Instead, she smiled and said, ‘You always were so decisive, Scotty. What’s your secret?’
She thought she saw a flicker of resignation in his smile. ‘Some might call it stubbornness,’ he said.
‘Can you give me some tips? I feel utterly incapable of making decisions.’ It was the most honest thing she’d said to him all morning.
‘You’re more decisive than you think,’ Scotty said, echoing Jackie’s sentiments of a few days earlier. This time his smile was warm, genuine. ‘You just take your time with it. There’s nothing wrong with that.’
Isn’t there? she wanted to shout. Perhaps if she’d been a little less deliberate in her decision-making process over the years, she wouldn’t be back in Bindallarah helping her first love choose the menu for his wedding.
CHAPTER TEN
It was nearing dusk by the time Claire staggered, exhausted, into Vanessa’s cottage and collapsed next to Gus on the sofa.
‘Tough day?’ her cousin asked, looking up from her Cosmopolitan magazine.
‘You have no idea,’ Claire groaned, kicking off her rubber thongs. Her feet ached as intensely as if she’d run a marathon in stilettos.
She must have traipsed ten kilometres up and down Bindy’s main street. After leaving the butcher shop, she and Scotty had gone to the bakery to choose a wedding cake. For once, he had lacked his usual resolve. He wanted an enormous traditional fruitcake, but with only ten days to go it simply wasn’t possible. Claire had sold him on the benefits of a ‘cake’ made of tiers of individual cupcakes instead – one for each of his guests and easily able to be made within the ever-narrowing timeframe.
When Scotty had to get back to work at the clinic, Claire had continued on alone. She felt conspicuous as she shopped for streamers and balloons in the discount store. It seemed somehow wrong to be making decisions about the wedding with neither the groom nor the bride present. She tried calling Nina to ask her to come along, but the call went straight to voicemail and Claire figured she must be teaching a yoga class. She worried the decorations she chose were a little bit twee, but with nobody on hand to approve or reject her decisions, she wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to do. Anyway, she reasoned, nobody was really going to expect sophisticated styling at a country wedding thrown together in mere weeks.
Next, armed with a list of Scotty and Nina’s favourite songs, Claire met with the DJ – yet another old schoolfriend, Jared Miller, who was a surfing instructor by day and moonlighted as a one-man mobile disco – and vetoed all the gangster rap that inexplicably peppered his playlist.
Then she went to Bindallarah’s lone florist. The wedding was cocktail style, meaning there wouldn’t be a formal meal, so she didn’t have to bother with table centrepieces. Claire chose two towering arrangements of natives to stand either side of the altar, and hoped Nina liked Australian flora as much as she did.
When the florist asked about the bride’s flowers, Claire had balked. Surely, even with Nina’s laidback approach to wedding planning so far, her bouquet was something she would want to choose for herself. Claire sent her a text message and Nina’s reply was swift and direct:
Happy 4 U 2 decide. Whateva goes w green! N ☺
Hesitantly, Claire selected a soft-pink protea surrounded by cream roses, Esperance pearl and sprigs of eucalyptus. She was tempted to throw in some bright-red poppies for a truly Christmassy touch against Nina’s mint-green dress, but something told Claire that this particular bride would prefer something understated.
‘How was everyone?’ Gus asked as Claire kneaded the burning arches of her feet with her thumbs.
‘What do you mean?’ she replied. ‘Everyone who?’
Gus rolled her eyes, as if her older cousin was particularly dense. ‘Everyone in town,’ she said. ‘Mum told me you’ve been worried they’d, like, chase you with pitchforks or something. So were they cool? Do I need to beat up anyone for you?’
Claire snickered. She didn’t doubt that Gus would go in to bat for her if she asked her to. She may be just eighteen, but she was as assertive and unapologetic as any woman Claire had ever met.
‘You know, it was okay,’ Claire said. ‘Kind of nice to catch up with people, actually.’
Vanessa was right. Claire hadn’t realised it, but she had been skulking around town with her head bowed for the past five days. She was so sure the people of Bindallarah still detested her – still blamed her for deserting her father, for driving him to deceive them all – that she unconsciously expected abuse at every turn. Toby Watts’s comments that morning had only confirmed that she wasn’t welcome by anyone aside from Vanessa, Gus and Scotty.
And yet everyone else she’d spoken to throughout the day had been friendly. Some even seemed pleased to see her after such a long time. Karen Steiner, the bakery manager, once a close friend of Claire’s mother, had wrapped her in a tight hug and made her promise to come over for coffee before she went back to Sydney.
At the discount store she’d bumped into Eloise Marshall, one of her best friends from primary school, who now worked on the checkout. Eloise had ignored the grumbling customers behind Claire in the checkout queue to show her photos of her kids and the house she was building just out of town.
Jared Miller had asked her all about her work as a vet – and then asked for her phone number. She gave it to him with the proviso it was to be used for wedding business only, but she felt surprisingly flattered that he’d asked.
‘That’s awesome,’ Gus said. ‘What were you so stressed about anyway? Why would anyone in Bindy have a problem
