I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(3)

“Completely normal,” said my mother, briskly.

“Oh, yes,” Cornelia said, nodding. “Classic, even. Prewedding jitters. Cold feet. Absolutely everyone gets them.”

“Did you?” I asked.

Cornelia suddenly became occupied with poking a single iris into a hillock of hydrangea, narrowing her eyes, positioning the flower just so.

“You didn’t, did you?” I asked.

“Oh. Well. Gosh. I . . .”

“Cornelia.”

She gave me an apologetic smile and shook her head. “Nope. I was actually even a little impatient.”

“A little?” said my mother, with a snort. “I know it was over a decade ago, but I seem to remember your trying to browbeat Teo into eloping with you even after you two had set a date and signed the catering contract.”

I laughed. For my professional party-planner mother, the catering contract marked the point of no return.

“I may have done that. Once or twice.” Cornelia laughed. “Per day, every day leading up to our wedding, including at our rehearsal dinner. But I’d known him since I was four years old. It was time to get that show on the road.”

“What about you, Mom? Jitters?”

“Oh, not with Gordon, but remember, I was twenty years older than you are now. With my marriage to your father, though, God, yes. Jitters upon jitters.”

“Your marriage to my father lasted all of three years,” I pointed out.

“Three years and nine months, actually. I just kicked him out after three.”

“Oh, much better. Very reassuring.”

Simultaneously, my mother’s and Cornelia’s faces softened into looks of concern. Oh, those two women. Suddenly, all I wanted in the world was to sit there with them, blessed by the beam of their gaze, watching the sun glance off their glossy heads of hair, and tucking flowers into other flowers, all day. Or for the next three days. Or for a lifetime. Sit, bless, beam, glance, tuck. Yes, a lifetime would be good.

“Darling,” said my mother, quietly, “do you need reassuring?” just as Cornelia reached across the table and pressed her hand over mine.

“Of course not,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “It’s just—” A sob snagged in my throat.

“It’s all right,” said my mother. “Whatever it is it’s all right.”

“Of course it is, sweetheart,” said Cornelia. “Never fear.”

I planted my elbows on the picnic table and covered my face with my hands.

“Please,” I said from behind my hands. “Just—”

“What?” said Cornelia. “We’ll do anything.”

I flapped my hand in their direction. “Talk!” I squeaked.

“About what?” asked my mother.

“Anything!”

We sat, tinsel threads of birdsong drifting and tangling in the air around us. Finally, Cornelia said, “I’m calling it. Time of death 9:41 a.m.”

Through a gap in my fingers I saw her holding the remains of the iris. She lifted it to her nose.

“Well, that’s interesting, Viviana,” she said.

“What?” asked my mother.

“This flower has been lacerated, mutilated, has suffered devastating internal injuries . . .”

“And external,” supplied my mother.

“Profound external injuries,” agreed Cornelia.

“She was twisting it,” observed my mother, “in addition to ripping it.”

“I saw,” said Cornelia. “The thing is horribly injured and irreversibly dead. And yet it still smells lovely.”

“Like jellyfish.”

“Precisely,” said Cornelia.

“Even when they’re dead and washed up on the beach, they’d sting you as soon as look at you.”

“They would.”

“Oh, and what about that mad dog in To Kill a Mockingbird?” said my mother. “The one Atticus shoots and then says is—”

“Just as dangerous dead as alive,” finished Cornelia, grimly. Through my fingers, I watched her nod. “Actually, I looked that up once.”

“I thought maybe you had.”

“And what I discovered is that the rabies virus can live on for months in the body of a dead animal in freezing temperatures.”

“But it never gets that cold in Alabama,” said my mother, skeptically.

Cornelia smacked the tabletop. “Exactly what I said to myself! Alabama is such a warm state that it isn’t even that cold in February, which is when Atticus shot the dog. However, even in warm temperatures, the virus can live for hours and can be transmitted as long as the saliva is still wet!”

“Saliva is such an unappealing word. And I wouldn’t say that that accounts for the statement that the dog was as dangerous dead as it had been when it was alive and staggering toward them down the street.”

“No. But I suspect Atticus exaggerated in the interest of protecting his children.”

“That would be just like him,” said my mother. “Oh! And then there’s the praying mantis.”

“Ah, yes,” said Cornelia, with relish, shifting into a nature show narrator’s voice. “During the mating act, the female savagely bites the head off the male, and, undaunted by his headless state, he continues to thrust—”