“Tabby can do it. I’m too clumsy. But I want to go and help. Maybe even make a few corsages to take along?”

“I can do what?” Tabby wandered into the room. “Y’all got so loud. What’s going on in here?”

Dixie gave her a short version of the story.

“Oh. My. Gosh! Am I dreaming? I really get to walk on a runway. I’ve got to practice my pivot.”

“You’ll have to ask your dad before we set anything in stone,” Mitzi said.

“He’ll say yes. I know he will,” Dixie said. “And he’ll probably even come so he can see us.”

“He’s a pretty good father, isn’t he?” Mitzi said.

“The best,” Dixie said.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Jody put the final pin in the lace around the edge of a chapel-length veil and laid it to the side. “I wish I’d been more like Dixie and Tabby when I was fifteen. When I was that age, I’d just entered the rebellious stage. Lyle and I’d started having sex, and we thought we knew everything. I wish I’d known then what I know now. To see them this excited about the bridal show is . . .” She searched for the right words. “It’s the way I wish I would have been, but then no one ever took much interest in me, other than when I was allowed to come visit at your house, Mitzi. I used to wish your mama and daddy belonged to me.”

“I wasn’t as focused as they are when I was twenty-five.” Paula finished basting two long pieces of skirt together and stuck the needle into a pincushion. “It is something else to see two fifteen-year-old girls so excited about everything, including the bridal show.”

“Don’t put them up too high on a pedestal.” Mitzi gathered elastic through a blue-satin wedding garter.

“Why? They’ve kind of earned their position on it.” Jody’s thoughts slipped back more than half a lifetime before. The summer she was fifteen and, according to her mother’s standards, too young to date, she’d snuck out the bedroom window and met Lyle at the park every chance she got. They were young and stupid, and no one, not even adults, could tell them how to live their lives.

“Because it will be painful when one of them does something stupid and falls off their pedestal,” Mitzi said.

Jody was so far into her own thoughts that she didn’t hear what Mitzi had said.

“Earth to Jody,” Mitzi teased. “You looked like you were a million miles away.”

“I was,” Jody admitted. “Do you think it was because we weren’t skinny that our self-esteem was low when we were Dixie and Tabby’s age?”

“No, it was because two of us had dysfunctional families,” Paula answered. “We weren’t the only big girls in Celeste schools.”