The best part about having too many irons in the fire was that when Annie’s hopes and dreams clashed with reality, at least she had something to do. A distraction or two (or three or ten) tended to keep her productive and preoccupied and prevented her brain from imploding or her mouth from blah-blahing, especially about people and situations she had no control over. Which, of course, meantallpeople. And most situations, unless they were of her making.
She and John spent a wonderful night together. He teased her several times, pretending to unzip the garment bag that held the ugly wedding dress, then feigning despair when she wouldn’t relent. Mostly they slept, because they both were tired, and John had to work on Friday, and Annie had to finish preparing the many bars of soap she’d need for the Holiday Fair.
Which was what she was doing in the morning, standing at her workbench in the corner of the workshop, surrounded by several dozen rectangular molds, the size of containers for small loaves of bread, where her batches of soap had firmed up weeks ago. She’d since transferred the loaves to trays and, using a stainless steel cutter, sliced them into generous-sized bars, then cured the bars on racks in the open air for thirty days. Now their time was up; they were ready for market. Adding to the clutter were rolls and sheets of packing and wrapping materials: pastel mesh, colorful wire ribbon, and stacks of empty plastic totes to fill with finished products.
Annie examined large chunks of what she called snowdrops and winterberries, the latter being bright red fruits that she’d first thought were bittersweet. Until Earl had corrected her.
“Bittersweet grows on vines; winterberries on stems,” he’d said. Then he’d shown her how to find winterberries around the ponds on Chappy. “They’re always in wet soil. Not like bittersweet, which couldn’t care less where it grows.”
Earl must have taught Francine a lot as well when she and Bella lived with him and Claire for nearly a year. And though Annie often lightly referred to them as an “island family,” for Francine, the connection must be stronger: she’d lost her father to suicide when she’d been quite young, and her mother died when Francine was nineteen and Bella was just an infant. Earl, Claire, and the rest of them had become much more than an island family to Francine. It almost seemed unfortunate that her aunt and uncle had suddenly surfaced, paid her college tuition, and now offered to change her future.
With a long sigh, Annie raised her eyes and looked around the room that was supposed to be Francine’s kitchen, once Kevin’s work was done. He’d assured Annie that he wouldn’t gut the first floor until she was done prepping for the Fair—which also meant that now Francine wouldn’t hear any hammering or power-sawing and start asking questions for the next two weeks.
In the meantime, Annie worried that she might leak Francine’s secret news about the potential move back to Minneapolis after the baby came; she worried that Francine would be unhappy there; she worried that Jonas would, too. And though Minneapolis was a vibrant city, Jonas’s paintings of the Vineyard, exquisite as they were, might not sell as well in the Midwest as they did in island galleries.
Annie also worried how she would cope if she lost the little family.
And she worried that she was worrying too much.
So she turned on the radio, and went back to work.
Once she finished inspecting two dozen bars of snowdrops and winterberries, she began to wrap each piece in plain white beeswax paper—biodegradable, non-toxic, plastic-free, recyclable—after which she’d add an outer wrap of red netting, then tie the package with red wire ribbon and add the tag that readSoaps by Sutton. She was building her brand, just as Trish and her team kept building the brand for Annie’s books.
As with writing mysteries, the business of soapmaking was time-consuming and labor intensive. If Francine stopped by this morning, maybe Annie could enlist her help. And when Lucy and Abigail returned from Plymouth, maybe she would ask Abigail to help out with the dress.
Creasing and folding another sheet of beeswax paper, Annie thought about her first wedding dress, an elaborate gown. It was the late 1980s, so the shoulders weren’t only padded but also pouffed, as if small helium balloons would lift her toward the altar. The gown itself was of pure white satin and lace with a sweetheart neckline, a very full, floor-length skirt, and tapered long sleeves with twice as many tiny buttons from shoulder to wrist than the ones that John’s grandmother’s dress had running up the back.
“Are you going to keep this?” Annie’s mother asked a year or so after Brian had been killed in a car accident. Mother and daughter had been cleaning the attic because Annie’s father had died by then, too, and Ellen Sutton wanted to sell the house and buy a condominium.
“Of course I’m going to keep it,” Annie responded. Parting with her wedding gown had been as unimaginable as losing Brian once had been. She hadn’t yet learned that the only memories that mattered were the ones she kept inside her heart.
Later, when she made the mistake of marrying Mark, she brought the gown to the thrift shop, hoping a young bride would cherish it as much as she had. A few years after that, however, she heard that a costume shop bought it for thirty dollars, and that it probably wound up as a Halloween costume or in the wardrobe room at a community theater in case a script featured a 1980s wedding. Annie had been upset, but by then she also was distracted by making plans for her second wedding, her new beginning. She and Mark wound up tying the knot in Las Vegas, of all places; she’d worn a shimmering black sheath that had a single slit halfway up her thigh and a deep V-neck, and made her feel like someone she didn’t know.
But that was the past.
And Annie now had an amazing present and a promising future with a wonderful new man. It didn’t matter that she’d long ago vowed to herself that she’d never marry again. It didn’t matter that marrying John meant she would live on the Vineyard until death did them part. That’s what she wanted. Wasn’t it?
Snipping a few lengths of ribbon, Annie decided she would absolutely contact Abigail as soon as the girls returned from Plymouth. Maybe once the semester ended, Abigail wouldn’t mind stepping up for her family—unless, of course, she moved to New Hampshire to be with the newboyfriend.
“Stop it this instant!” she admonished herself for being sarcastic, just as the door opened and her brother appeared.
“Oh, my God,” Kevin said, “you’re talking to yourself.”
She wiped her brow. “Yes. I enjoy that on occasion.”
“Does the groom know?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
He looked around at the mess. “Looks like you have work to do.”
“Two weeks until the Fair. Two weeks after that until my wedding. Yup. You might say I have work to do. I think I’ll ask Francine to help. It might take her mind off worrying about the baby.”
“Asking her to help sounds like a good idea,” Kevin said. “But just because I won’t be hammering, when she comes in here, she’ll probably wonder why there’s a bathtub in the middle of the floor and crates of kitchen cabinets all over the place.”
“Oh. Right.” Annie scanned the evidence that a major construction project was nearly underway.
It was the perfect time to tell him about Francine’s possible change of plans. And that it wasn’t even yet decided if she and Jonas would wind up as a couple, married or otherwise. But though Annie wished she could prepare her brother, she couldn’t betray Francine’s confidence.
