Celia's Legacy by Kimberly Diede

Author:Kimberly Diede [Diede, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781735134338
Publisher: Kimberly Diede

Chapter Twenty-Three

Gift of Music and Dance

After a beautiful wedding ceremony, Jim and Renee led a boisterous parade of family and friends through the streets of downtown in their balloon-festooned, rusty gold Monte Carlo, arriving at the reception hall, ready to celebrate. A generous group of Lavonne’s girlfriends served the happy couple and guests a tasty meal. The only unfortunate incident of the whole day came when the cake top wobbled, leaving the crowd gasping. Jim did his best to catch it, but gravity won out, and he ended up falling down himself, knocking down the cake top, too. Celia noticed the sheen of tears in Renee’s eyes, but young Val stepped in, scooping the miraculously unbroken figurine of the bride and groom out of the splattered cake. She promised her big sister to bake the newlyweds a fresh cake, complete with the salvaged figurine, on their one-year anniversary.

Crisis averted.

As Celia watched Lavonne stoop down in her wedding finery and clean the mess up with a stack of personalized napkins, an old memory surfaced. Her mind took her back to the lodge kitchen at Whispering Pines, to Mrs. Bell on her hands and knees cleaning up a mess of dropped chocolate cake and fudge frosting. It was the same night Celia finally got up the nerve to ask the woman how her son was doing off at war. Even then, after spending just one summer with Danny, Celia already knew he’d be an important person in her life. If he survived the war. He survived, but poor Mrs. Bell didn’t live much longer after Danny had to make the excruciating decision to put her in a home when her memory started failing. Celia missed the dear woman. She’d taken Celia under her wing, much as Preston had back then.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Ruby said, nudging her arm. “You look a million miles away.”

Celia pulled her attention back to the festivities, and to the other three women seated at her table near the cake. She’d appreciated Renee’s phone call six months earlier, asking who Celia would like added to the guest list.

“You are family, too,” Renee had said. “We wanted you to celebrate our wedding with your friends, too.”

She didn’t add, though Celia suspected she was thinking it, Since you’ll never have a child get married.

“I wouldn’t say I was a million miles away,” she told Ruby. “That ruined cake reminded me of the time Mrs. Bell dropped a big chocolate cake. You weren’t there that summer, but Helen, you might have been there that night. Do you remember?”

Helen paused. “I can’t say that I do. But I remember what a fabulous cook Mrs. Bell was, and how kind she was to us all.”

“I was so sad to hear of her passing,” Eleanor added.

Celia lifted her champagne flute into the air. “To Mrs. Bell—for feeding us well, and not ratting us out to Preston when we spilled wine on our picnic blanket.”

The four women tapped their glasses and sipped champagne, each lost in her own memories of their girlhood summers at Whispering Pines.

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