Queen of Babble

But his secret isn’t guaranteed to make anyone mad at him, the way mine was.

I should have known, of course. Men can’t be trusted to keep a secret. Well, okay, I can’t be trusted to keep one, either. But I thought Luke was different from other guys. I thought I could tell him anything…

Oh my God! What else did he tell Shari? Did he tell her about the you-know-what? No, surely not. If he had, she’d have said something. She wouldn’t have cared about shocking all those Daughters of the American Revolution. She’d have been like, “YOU GAVE ANDY A PITY BLOW JOB? ARE YOU INSANE?”

At least, I think she would have…

This is what I’m thinking to myself as I race into the house and up the stairs. I don’t see anyone on my way to the second floor, where I find Craig, tapping on the door to Vicky’s room and saying, “Vic. Let me in. Now.”

“NO!” Vicky cries in an anguished voice from behind the door. “You can’t see me! Go away!”

I approach, a little out of breath.

“What’s wrong?” I ask Craig.

“I don’t know,” the groom-to-be says with a shrug. “Something to do with her dress. I’m not allowed to see it, or it’s bad luck. She won’t let me in.”

Something to do with her dress?

I tap on the door.

“Vicky?” I say. “It’s Lizzie. Can I come in?”

“No!” Vicky cries.

But the next thing I know, the door has been flung open.

Only not by Vicky. By her mother. Who snakes out an arm, grabs me by the shoulder, and pulls me into the room with a terse “Please go away, Craig” to her future son-in-law before slamming the door shut behind us.

As I stand in the large corner room, with its pink-papered walls and enormous canopy bed, my gaze is instantly drawn to the girl sobbing on a pink stuffed chair in the corner. Mrs. de Villiers is stroking her niece’s hair in an attempt to calm her down. Dominique, looking darkly malevolent for some reason, glares daggers at me.

“Dominique says you know how to sew,” Mrs. Thibodaux says, still not having let go of my shoulders. “Is that true?”

“Um,” I say, completely confused, “yes. I mean, I can sew-”

“Can you do anything about this?” Mrs. Thibodaux demands, and spins me around so that I can get a look at her daughter, who has climbed to her feet and is now standing…

…in the most hideous wedding dress I have ever seen in my life.

It looks as if a lace factory threw up on her. There is lace everywhere…the poufed sleeves…the insert above the neckline…dripping from the bodice and skirt, then looped up in bunches all around the hem. It’s the kind of wedding dress some girls dream of…

When they’re nine.

“What happened?” I ask.

This just makes Vicky cry harder.

“You see?” she wails to her mother. “I knew it!”

Mrs. Thibodaux is chewing her lower lip. “I told her it wasn’t that bad. She’s so upset…”

I walk around the stricken bride to get a look at the back of the dress. Just as I suspected. There is an enormous lace butt bow in the back.

A butt bow.

Things could not be worse.

I exchange glances with Luke’s mother. She looks, very briefly, to the ceiling.

I have no choice but to admit the truth.

“It’s bad,” I say.

Vicky lets out a hiccupy sob. “How c-could you let this happen, Mother?”

“What?” Mrs. Thibodaux looks indignant. “I’m the one who warned you! I’m the one who kept saying not to overdo it! She designed it herself,” Mrs. Thibodaux explains to me, “and had a Parisian dressmaker hand-sew it, based on Vicky’s sketch.”

Oh. Well, that explains everything. Amateurs should never design their own dresses. And certainly not their own wedding dress.

“But I didn’t mean it to look like this,” Vicky wails. “It didn’t even look like this at the last fitting!”

“I told you,” Mrs. Thibodaux says to her daughter. “I told you not to wait until twelve hours before your wedding to try your dress on! And I told you not to add all that lace! But you wouldn’t listen. You kept saying it would be fine. You kept saying you wanted more.”

“I wanted something original,” Vicky cries.

“Well, it’s original all right,” Mrs. de Villiers says wryly.

“The question is,” Dominique says, speaking for the first time since I’ve entered the room, “can you fix it?”

“Me?” I fling a panicky glance at the gown. “Fix it? How?”

“Get rid of all this,” Vicky says with a sniffle, lifting up a limp layer of lace that hangs, inexplicably, from the gown’s bodice.

I stoop to examine the gown. It is, just as she asserted, hand sewn. The stitching is superb.

And is going to be nearly impossible to rip out without damaging the material underneath.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, it’s sewn on there really well. Removing it might leave holes. It could end up looking really weird.”

“Weirder than this?” Vicky demands, lifting her arms and revealing what appear to be wings of lace coming down from the sleeves.

“Good God in heaven!” Luke’s mother exclaims, seeing the wings.

The wings seem to have clinched the matter for Mrs. Thibodaux.

“Can’t you sew up the holes?” she asks me.

“In time for her to wear it tomorrow afternoon?” Luke’s mother’s tone is still wry. “Gi

“Oh, Lizzie is quite accomplished,” Dominique chimes in. “Jean-Luc can’t stop raving about her many talents.”

Luke can’t stop raving about me? Many talents? What talents? What is Dominique talking about?

“Really?” Mrs. de Villiers is looking at me with pointed interest. I can’t tell if it’s because of what Dominique just said, or if it’s residual curiosity concerning what I told her earlier in the evening, about her son’s medical aspirations.

“Jean-Luc says she makes all her own clothes,” Dominique says. “She even made that dress she’s got on right now.”

“What?” I’m so startled I jump. “No I didn’t. This is by A

“Oh, don’t be modest, Lizzie,” Dominique says with a laugh. “Jean-Luc told me everything.”

What is she talking about? What is going on? What did Luke say to her about me? What did Luke say to Shari about me? What is Luke doing, going around talking about me all over the place?

“It won’t take Lizzie any time at all,” Dominique is saying, “to whip Victoria’s dress into shape.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Thibodaux claps her hands together, tears-actual tears-glistening at the corners of her eyes. “Is that really true, Lizzie? Can you really do it?”

I look from Mrs. Thibodaux to Mrs. de Villiers to Dominique, then back again. Something is going on here. Something that, I’m starting to suspect, has more to do with Dominique than it does anything else.

“Do you think you can salvage it, Lizzie?” Mrs. de Villiers asks me, looking worried.

Did Luke really say I have many talents? That I’m accomplished?

I can’t let him down. Even if he did rat me out to Shari.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I say hesitantly. “I mean, I can’t promise anything-”

“I don’t care,” Vicky says. “I just don’t want to look like Stevie Nicks on my wedding day.”

I can see her point. Still-

“Take off your dress and give it to Lizzie,” Mrs. Thibodaux tells her daughter. “And change into your rehearsal-di

I didn’t point out that it seemed as if most people hadn’t been too alarmed by Vicky’s screams, since she seems to let them out so often.

A minute later I find myself standing there clutching an armful of satin and lace.

“Do what you can,” Mrs. Thibodaux says to me as Vicky, having changed into a demure pink sundress and repaired her tear-stained makeup, opens the door and goes out to greet Craig, who has been calmly waiting for her all this time.