Roz Fox - The Secret Wedding Dress

The girl nodded, her face streaked with tears.

“I’m worried about my cat. Daddy’s real busy, but Fluffy’s only ever lived in a ‘partment. I don’t want to leave her, ‘cause maybe she’ll get lost.”

“Ah.” Sylvie considered the distance from her to the cat. It wasn’t that the span was so great, but the limb seemed pretty frail. “Where was your apartment?”

“Atlanta. I’m six, almost. I loved my school and my teacher. Do you think they’ve got a nice school here?”

“I’m sure of it. I lived in Briarwood all my life, well, except for a few years I went off to work in New York City. There’s a bunch of things that’re way better here.”

The girl stared at Sylvie with huge, watery eyes. “I’ll like it okay. My daddy said it takes time to get used to somewhere new. What happened to your dog? My daddy said that dog’s gonna be trouble.”

Sylvie smiled at the girl who obviously planned to parrot everything her father said. No telling what she might discover about her new neighbors at this rate.

“Oscar isn’t really my dog,” she explained. “Normally he’s friendly and loveable. I bathe pets and sometimes dogsit, too. Look, honey, why don’t I try to get Fluffy down?”

“I’d like that, thank you,” the child said politely.

Sylvie inched out on the limb. “Is your last name Whitaker?”

“Uh-uh. Mercer. Rianne Mercer. My daddy’s name is Joel, and my mommy’s name is Lynn.”

Creeping out several more inches, Sylvie absorbed those facts. It must mean that Iva’s great nephew had sold his inheritance. She was about to ask, when she heard the limb crack. Her heart jackhammered wildly. The Mercers’ back door flew open and the man with the gruff voice called, “Rianne? Where are you, sweetie? The movers need you to tell us where you want your bed.”

The girl swung around. “Can I come in a minute, Daddy? Fluffy’s still in the tree.”

Sylvie heard dark muttering that mirrored the thoughts running through her head. Then she heard a sound like pebbles striking metal. Rianne’s dad was pouring dry cat food into a bowl—but that only occurred to her when, big as you please, Fluffy leaped down from her perch. She landed safely below on all fours and dashed through her back door. Rianne shouted gleefully and raced after her pet.

Sylvie was glad her ignominious fall into her yard, limb and all, took place after her obnoxious, arrogant neighbor had closed his door. Luckily, her pride was all that suffered injury. Although, she mused, limping toward her cabin, who knew what aches and pains she’d have come morning?

JOEL MERCER had gotten a fair glimpse of his neighbor, wrapped tight around a sagging tree branch. His earlier impression had been of a scrawny dark-haired woman in her mid-to-late twenties, who behaved in a somewhat bizarre fashion. Hell, what was he thinking? She’d acted like a complete fruitcake.

Seeing her on to that branch was his second glimpse, and it did nothing to alter his first opinion. She’d changed clothes to climb trees, apparently. Her hair no longer hung straight to her chin as it had; she’d secured a twist atop her head with what resembled a large metal chip-bag clip. Spiky hair poked out every which way. Joel wondered if she’d been attempting to spy on him. Was that why she’d decided to swing through the trees like Jane of the jungle? God only knew, but Joel had run into of some pretty odd women hanging out in Atlanta’s singles bars. Women he’d labeled predators. In spite of his weekly comic strip, which centered on a couple of zany cartoon girlfriends named Poppy and Rose and described their dating misadventures, Joel usually managed to keep his private life fairly tame. Making his life tamer still had been his one goal in moving to laid-back Briarwood, North Carolina, into the home he’d inherited from his great-aunt. That, and keeping Rianne from seeing her mother’s face splashed all over half the billboards in town because it confused and upset her. Joel didn’t begrudge Lynn her newly acquired high-powered TV anchor job. He did resent that she never made time to spend with their daughter.

“Rianne, let Fluffy eat in peace. I need you to come upstairs and pick the bedroom you’d like. Then we’ll set up your bed.”

The girl skipped up the curving staircase, landing hard on both feet at the top. “I never choosed my room in our ’partment.”

“Choosed isn’t a word, honey. It’s chose. And you should say apartment.”

“Why?” She slipped her hand in Joel’s.

Answering his daughter’s endless whys had been his second-biggest challenge as single dad to a precocious child. The first, he discovered, was figuring out how to safely shuffle Rianne in and out of women’s public restrooms in restaurants, malls and parks. Now, that took charm and ingenuity. He always had to garner the aid of kind, elderly ladies; he’d learned to sense which faces to trust.

“The rules about using the proper words will fall into place when your new first-grade teacher gives you word lists. I’ll help you study them.”

“Daddy, the lady next door said I’ll like school here. She said she’s lived here her whole life, ‘cept for when she lived in New York City.”

“She didn’t live in that house, Rianne. I knew the couple who lived there. Mr. Shea taught me how to fish in the lake I showed you. His wife, Mary, baked the best oatmeal-raisin cookies I’ve ever tasted. I can almost smell them even now. Okay, snooks, this is the yellow room. Across the hall, the other room is painted…violet, I guess. One of its walls is covered in flower wallpaper. We can change the paint color and pick out new paper, if you’d like.”

“I like this room, Daddy. Oh, look, there’s a bench in the window. I can see Oscar playing in the lady’s yard.”

Joel knelt on the bench and gazed down on his neighbor’s backyard. Given the amount of land attached to the Whitaker estate, he wondered why his great-uncle Harvey hadn’t picked a more secluded spot to build. “Considering the size of the neighbor’s dog and the way he scared poor Fluffy, I’d rather you stayed far away from that woman and her pet.”

“Oscar’s not hers. She baby-sits him. She gives doggies baths and sometimes dogs stay with her, like I did at my baby-sitter’s the days when you worked late.”

“Gr…eat!” Joel heaved out the word. “I see a dog run and kennels. Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought that would be a legal business inside the city limits.”

“Why?”

“Just because,” Joel said, eyeing the neighbor’s yard as the movers hauled in Rianne’s bed. He turned from the window with a frown. He’d always sworn he wouldn’t resort to answering his kids’ questions with just because. As a boy he’d had an inquisitive mind. His parents, who fought constantly, never gave straight answers. Their bitterness had led to their eventual breakup and to his estrangement from them. Which was another reason this house and Briarwood held such fond memories for him. Iva and her good friends, Bill and Mary Shea, had nothing but time to lavish on a lonely, neglected boy. Joel’s folks had finally split the year he’d turned fifteen. His dad, a career Army man, went on to a new duty station in Hawaii. He’d remarried ASAP, and his new wife had given birth to a son. Joel’s dad seemed to forget he had an older son from his first marriage. He retired in Hilo, so Joel had never met his stepbrother. And his mom had continued with her job in Atlanta until she, too, met and married a new man. Seventeen by then, Joel elected to stay behind. His high school teachers and counselors secured him an art scholarship, for which he’d always be grateful. As a lonely child, he’d coped with moving from one army base to the next by drawing funny caricatures of the people around him. His drawing ability, combined with observational skills and a dry wit made him a good living from the time he’d hired on to create political cartoons a decade ago, to now. After a few years, the paper had offered him his own, more lucrative, weekly strip, which went into syndication a while ago.