Abby, Get Your Groom! Page 5

  Rather than calling him her father or Gus Glassman, she said, “He was at the factory to intimidate the supervisor so the vote wouldn’t be held. Employees testified that they were all afraid when they saw him. When he walked in, a lot of them decided not to vote at all. But the supervisor stood up to him and...” Abby shrugged. “They fought. The supervisor was killed. The newspaper articles also said that Gus had a police record stretching back to when he was a teenager. It was for minor things but still—”

  “Okay, so he wasn’t a saint. But if he was a good dad to you for those two years, that’s something.”

  Abby knew that was how her friend would look at it because that was how China viewed her own years with her mother, forgiving her mother everything because her mother had loved her. But China’s mother had done most of her harm to herself. She hadn’t killed someone else.

  “At least I guess I can be glad that Mark isn’t around for this,” Abby said then.

  “I’m glad he isn’t, too. He’d just make you feel worse about it!”

  That was true enough.

  “It’s kind of hard to feel good about it, though,” Abby confessed then. “Look farther down in the article—there’s a picture of the supervisor.”

  China did.

  “He looks like he was a nice guy, doesn’t he? The article said he was a devoted member of his church. That he worked with the church’s youth group and was a volunteer with Big Brothers—that means he was someone who tried to help kids like us. He was about the age we are now when he died. He had his whole life ahead of him and my father took it from him.”

  “Okay, your father did something bad. But maybe he wasn’t a bad person. You know I trashed that mean girl’s bike when I was ten, but that didn’t make me bad through and through, did it?”

  “The mean girl was sooo mean to you,” Abby commiserated, having heard the story about the year of constant abuse her friend had taken at the hands of the other kid. “But this isn’t the same,” she insisted. “And I don’t know, China. I know I should just be happy to find out something about myself. But—”

  “You hoped it would be something to be proud of. But what were the odds, Ab? How many kids in foster care over the years did you run into with the kind of stories we’ve made up about you?”

  “None,” Abby admitted.

  “It’s like everything else about us—we have to take what we can get and make the best of it.”

  “Because if we reach for more, like I did with Mark, we live to regret it,” Abby added.

  “That guy was a jerk who didn’t appreciate what he had. Maybe the Camden hottie is smarter than that.”

  Abby was grateful for her friend’s loyalty but it didn’t change the facts. “Right,” she said facetiously. “Like there would ever be anything between the Camden hottie and me. You and I also know what it means to be in the system and the way people see us because of that—even before they hear something like this.”

  Add to that the status and prestige of a Camden? She hadn’t even been good enough for an upper-middle-class systems analyst like Mark. She’d really be barking up the wrong tree with Dylan! And it was something she knew she had to keep in mind now.

  Now, when—despite having so much to think about with her suddenly disclosed past—she’d still found herself also thinking about Dylan Camden. And recalling every detail about that face and body. And mentally replaying everything he’d said and the sound of his voice as he’d said it. And picturing his every expression, his every gesture, his every nuance. She even kept closing her eyes and remembering how his cologne smelled like a forest filtered through clean mountain air, and the way his hair had felt when she’d cut it, for crying out loud!

  “If you don’t want to give him a chance does that mean I can?” China challenged her, yanking Abby out of the reverie she’d drifted into.

  “No,” Abby said quickly and firmly, making her friend laugh.

  “I didn’t think so,” China said, as if she’d known it all along. “And our hottie wants to help you find out everything you can about your family?”

  Abby tried not to recoil at the our part of that and say he was her hottie. Which he wasn’t. But for some reason she was inclined to make that possessive correction and had to fight not to.

  “I think Dylan and his family are on some kind of guilt trip over this,” she said instead.

  “Well, that says something good about them, doesn’t it? They—or at least their relatives—were the ones who put the wheels into motion that left you without anyone to take care of you. Somebody should feel guilty about that.”

  “To answer your question—yeah, Dylan wants to help find out whatever can be uncovered.” And to be by her side when they learned about her family—Abby kept coming back to that and to how much she liked it.

  Well, how much she appreciated it. It wasn’t that she could let herself like that he’d be with her.

  Because she was out of her depth with him, she repeated to herself like a mantra.

  And it was bad enough that she kept having that sense of him as some kind of reinforcement, she certainly couldn’t let herself come to depend on it in some way. She knew better than to depend on anyone. Well, anyone except China.

  “I’m still gonna keep my fingers crossed that he digs up good stuff,” her friend said. “Maybe not gold coins or diamonds or a crown, but all good stuff from here, and that you’ve learned the worst there is to learn.”

  “I’m gonna hope for that, too,” Abby said.

  “But since today isn’t the day somebody waved a magic wand and made us rich, I guess we’d better get dressed and go to work, huh?” China said then, glancing at Abby’s wall clock.

  They both stood and took their coffee cups and cereal bowls to the sink.

  “Want to get a pizza tonight?” China asked in the process.

  “I promised to meet Dylan at the special events shop after work to show it to him—he needs to check it out for security because he says this wedding has stirred up media interest or something. I don’t know how long that will take.”

  “I’d say I’ll wait for you but maybe he’ll take you somewhere after...”

  “It’s just business. The family wedding and this looking-into-my-background thing—that’s all there is to it and all there’s going to be to it,” Abby insisted.

  China smiled. “Still, I don’t want you committed to pizza with me, just in case.”

  Abby rolled her eyes as she put their cups and bowls in the dishwasher and her friend left.

  But she was aware that she hadn’t jumped in to insist that China wait for her tonight, to tell her friend she would make sure she was home in time for them to have dinner together.

  Because even though it would actually give her an excuse she could use with Dylan to hurry him through the tour, deep down she didn’t really want to shorten her time with him by even a minute.

  * * *

  “Okay, you’re right—I can’t see through those curtains even with the lights on in here,” Dylan said after stepping out the front door of Beauty By Design’s special occasions location and then rejoining Abby inside.

  “And we only open the curtains if the wedding or party or whatever is going to be held outside. If it is, we need to make sure the makeup works in sunlight. But if we need the makeup to work in interior lighting, we need sunlight not to be a factor. Since your sister’s wedding won’t be outside—”

  “You’ll keep the curtains closed and photographers won’t be able to take snapshots from the sidewalk if word happens to get out that this is where we are.”

  “Right.”

  “And there’s parking and a door we can use in back rather than coming in through the front. Once the whole group is here I can lock both the front and the back doors because there won’t be any other clients
coming in and out,” he repeated what she’d told him as she’d given him the tour. “I think that’s everything, and this should be okay,” he said then, taking one more glance around the opulent-looking open space designed to accommodate private groups having their hair, nails and makeup done.

  Unlike either of the other two Beauty By Design shops that could accommodate fifty customers at a time, here there were only two pedicure chairs and manicure tables, and three stations where hair and makeup were done.

  Also unlike the regular salons, there was a raised platform surrounded on three sides by full-length mirrors in case anyone wanted to try on their dress or gown for the full effect.

  Plus there was a section in one corner with a huge, comfy white sofa and two matching chairs situated around a coffee table where patrons could relax between services and enjoy the finest chocolates along with cocktails, wine or champagne—or other beverages if the group was underage for a birthday, prom, sweet sixteen, bat mitzvah or quinceañera.

  The object was to pamper clients in a party-like atmosphere that would be as much fun as the event itself while still making them look and feel beautiful.

  “But I’m supposed to ask,” he said, “if you end up doing the wedding—can it be done by you and your team coming to us rather than the wedding party coming here?”

  “It costs extra.”

  He grinned, and she tried not to like the look of it as much as she did. But that attempt failed because a smile just added so many new elements to how good-looking he was and she couldn’t help noting that.

  “The cost doesn’t matter if you’ll just do it,” he assured.

  “We do that, yes,” Abby responded. “In fact, I like when we get to.”

  “Really?” he asked as he leisurely climbed the steps up to one of the pedicure chairs—and in the process gave her a glimpse of some pretty spectacular male buns in a pair of jeans that knew just how to show off his rear end. Abby caught herself looking where she shouldn’t have been just as he turned to sit and she shot her gaze upward.

  Since he seemed to be settling in and she was in no rush, she went to sit in the other pedicure chair, angling toward him as he did the same so they were facing each other.

  “Really,” she confirmed. “If we do everything here, that’s the end of it for me. The client goes off to have their special day, but I don’t get to see any of it. If we do the work at the event we get to see more and be more involved in occasions that I’d never get to be a part of otherwise.”

  “You don’t think you’ll ever get married?” he asked, sounding surprised.

  “Even if I do it can’t possibly be on the scale that your sister’s wedding will be. And the other stuff—proms and the coming-of-age celebrations, the Debutante Ball—those are things I never got to have, no.”

  “You never went to a prom?”

  She shook her head then motioned with it to their surroundings. “I also never knew anyone who could pay for something like this. But now I get to participate in these big, fancy things indirectly. If we go to the venue I usually have the chance to peek in to see the flowers or the decorations or the cake. If we’re hired to stick around for hair changes and makeup retouches, I get to hear the music, sometimes some of the food gets sent to us—we aren’t guests but we get to experience some of it on the sidelines, and...” she shrugged “...that’s fun for me. These are some of the happiest, most joyful and hopeful times in people’s lives and I get to be a part of it. I get to help make it special, to make them look and feel beautiful for it, sometimes I get to see it—how nice is that?”

  “I think it’s nice that that’s how you look at it,” he said, studying her as if he was getting insight into her. “Is that why you became a stylist?”

  Abby laughed. “You’re so funny to think there were a lot of choices in what I could become.”

  “You’re smart, talented—”

  “And you think that made a lot of difference?” she asked, even as she took his words as a compliment and reveled in the possibility that that might be what he thought of her. “When I was thirteen,” she went on, “I needed to pick whether I planned to get a job right out of high school or if I wanted to try to go to college or trade school.”

  “At thirteen?”

  “It isn’t easy for kids in the system to follow the same course as kids with families who can afford to just let things play out. The world is not our oyster. So school counselors and case workers and just about every adult I ever came into contact with, warned me that I needed to plan for myself—”

  “Starting at thirteen?”

  “That was how old I was when I went to middle school. Before that, everybody learns the same things. But when I had to start picking some of my own classes, I needed to start thinking realistically about whether I wanted to go to college or trade school or just get a job. For me, trade school seemed like the middle of the road—something I was reasonably sure I could get into and afford with subsidized tuition, and something that wouldn’t take as long as college before I could come out with some kind of skill to support myself.”

  “So you didn’t choose to be a stylist at thirteen, you just chose trade school.”

  “Right. Which meant I wasn’t put in the same classes as kids aiming for college.”

  “What if you had changed your mind?”

  “I could have. But when I sort of toyed with the idea of college a few years later it was discouraged. My grades were good enough to get in somewhere, but my counselor said if I did, how was I going to pay for it? And how was I going to make enough money to live, too? Scholarships, grants, living stipends—things like that aren’t a guarantee. I was warned not to plan on them. And no one ever let me forget that at the stroke of eighteen I was on my own.”

  “Without any help? Eighteen is still just a kid...”

  “Not when you’re in the system it isn’t. Mature, immature, ready or not, you’re an adult. There are some short-term transitional services and there’s a little funding to get started, but basically, yes, you’re on your own, without help. Unless you go on welfare and food stamps and go that route, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to if I could be close to supporting myself when I graduated high school.”

  He took a deep breath and blew it out with puffed cheeks, his eyebrows arched over those blue eyes as if the image she was painting was baffling to him. “Eighteen and on your own without family as any kind of safety net.”

  “Without anything or anybody. If China and I hadn’t become friends and stuck together neither of us would have had anyone at all to turn to or count on. We were in independent-living housing by the time we each turned eighteen, and because we hadn’t dropped out of high school and were getting good grades, we were allowed to stay through graduation. But right after that we were out the door. And once we were, I had two more calls from my case worker to see how I was doing. China only had one and—”

  “That was it?” he asked as if it was hard to fathom.

  “That was it. Because I’d opted for trade school at thirteen I got to have some of my high school classes at the trade school—which was when I decided doing hair might be something I was good at—and it gave me a head start to finishing not long after graduation. And that’s how I came to this. So, no, I didn’t become a stylist just so I could be on the fringes of weddings and parties. But I’m glad it worked out that way and I think of it as a perk.”

  “And that’s what you’ve done for how long?”

  “I went to work a few months before I turned nineteen so...eleven years.”

  “Did you go to work at Beauty By Design at nineteen?”

  She laughed again. “Uh...no, I worked in about a dozen different shops before that.”

  His eyebrows arched. “How come?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Someone I knew had a theory that no
t staying in one place for long was what I was used to because of the way I grew up—that I had a transient upbringing and that made me unstable.” Mark’s opinion. “But I think it’s just hard to find a good fit.”

  “Is Beauty By Design a good fit?”

  “I think so. For now. I’ve been with this shop for four years, which is the longest I’ve been in one place—that must mean something, right?” Which Mark had disregarded. “But I guess my résumé doesn’t say much for my sticking power—twelve different salons in seven years...”

  “You stuck with the same occupation, though,” Dylan pointed out.

  “That’s true.” And she wished it was an argument she’d thought to use before.

  “What about you?” she asked then, for some reason feeling free to treat this as just any other conversation with any other person. “Did you say you do security?”

  “I did and I do. I’m head of all of the security in every form for Camden Superstores and Camden Incorporated.”

  “Along with the security for your sister’s wedding?” she asked, because his title seemed too elevated for something like that.

  “Along with my sister’s wedding.”

  “So while all the girls are here doing hair and nails and makeup and girlie things, and drinking and eating chocolate, you’ll do what? Stand like a guard at the gate?”

  It was his turn to laugh. Before his handsome face screwed up into a pained sort of expression. “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

  “You couldn’t delegate that job?”

  He laughed again. “Ordinarily I would have. But I have some things to make up to my family and I’ve been out of the country for the last three months, so taking care of the wedding security myself and giving it all the personal touch is just sort of the way I think it needs to be done this time.”

  “You were out of the country for three months?”

  “Working on the security issues in our European stores.”

  “Like, because of terrorist threats or something?”

  “Well, those are everywhere these days. But that wasn’t the primary purpose. Mostly I just refined systems, increased security against hacking, met with teams over there so I could get to know personnel and establish a presence...” He chuckled a bit wryly. “That all sounds really professional, doesn’t it?” he asked with a humility she liked. “But the truth is that none of it was necessary. Mostly I was just getting away.”