The Wedding Dress(63)

“Milk, please.” Sounded good. Charlotte squeezed her arms against her sides, warmed by Hillary’s frank but tender demeanor.

Over glasses of milk and cinnamon muffins, the women chitchatted, getting to know each other. Hillary had been a nurse in the navy, then at St. Vincent’s.

Charlotte owned a bridal boutique.

Hillary had married Greg when she was in her forties. He was a retired naval officer who worked as a civilian contractor.

Charlotte was thirty and still single.

They both loved sunny, hot days. Dogs. And Michael Bublé.

“Are you successful?” Hillary leaned on the chair’s arm. “Your shop, I mean.”

“Five years and counting. I’m in the black most of the time. Tawny Boswell recently bought her wedding dress from us.”

“Tawny Boswell. Miss Alabama? Well, well.”

Charlotte smiled. Hillary didn’t seem the kind to know about beauty queens.

“I can tell by your face you’re surprised I know about Miss Alabama.” Hillary rocked back in her chair, bringing her coffee mug to her lips. “I was a Miss Teen Alabama finalist in 1962.”

“Really?” Charlotte said, smiling. “You just don’t seem like the beauty pageant type.” Why did it sound like an insult? “I mean, the fuss and pretend. The phoniness.”

“Twenty years as a navy nurse will get the frippery out of you.” She drank her coffee. She didn’t sip. She drank. “You don’t have to look sheepish. I’m not the same woman I was then. Nor the woman I thought I’d be when I reached sixty-five. So tell me, why’d you come? You said you found something that belonged to me?”

“I was hoping you could help me solve a mystery.” Charlotte took the silk sachet from her purse and handed it to Hillary. Bethany had returned it, sample sachets already made, and Charlotte tucked the dog tags back inside the original. “I found this in a trunk I bought at an auction.”

At first Hillary didn’t show any recognition. But when her fingers touched the silk, they were trembling. Her nose and eyes reddened. “Well, mercy—” Emotion watered her voice and her eyelids fluttered. “I didn’t ever expect to see this again.”

“The dog tags are inside. Did you put them there?”

“I take it you finagled a way to open up that trunk?” Hillary poured the tags into her hand and closed her fingers over them. “I wanted to burn the whole kit and kaboodle the night after his funeral.”

“I read his body was never recovered.”

“He was blown to pieces. There was no body to recover.” Hillary reached down beside her chair for a tissue. “I didn’t think anyone would ever get into that trunk after I torched it closed.”

“It wasn’t easy. My friend had to cut it open.”

“Guess I’m not the welder I thought I was.” The soft curve of Hillary’s smile caught the slow drift of a solo tear. She caressed Joel’s dog tags. “I still miss him. Forty some-odd years later, I miss him.”

“You were married before he left?”

“We had the loveliest backyard wedding at my parents’ home—not far from here, actually. Joel was set to leave and I wanted to marry him so bad. I had a year left of college, but he’d be in Nam. I thought we should seal our love with a wedding. I just knew our love was stronger than death.”

“Maybe it is, Hillary. You still love him, right?”

Hillary wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Our love wasn’t bulletproof. It didn’t keep him alive. I don’t know how it was with losing your mama, but with Joel I found it awfully hard to have closure on a life that never got started. All our dreams were on hold while he did his tour.” Hillary rocked back in her chair. “And there they are now, still on hold. Rusty and dusty on the shelf, lonely ’cause I never look at them anymore. He didn’t want to get married, but—”

“What happened? I mean, you got married, right?” Charlotte pictured Hillary’s and Joel’s names on the brittle cake invoice.

She smiled softly. “I’d already decided to throw him a party before he shipped out. We talked and argued about getting married, but Joel insisted he didn’t want to leave me alone, didn’t want the possibility of leaving me a widow at such a young age. The going-away party was fine, but not a wedding. I invited all our friends from college, our families. I was cleaning out the basement when I found the trunk and the dress.”

“You didn’t know it was there?”

“I had no idea. Neither did my parents. Boy, if I didn’t take that gown as some kind of sign.”

“What did Joel say?” Charlotte leaned into Hillary’s story.

“I didn’t tell him. About killed me to keep my mouth shut.” She smiled, a wrinkled nose smile that Charlotte felt in her spirit. “I wanted our last couple of weeks to be happy. Not arguing about weddings and marriage. But”—Hillary speared the air with her finger—“what I didn’t know was Joel had changed his mind about waiting. We were about halfway through his party when he got down on one knee and proposed in front of our family and friends.”

Tim had proposed in front of his family and friends too. But that story was for another time.

“The next week was a blur of wedding preparations. We got married on a Friday night, he shipped out the following Friday, and that was the last time I ever saw him.”