“But when will you be back? How will Jenny and I get home?”
He grinned. “I’m sure someone here will give you a ride. In the meantime, we’re going up the street for a guy lunch. No girls allowed. Except for Ruth, of course, who already left with Jeff. But since she’s just a baby, she doesn’t count.”
Butch followed Jim Bob out the door before Joanna could lob a rejoinder in his direction. By then an apron-clad Junior Dowdle had walked up behind her, grinning broadly and carrying a black baseball cap with the word bride embroidered on the front.
“Put on!” he demanded urgently, handing Joanna the cap. “Put on now.”
Knowing the cap would give her a terrible case of hat-hair, Joanna tried to weasel out of it. “Do I have to?” she asked.
“Put on!” Junior ordered again. Amid another burst of general laughter, Joanna did as she was told.
Within minutes, Joanna lost herself in the carefree mood of a wedding shower. Daisy Maxwell, owner of Daisy’s Café, had provided platters of nachos, tacos, and mini burritos. For a change, instead of hustling around with a pencil in her beehive hairdo and taking orders, Daisy herself was seated among the guests while a wait staff that included her husband, Moe, took care of the shower guests as well as the other Sunday diners on the far side of the balloon barricade.
After lunch and pieces of a wonderful lemon chiffon cake, it was time for Joanna to tackle the mountain of gifts. She was assisted in the unwrapping process by Angie Kellogg, who had finagled a day off from her relief bartending job at the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge up in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch. Angie, a former L.A. hooker, was someone whose rehabilitation Joanna and Marianne Maculyea had taken on as a joint project. Together they had helped her exit her previous line of work and had eased her way into a far more settled existence in Bisbee. Her new life came complete with a boyfriend named Dennis Hacker, an English biologist who specialized in reintroducing parrots into the wild forest lands of southern Arizona.
Angie’s newfound happiness was a testimony to the fact that Joanna Brady was making a contribution with her own life—that her efforts were accomplishing some good. That afternoon it was especially gratifying for Joanna to see Angie laughing, talking, and seemingly completely at ease among a group of women in whose presence she would have been petrified and/or self-conscious only a few years earlier. It was also fun to see Angie, as designated maid of honor, set about the mundane task of stringing colorful package-wrapping ribbon through a paper plate in order to make the traditional shower ribbon bouquet.
Not far into the pile of gifts, Joanna was grateful the men had been banished to parts unknown. Angie Kellogg’s carefully understated gift was a beautiful box of perfumed bath oils and powders. Other attendees’ gifts, however, weren’t nearly so restrained. There were several sets of sexy, slinky underwear, including a particularly racy black bikini-cut duo from Kristin Marsten, Joanna’s secretary. There were two separate peignoir sets. One, from Joanna’s mother, was a stylish but chastely cut long gown and robe in a demure cream. To Joanna’s amazement, the one from Eva Lou Brady, her former mother-in-law, was a short, flimsy see-through froth of emerald lace and silk that left nothing to the imagination.
“Eva Lou!” Joanna exclaimed. “It’s lovely, but where on earth did you get this?”
Eva Lou Brady blushed and beamed with pleasure. “Victoria’s Secret,” she said. “I ordered it from a catalog. You don’t think I’d actually set foot in a place like that, do you? I’d be too embarrassed.”
Glancing back at the growing pile of unwrapped lingerie on the table, Joanna looked around the room. “Are you guys trying to tell me something?” she asked.
Eva Lou nodded. “You’re a little too practical for your own good at times,” she said. “It’s time you lightened up. Time you stopped taking everything so seriously.”
“I’ll try,” Joanna said with a laugh. Then, ignoring the strictures about not breaking any strings at a wedding shower, she tore into the next package.