If At First

Part 17 - Chapter 16

I, am going to kill Andy. This must have been a part he forgot about while he was unconscious. But if he created all these things to gamble away in a poker game and Haven ended up winning more from him than Fitch did, what on earth did he lose to Haven?

"Thank you Fitch, I think I'll pass."

"Then we've reached a stalemate." He scoffed.

"We really haven't."

"You could join me for a sail. The sky is beautiful at this time of evening and I'm docked just over in the harbor,"

I glared at him disdainfully. "Another time, maybe." My hand was on the door handle and I heaved it open for him, suggesting it was time to depart.

"You're sure?" He smiled deceitfully, and shrugged. "Fine then, I will be seeing you very soon." He said, and ran the back of his finger down my cheek before nodding courteously to Beverly on his way out.

"That guy makes my skin crawl." Beverly said when the door closed behind him, "Always has."

"Yeah, well your instinct isn't wrong."

"I was coming to tell you Michelle is ready for you."

I ran up the stairs for my fitting with Michelle while approaching an overwhelming level of anxiety, and entered what was now considered the fitting room. I stood on the platform in front of the three way mirror, staring absently at a bird flitting from branch to branch outside the window. "What's the matter with you today?" Michelle asked. "You're quieter than normal."

'I'm not, I just...was thinking."

"Do you hate your dress?"

I looked, for the first time, at my reflection. My jaw dropped, and every thought, every worry, every everything left my head. The exquisite image facing me was the single most amazing creation I'd ever witnessed. A delicate, strapless white taffeta confection figured beneath an off-shoulder black lace overlay with the most flatteringly feminine silhouette imaginable, and every earmark of an expert eye with the most carefully detailed artistry, stood before me.

"Hate it?" I gasped, "Michelle! You're sure you want me to wear this?" I stared wide-eyed at my reflection.

"Well I made it for you, didn't I?" she tsked under her breath, "What a silly question. It did turn out rather nicely, didn't it?" She rose from her position near the floor where she had been adjusting a hem and skipped across the room smiling, "I have your shoes ready as well."

I turned to the side to see the back, and looked down at myself to make sure it was really me. I was so entirely undeserving of this dress. No one was deserving of it. I tried imagining either Nana or Michelle as some kind of fairy godmother, but it wouldn't fit.

Michelle returned cradling the shoes in her arms like a baby and I knew I would never make it out of the room in one piece.

"Am I still supposed to model those at the party?"

"It's a gala, not a party. But I don't think it will be at all necessary for you to stand up and model them. If anyone can peel their eyes away from the rest of you, they'd be willing to sell their eye teeth to buy any part of what you're wearing. You still have to take a spare set though. Whoever does win these will probably want them right away."

"I suppose going barefoot isn't an option?"

"Unquestionably, dear." She answered, looking a bit exhausted, "unless you're trying to start a new trend, which I don't doubt you could easily do."

"She wants nothing of the sort." My grandmother said, announcing her arrival to the room in a grand manner. "And if she was, it wouldn't be one that included going without shoes to a social gathering where Darling Casey was in attendance."

"What do you think ma'am?" Michelle asked, indicating her handiwork.

My grandmother let her eyes settle on me, traveling critically from head to toe. "Yes, that will do." This might have been the highest compliment she had ever paid someone to their face. "Now Michelle, I know you are to dress Darling on the day of the gala, but she will be arriving there earlier than we will. So when you have finished with her, I want you to come here and make any final adjustments we may need. I will have Marybeth and Laura here for hair and for makeup, and that will be all. No one else will get in your way."

"Yes, of course." Michelle answered. I don't know whether it was my imagination, or if my grandmother really was more pretentious than normal, and Michelle more accommodating.

The day before "the gala" was filled with stress and anticipation in my grandmother's house. All the preparations for her official return to society filled her days with innumerable occasions for new encounters with old friends. She was as happy and as busy as I had yet seen her, but the question did emerge more than once in my mind if she wasn't perhaps a little drunk with reclaimed status.

I resigned myself to the fact that, before going home, I would be playing the role Nana expected of me and attending with her what appeared to be the most significant event of her social career.

When I confronted her with the information of my plans to leave for Madison, she was already so delirious with illusions of greatness that would foreseeably have been attained by then, she didn't outright oppose the proposal. It was more like an unenthusiastic and inconvenienced acceptance. "But Tabitha," she stipulated, "I absolutely must speak with you before you depart. It is very important."

Soby the actual day of the event, after I had already packed everything thatwasn't immediately necessary before I went home, I found I needed a break fromthe intense atmosphere of the house. It would be critical to my survival of theupcoming evening.