The Bishop’s Wife (Linda Wallheim Mystery, #1)(4)

The cultural hall was behind the chapel in the standardized, streamlined church design that allowed three different wards to share the same building for Sunday and weekday meetings. Around those two central large rooms were hallways that led to a ring of smaller classrooms and the offices for the bishopric, Stake Presidency, and High Council. There was also a kitchen—only to be used for warming up food, since no one in the ward had a state food preparation license—on the side of the building, so it could be ventilated easily if something burned.

I found Cheri in that kitchen, with her daughter, Perdita, who was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt. Obviously she hadn’t headed off yet to have her hair and makeup done at a salon.

“How can I help?” I asked.

“Oh, Sister Wallheim! I’m so glad you’re here. The gazebo isn’t set up yet, but the pieces are in the gym,” said Cheri. “Do you think you can manage it? I asked my husband to come, but he can’t get here until four and we’ll only have two hours until the wedding then.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

There would be no elaborate dinner, nor even a luncheon for this. The reception was after the wedding itself, starting at seven, just as it had stated on the original invitations.

Perdita, who was eighteen, and her fiancé, Jonathan, had been dating steadily since they were sixteen, despite Cheri’s lectures. The Mormon church’s rules on dating were clear. No dating at all before sixteen, and no steady dating until after a mission. But apparently Perdita always said she was going on group dates (which she was) and promised her mother that she and Jonathan weren’t going to have sex before they married. Cheri thought that meant they’d wait until after Jonathan went on a mission, but Perdita and Jonathan had declared they were too much in love to wait for two years.

They might still have been married in the temple without Jonathan going on a mission. But when it came to their premarital and temple recommend interview, it turned out that Perdita and Jonathan had come so close to having intercourse that Kurt told them they couldn’t get married in the temple unless they waited another three months. And kept their hands off each other until then. Completely off. Kurt hadn’t told me specifics about what they had and hadn’t done, but it was his right as bishop to determine who was worthy for a temple recommend and who wasn’t.

In the end, Perdita and Jonathan decided to go ahead with their original wedding date. They had already sent out the invitations. They would have had to send out a set of cancellations, and then new invitations several months later. It would have been confusing, and expensive. But most of all, it would have been embarrassing. The words “sealed in the Salt Lake Temple” were embossed in gold on the wedding invitations, but since only thirty or so people were allowed into the sealing room—the closest of family members with temple recommends themselves—few people would know about the canceled temple ceremony.

“It smells wonderful, by the way,” I told Cheri and Perdita. The kitchen was filled with cinnamon, ginger, and allspice.

“It’s a kind of post-Christmas theme,” said Perdita. “I love gingerbread.”

“Ah,” I said. That explained it. I gestured at the twenty-gallon pot on the stove. “And that is?”

“Wassail,” said Perdita. Nonalcoholic.

“It’s pretty adventurous, doing it all yourself,” I said. “You weren’t tempted to get caterers?”

Perdita shrugged.

Cheri put in, “We told them that if they did it themselves, they would get the money we saved to live on.”

“Do you know how much caterers cost, Sister Wallheim?” asked Perdita, her mouth open wide.

“Actually, I do.” I had two married sons, and even if I’d never had to do as much work as the mothers of the brides, I had paid for half the catering to be fair. I also thought it was worth every penny. A wedding was stressful enough—all the family members coming in, the emotional difficulty of letting go. I didn’t think anyone should have to put more on their plate.

Cheri, for instance, looked like she had spent the last two weeks in a clothes dryer. Her hair was frizzled under the curlers she had in, and her skin was worse than the normal Utah winter desert crack.

“Well, we can live for three months on that, if we scrimp,” said Perdita.

I glanced at Cheri, who looked away. I was more and more impressed with Perdita and her good sense. She might be just out of high school, but she knew who she wanted and she knew how to survive. That was more than I could say of myself at that age. I had been a disaster, and had spent six years figuring out how to move on with my life.

“I’ll come back when I’m done with the gazebo,” I said with a nod toward the cultural hall.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” said Cheri.

The gazebo wasn’t heavy, but it was tricky to put together. I painstakingly put part A in slot B, then part C in slot D. And the gazebo went up. When it was taller than I was, I got some chairs to stand on. I heard a door open and saw an unfamiliar face bringing in flowers.

“The Tate wedding?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s here.”

He nodded and carried in several boxes of flowers, then left again.

The silver and gold ribbons were wrapped around cardboard in a pile by the door. I got them out and tried twisting them together and arranging them on the gazebo. I wasn’t an interior designer by any means, and my house was proof of that. But ribbons I thought I could manage. I poked around in the flower boxes and found some garlands to put over the top of the gazebo, as well. It wasn’t going to look like a summer wedding, but it would be nice.