “I swear to God with one hand on the Good Book and the other raised to heaven that she’d better back off or I’ll take care of her sorry ass. I don’t mind spending the rest of my life in prison.” Frankie caught Tessa’s eye in the rearview mirror and gave her another wink. “Now let’s talk about our tats. I love mine and I want you to take a picture of it with your phone, Lola, and send it to Inez.”

  “I’ve got, like, the coolest aunts in the whole world,” Melody said. “Jill agrees with me. I took a picture of all y’all’s tats already and sent them to her.”

  Tessa held her foot up and looked at the tat. “My mama is going to freak out.”

  A wide grin erased the sadness in Branch’s eyes. “I’m not tellin’ my family. I intend to keep it covered up until it’s gone.”

  Lola undid her seat belt and whipped around so she could see her mother when she talked to her. “Hank says he loves it and he’ll go get a real one like it with our names engraved inside the wedding bands when we’re on our honeymoon. Mama, he says we’re taking a travel trailer and we won’t come back for three or four months. You going to be okay with that?”

  Frankie nodded and patted her on the shoulder. “Of course, honey. I’ll be fine with it. Y’all can leave anytime after the middle of October. By then I’ll be more than okay with it. And think how pretty the trees will be up in Vermont and those places by then. Oh, and the antiques abound in that part of the country, so you can ship stuff home to Inez every day.”

  Frankie’s voice probably sounded perfectly normal to everyone else, but Tessa heard the hauntingly sad undertones. She quickly wiped away a tear. “Damn bug got in my eye.”

  “Ignorant things ain’t got a lick of sense. One of them dog-assed gnats flew into mine, too,” Frankie said. “Old as I am, the dumb thing ought to know that I’m all dried up and there ain’t no drinkin’ water in there for him.”

  Branch followed Lola’s directions when they reached the Plainview city limits sign and pulled Mollybedamned into the hotel parking lot without a single problem.

  He whistled all the way back to the trunk. “Hey, Lola, I’m glad you made reservations. I bet lots of those folks at the cotton festival stay in Plainview. It’s the nearest place for hotels.”

  “That’s what I figured, too, and I damn sure don’t want to sleep in a barn the night I get formally engaged,” Lola said.

  “Me, either. All that hay might, like, mess up my tat,” Melody said.

  Frankie and Ivy were slow getting out of the car, so Tessa bailed out and helped with Blister, then held on to Ivy’s arm on the way inside the big double doors that slid apart when they stepped up to them.

  “Fancy things like doors that know when to open and keys that look like credit cards. I love all of it,” Ivy huffed. “I think I overdid it a little at the carnival. I’m glad we brought all those Indian tacos home for supper and I didn’t try to eat one of them, too. But I think maybe me and Frankie both need a nap before we eat. Reckon you could take Melody with you? Her chatterin’ drives me up the walls when I’m tired, and she’s so wound up about that tattoo and the wedding. I swear she and Jill have talked it to death, but she’ll be all up in it again soon as we get to our room.”

  “Of course,” Tessa said.

  “I’ll be okay in the morning but between me and you, I don’t reckon I’ll make it the whole month. Frankie is failing, too. Don’t worry. She told me that you know,” Ivy said softly. “If we can make it until Friday, our room will be ready and we can go on to Beaumont.”

  “We can slow down,” Tessa said.

  “Hell, no! We’ll go full speed ahead until they tell us everything is in order. We’ll have plenty of time to rest then and we can spend our last days talkin’ about how much fun we’ve had our whole lives, but this trip, oh, this is the icing on the cake, Tessa.”

  “Thank you.” Tessa’s eyes welled up again.

  “No, darlin’, thank you. Lola is doing so much better with you around and Frankie, well, there ain’t enough words.”

  Tessa picked up her journal that evening and thought back over what had happened since she last wrote in it. Entries were getting easier and she found that she made mental notes through the day to write about that evening. Someday when she was as old as Frankie, she’d drag out her journal and the things she’d written on her laptop and remember the way that one month in the fall just before she was thirty changed her whole outlook on life.

  Day happiness: The days are going by fast and suddenly the calendar isn’t as important as the hours in the day or even the minutes. So today I’m dubbing happiness for many reasons. We found the cotton festival in a little town and we went to a carnival where Frankie won two huge stuffed bears. There was no way we could bring them with us in Mollybedamned, so she gave them to a couple of little elderly ladies and they thought Branch won them special for them. It was a glorious day.

  We ate cotton candy and got tattoos. Not real tats but henna ones that will fade or be washed away in a few weeks but I felt a little surge of rebellion and craziness at having even that on my body. Branch and I got symbols for happiness and there’s a bit of rebellion in my heart when I look at it. That silly Melody has already taken pictures of them and sent them to her friend.

  Lola and Hank are getting married and she says she’s cured from knitting. Melody is ecstatic with her tat. Frankie and Ivy think it’s a lark. Branch and I have matching ones and that seems to draw us closer together. And Lola got one across her shoulders that announces her love for Hank. If happiness could be contained in a car, Mollybedamned would be overflowing today.

  I felt a little apprehensive and strange that the wedding pearls would skip a generation, so there’s another thing to be glad about. Lola will wear them like she should and then someday they will be passed on down to me. Who would have thought I’d wind up with my wedding pearls from this trip? Or that I’d be willing to let my tattoo mama put them on me on the day of my wedding? Lord, I hope Mama will be okay with that. Or worse yet, Maw-Maw! My Cajun grandmother can be a handful. I suppose I should call her and tell her about this whole trip.

  But I won’t think about that now, because I don’t want any negative thoughts to ruin my happiness today.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thought this old fart was never going to wake up,” Ivy said the next morning when they were having breakfast in the hotel dining room. “I’ve got Blister and we don’t need to refill his mama until the weekend, so I can always loan her a little oxygen if she needs it to wake up.”

  Tessa’s heart stopped and her breath caught in her chest. What would happen if Frankie didn’t wake up on the trip and she had to tell Lola? She couldn’t begin to think about the horror of such a thing.

  “Oh, hush.” Frankie waggled a finger at Ivy. “All I needed was a good strong cup of coffee. Sit down here and get out your phone, Lola. I’ve looked at my map and we’re staying in Abilene tonight. So book us a room. Looks like rain, so we’ll have to keep the top up today.”

  Branch pointed at Lola. “And do not take any back roads to check out garage sales?”

  “Never again,” Lola answered. “But Mama, it’s only a little more than a hundred miles to Abilene. If we leave at ten, we’ll be there at noon and we can’t check in until two.”

  A tired smile was all Frankie could muster that morning. “We’ve decided since it’s raining to stay here until noon. That’s the checkout time anyway, and then we’re going to find a restaurant right here in town for dinner. We’re thinking a pizza buffet would be fun today. And then we’ll head toward Abilene.”

  “Okay, you are navigatin’ this boat. I’ll make some arrangements. Care to tell me where we might stop tomorrow night, and I’ll go on and get t
he reservations made there while I’m at it,” Lola said.

  “Fort Worth. We want to go to the stockyards and to a bar with loud music and dancing,” Frankie said.

  Clapping her hands and wiggling her butt in the chair dislocated Ivy’s nose tubes and she had to fix them. “That’s why we’ve decided to go easy today and tomorrow. We want to be ready to do some serious partying.”

  “I thought we were going to circle the whole state of Texas,” Lola said.

  “So did we, but our old bones are telling us that they’re getting tired so we’re going to start slowly heading for home. We’ve got a few more things we want to do on the way but we’re probably looking at getting back to our stomping grounds toward the end of the week,” Frankie said.

  Melody laid the back of her hand on her forehead, rolled her eyes, and groaned. “No, no, no! This cannot be so. Please let me stay at your house, Aunt Ivy. I’ll do whatever you say if I don’t have to go to detention for, like, two whole weeks.”

  One corner of Ivy’s mouth turned up in half a smile as she slung an arm around the girl. “I’ve talked to the judge and we’ve made a new plan. He’s going to let you go back to your regular school classes, but there is a condition. You have to go to this retirement home in Beaumont for eight hours on Saturdays and from two to five on Sunday afternoons to do your community service. Your mother will drive you there and pick you up since you won’t be allowed to drive until you are off your probation. You’re going to read mail to little old ladies or do whatever you can to make them feel special.”

  The hand came down and Melody’s eyes fixed on Ivy as if she was afraid to blink. “Are you joking? You mean I get to go to school with Jill, like, next Monday morning?”

  “I, like, mean, like, you, like, get to go to, like, school with, like, Jill, like, next, like, Monday morning,” Ivy said. “And if she wants to do volunteer work at the retirement place, she can come with you on weekends.”